French railway carriages

Spent hours on French websites up to and including a dodgily-scanned OCR version of the nineteenth-century Grande Larousse, trying to establish whether long-distance trains in Europe in the 1880s had English-style compartments or Continental 'open' coaches -- a task made more difficult by the fact that almost all French-language sites on the history of railways turn out to be talking about early English and/or American practice, or else don't specify!
Turns out the answer is on Wikipedia, which says that the open stock wasn't introduced in France until the 1960s (about the same time as in Britain, ironically) and shows pictures.
And, of course, in Leroux all along, where Raoul is mentioned as 'settling down in his compartment' on the overnight train down to Perros-Guirec.

All this for one paragraph of story concerning Raoul's return from Sweden :-(
Still, the Grande Larousse goes into a great deal of detail so far as the interior decoration of first-class compartments of that (one generation earlier) era was concerned...

Raoul and Philippe

I was thoroughly enjoying writing the scene where Raoul arrives back in Paris and collapses into tears while being comforted by his brother (who is of course extremely relieved to hear that Christine is out of the picture, but wise enough not to say so explicitly!) -- everything was flowing nicely, as opposed to the heavy weather I'd been making of the start of the chapter. I always did prefer dialogue...

Then it dawned upon me that if Raoul were only a more popular character in the fandom, there would probably be reams of fans writing Raoul/Philippe incest slash, as they do for other fraternal relationships. At which point I felt rather at risk of being misinterpreted :-(