Beauvais and coach travel
18 July 2021 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI had a look at the Beauvais problem and the details of what I had actually written in the last two chapters, and concluded that the choice of location is probably all right as it stands.
Google Maps, although notoriously inaccurate for arbitrary travel time estimates (e.g. 58 hours to hike 165 miles over mountains), gives a distance from the chateau de Flambermont, for example (a couple of miles out of Beauvais) to the centre of Paris as 42 miles and a cycling time of 4 and a quarter hours — cycle journeys being the easiest modern mental equivalent in terms of speed and (for the average unfit human) range to horsedrawn transport. I could do a forty-mile trip (on my heavy three-speed bike), but I would be exhausted at the end of it. At least, I was on the one occasion I tried!
For comparison, the famous London-Brighton route (53 miles) was traversed on a regular basis as a single day's journey using changes of horses, a fast schedule being 4¾ hours (and a record-breaking journey being the round trip in under eight hours — with 'fourteen changes', apparently!) But one thing looking at coaching times to Brighton does draw to my attention is that the era of the coaches virtually ended (save for an odd revival later in the century, which appears to have resembled the modern-day fashion for steam-hauled rail tours) when the London–Brighton railway opened in the 1840s.
I was assuming that the Chagny family's private travel would be horse-drawn in the 1880s, since motor-cars were non-existent (although they were apparently adopted earlier in France than in this country; the first motor-race in France took place before the first motor-car had even been imported into England!) But since the direct railway from Paris to Beauvais town opened in 1877 (and a station had existed at Beauvais since 1857), wouldn't it in fact have been more likely that — even if the chateau had originally been acquired because it was a convenient 'day's journey' from Paris — Hertha would have travelled most of the way by train? :-(
What I've currently got written is that leaving directly after the end of the opera (around eleven pm–midnight) would "mean trying to doze in the coach in full evening dress, and descending upon an unprepared household tomorrow" at an unspecified hour but presumably by daylight (so a trip of six to eight hours?), that Raoul was spending a good deal of time in Paris (I was picturing him staying for periods of several days rather than commuting up and down, but I don't think I've actually made that explicit until the day of the party, when he is described as returning that evening "after almost a week's absence" and bringing his parents "down with him", after which he needs to shave and wash to "shed the weariness of Paris with the dust of the journey"), and that pregnancy provides Hertha with an excuse "to be able to escape up to town from time to time" for appointments with an accoucheur (here implying a relatively easy return journey within the same day). At the end of Chapter Seven, Hertha "had risen early and had myself driven in for an appointment at noon" (I could say "before dawn", but as we're in early February at the time, dawn is relatively late!) "with the idea of having a few hours' liberty afterwards to spend in Paris", and is subsequently seen returning "in the early hours of that evening" in "the jolting of the carriage on our journey back to the country estate", which I altered in a panic to "the wearisome stages of our journey" in an attempt to imply changes of horses.... She and Raoul "amused ourselves for a cheerful hour or so" before their more serious exchange "in the jolting semi-dusk" at the end of the chapter.
I think all that is reasonably consistent, after all, with the idea of a four- or five-hour journey. It can be done there and back in a day if you are willing to make a very long day of it, although you wouldn't do so all that often, but if you are elderly or travelling with luggage it would normally be a one-way trip.
On the other hand it wouldn't be completely out of the question to rewrite it to specify a railway component — I haven't created any plot element that's absolutely dependent on coach travel. Note however that Leroux did have Raoul planning to elope long-distance by coach in canon: on ne devait pas prendre le chemin de fer pour dérouter le fantôme! (Ironically I took it absolutely for granted in Arctic Raoul that the protagonists would be travelling from Paris to Chagny by railway...)
Google Maps, although notoriously inaccurate for arbitrary travel time estimates (e.g. 58 hours to hike 165 miles over mountains), gives a distance from the chateau de Flambermont, for example (a couple of miles out of Beauvais) to the centre of Paris as 42 miles and a cycling time of 4 and a quarter hours — cycle journeys being the easiest modern mental equivalent in terms of speed and (for the average unfit human) range to horsedrawn transport. I could do a forty-mile trip (on my heavy three-speed bike), but I would be exhausted at the end of it. At least, I was on the one occasion I tried!
For comparison, the famous London-Brighton route (53 miles) was traversed on a regular basis as a single day's journey using changes of horses, a fast schedule being 4¾ hours (and a record-breaking journey being the round trip in under eight hours — with 'fourteen changes', apparently!) But one thing looking at coaching times to Brighton does draw to my attention is that the era of the coaches virtually ended (save for an odd revival later in the century, which appears to have resembled the modern-day fashion for steam-hauled rail tours) when the London–Brighton railway opened in the 1840s.
I was assuming that the Chagny family's private travel would be horse-drawn in the 1880s, since motor-cars were non-existent (although they were apparently adopted earlier in France than in this country; the first motor-race in France took place before the first motor-car had even been imported into England!) But since the direct railway from Paris to Beauvais town opened in 1877 (and a station had existed at Beauvais since 1857), wouldn't it in fact have been more likely that — even if the chateau had originally been acquired because it was a convenient 'day's journey' from Paris — Hertha would have travelled most of the way by train? :-(
What I've currently got written is that leaving directly after the end of the opera (around eleven pm–midnight) would "mean trying to doze in the coach in full evening dress, and descending upon an unprepared household tomorrow" at an unspecified hour but presumably by daylight (so a trip of six to eight hours?), that Raoul was spending a good deal of time in Paris (I was picturing him staying for periods of several days rather than commuting up and down, but I don't think I've actually made that explicit until the day of the party, when he is described as returning that evening "after almost a week's absence" and bringing his parents "down with him", after which he needs to shave and wash to "shed the weariness of Paris with the dust of the journey"), and that pregnancy provides Hertha with an excuse "to be able to escape up to town from time to time" for appointments with an accoucheur (here implying a relatively easy return journey within the same day). At the end of Chapter Seven, Hertha "had risen early and had myself driven in for an appointment at noon" (I could say "before dawn", but as we're in early February at the time, dawn is relatively late!) "with the idea of having a few hours' liberty afterwards to spend in Paris", and is subsequently seen returning "in the early hours of that evening" in "the jolting of the carriage on our journey back to the country estate", which I altered in a panic to "the wearisome stages of our journey" in an attempt to imply changes of horses.... She and Raoul "amused ourselves for a cheerful hour or so" before their more serious exchange "in the jolting semi-dusk" at the end of the chapter.
I think all that is reasonably consistent, after all, with the idea of a four- or five-hour journey. It can be done there and back in a day if you are willing to make a very long day of it, although you wouldn't do so all that often, but if you are elderly or travelling with luggage it would normally be a one-way trip.
On the other hand it wouldn't be completely out of the question to rewrite it to specify a railway component — I haven't created any plot element that's absolutely dependent on coach travel. Note however that Leroux did have Raoul planning to elope long-distance by coach in canon: on ne devait pas prendre le chemin de fer pour dérouter le fantôme! (Ironically I took it absolutely for granted in Arctic Raoul that the protagonists would be travelling from Paris to Chagny by railway...)
