The last chapter

Well, I was right about the three days to a week from last Sunday to finish Chapter 13; I provisionally completed it a couple of days ago and am now definitely launched on what is going to be the final chapter (bar epilogue) unless it massively overruns. I'm currently dealing with Christine's account of the Final Lair and with Hertha's musings on mobs (since they're not historically keen on Jews she isn't very comfortable with them -- fortunately she was still stuck up in the managers' box at the time). Four pages left in the notebook; two pages written on this chapter so far.

Also, I'm going to need a new pen filler; the identical replacement pen that I managed to get off eBay that came with a vintage squeeze-filler appears to be suffering from a perished ink-sac, as it is not holding very much ink and is staining my fingers when I squeeze it (ink is not supposed to come out at that end!) I was quite surprised that it was working in the first place, as who knows how old the rubber was -- but since the pen happened to come with a filler, it saved paying postage on a separate unit at the time.

Around the World in Eighty Days

It's a bit damning when Michael Palin's non-fiction "Around the World in Eighty Days" challenge is proving to be closer to the spirit of the original and more watchable than the BBC's fancy new drama :-(

And the dispiriting thing is that the latter *could* have worked, even with all the revisionism and re-casting; there are moments in every episode when you can see the ghost of what might have been, despite the fact that it has practically nothing to do with the original plot. ( Read more... )

On Divorce by Mutual Consent

One more quirk of the Napoleonic legal system (in addition to the business of needing the father's permission to marry if you were under the age of twenty-five): couples could not be divorced 'by mutual consent' if the husband was under the age of twenty-five -- or if they had been married for less than two years.
So if Raoul wanted to divorce his wife and remarry to Christine, he would have to have brought his concubine into their common residence first, and get Hertha to divorce him, because otherwise they are deemed too young to know their own minds. (Not a completely unreasonable legal attitude, although an unexpected one!)

And the 'concubine' in question couldn't be Christine herself, because the guilty party is not permitted to marry his accomplice subsequent to the divorce. ( Read more... )