High City on a Hill (Ch7)

Just over six thousand words, in the end -- almost exactly the same as Chapter 4. I haven't made any attempt to unwind the *two* flashback/framing device set-ups in this chapter, although I did try to make it a bit more clear when we finally caught up to the present again. I think the only 'present-day' passage in the entire chapter is the brief one between the return to "she had felt afraid to show her face in the street" and the section following "as I observed to Raoul in the early hours of that evening" -- the course of the actual conversation with Madame Firmin, and only that :-(

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Chapter 7 — “It Will Be At Midsummer”

It was months before I set foot again in the Opera Populaire. Indeed, there was gossip abroad that the opera would never reopen; that the cost of repairs would be too great, and audiences would never return to the scene of a disaster so widely reported in such lurid terms. Raoul had tried to keep the illustrations in the papers from me, but I had seen them: images of screaming women holding aloft their infants, and dying men at one another’s throats. It was all fanciful, so far as I could tell — certainly there had been no babes in arms, nor any other women that I had seen amid the crowd in the pit, where the crush in ordinary times was unsuitable for skirts, and where the panic had been at its worst — but to my knowledge at least three people had died, and the reality of it had been nightmarish enough. The outcry against the management was immense, and poor Madame Firmin confided to me that she had felt compelled to retire to the country to avoid the opprobrium.

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