In Regret, Always (ch4)

Ironically, although this final chapter is narrated from Christine's point of view it's really Gustave's backstory, just as the previous chapter was as much Christine's backstory as Raoul's...

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Ch 4: Mort pour la France

Paris in the autumn was as busy as ever. The leaves on the trees were dusty as the streets and beginning to turn brown, and the sun through the windows of the tramcar struck hot on Christine’s cheek as it had not done all summer — or perhaps, she thought, adjusting her blue uniform cloak, perhaps it had, and she had not been in any condition to notice it.

She descended from the tram at the corner of the boulevard Mont-St-Fleury with a nod to the lady conductress — the war had changed many things — and began to walk rather slowly towards the little café further down. In the pocket of her dress, behind the red cross sewn at her breast, lay the letter that had brought her here, dragging at her steps like a weight from which she had believed herself cut free. She was tired: too tired to feel anything, she told herself, with a bone-deep weariness born of long nights of strain and endless exhausting days of labour over shattered bodies in improvised wards behind the lines.

There was nothing romantic in nursing; Raoul had been right — poor Raoul! But that reflex jolt of memory was nothing more than a dull echo now.( Read more... )

The dancing one-shot

I've been having quite a bit of trouble with getting an ending for my 'dancing at the masquerade' story — not assisted, of course, by the inconvenient fact that Christine turns out not only to dance with Raoul before their little argument (It's an engagement, not a crime!) but actually gets lifted by him at that earlier stage, which was what I'd been intending to use as the grand climax of the 'dance'.

I eventually managed to fudge the issue about all the dancing sequences shown in my part of the narrative actually being repeats of stuff they've done already, although I can't really do much at this stage about the problem of things happening in my story that don't observably happen on stage — Christine and Raoul stop dancing and argue again at least once, for instance, whereas in the musical it's just one long chorus routine. But since with the exception of the separation and reunion with which I had decided to start the story it isn't even really a narrative ballet scene, it's a bit tricky to make a coherent conversation out of it as it stands.( Read more... )