Heloise costume

I spent far too long researching 12th-century costume after deciding that Hertha could come to the Masquerade dressed as Héloïse (of Héloïse and Abelard fame; inconveniently, she doesn't seem to have an identifying surname) -- the number of famously pregnant heroines being somewhat limited! This after the hippopotamus rabbit-hole, when I spent a day trying to establish whether the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes actually possessed a hippopotamus in the 1880s, all for the sake of a one-sentence attempted joke. (There was definitely a hippo in Paris at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and another one painted as early as 1830, so I decided it was a reasonable bet that someone had one somewhere in the city.)

However, it eventually dawned on me that the important issue was not what the real Héloïse would really have worn as a young woman, but what the 19th-century French public would have pictured her as wearing, so generic mediæval was more important than accuracy ;-p
(Though I decided not to go for the wimple in the end, not because they didn't come in until above sixty years later but because they were associated with married status, and Héloïse was notoriously not married at the point of her pregnancy!)

I suppose the Phantom is actually going to show up for the first time in this chapter ;-)