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Fic progress
I've finally finished with the Masquerade (where the Phantom really plays a rather minor walk-on part in terms of the chapter :-p) and have now begun what I think is Chapter 9.
Hertha and Raoul are going to have a confrontation that wasn't planned, but I just don't think it's plausible that she would hold her tongue any longer after the amount of angst in the last chapter. I need to be careful how much I have her admit about her own feelings, though, or like Leroux I may end up having to cut the scene later on in order to avoid making the characters' subsequent uncertainty about each others' emotions too implausible.
Also, I think we're going to have to address the elephant in the room -- the question of Hertha's Jewishness -- at this point. I'd more or less decided to leave it tacit throughout, but the story has been dancing around it with a series of various hints for rather a long time, and now that the Phantom has chosen to bring it out into the open and taunt her with it in public (Did you think that the world would forget where you came from -- what you are?) it feels coy and artificially forced to continue to avoid the subject. And it clearly doesn't worry Raoul; we already know that he actively likes and respects her father, and I've already got a potential snippet of dialogue in which Hertha is talking about her Jewish grandfather, only for Raoul to retort that his grandfather fled the field at the battle of Waterloo, and nobody holds that against the family ;-p
(His father must have been born around 1820, assuming that he is now over sixty, so it's quite reasonable for the previous generation to have been involved with Napoleon Bonaparte -- what I'm not quite sure about is which side the Vicomte of the day was fighting on at the time :-p I don't know that there were many Royalist emigré troops present at the Battle of Waterloo [Edit: the Chasseurs Britanniques were disbanded prior to that campaign], although we know from a reference dropped in an earlier chapter that at least one generation of Chagnys did emigrate to London. And I believe it was the Dutch/Belgian cavalry that notoriously broke and galloped all the way back to Brussels, so while it's possible the Vicomte was attached to that, I have a feeling he was more likely to have been a member of the younger generation who returned to their fathers' homeland and jumped at the opportunity to fight for France in the glorious campaigns of the Grande Armée. There was an awful lot of French cavalry, and it got quite badly mauled, so desertion under those circumstances seems quite plausible.)
I just wish I were happier with this story overall. It was a good idea, but I'm getting the feeling that the way I've written it isn't going to be psychologically convincing. Having a bust-up between Hertha and Raoul at this stage -- she is about to threaten to leave him and go 'home' -- might help a bit in that respect....
Hertha and Raoul are going to have a confrontation that wasn't planned, but I just don't think it's plausible that she would hold her tongue any longer after the amount of angst in the last chapter. I need to be careful how much I have her admit about her own feelings, though, or like Leroux I may end up having to cut the scene later on in order to avoid making the characters' subsequent uncertainty about each others' emotions too implausible.
Also, I think we're going to have to address the elephant in the room -- the question of Hertha's Jewishness -- at this point. I'd more or less decided to leave it tacit throughout, but the story has been dancing around it with a series of various hints for rather a long time, and now that the Phantom has chosen to bring it out into the open and taunt her with it in public (Did you think that the world would forget where you came from -- what you are?) it feels coy and artificially forced to continue to avoid the subject. And it clearly doesn't worry Raoul; we already know that he actively likes and respects her father, and I've already got a potential snippet of dialogue in which Hertha is talking about her Jewish grandfather, only for Raoul to retort that his grandfather fled the field at the battle of Waterloo, and nobody holds that against the family ;-p
(His father must have been born around 1820, assuming that he is now over sixty, so it's quite reasonable for the previous generation to have been involved with Napoleon Bonaparte -- what I'm not quite sure about is which side the Vicomte of the day was fighting on at the time :-p I don't know that there were many Royalist emigré troops present at the Battle of Waterloo [Edit: the Chasseurs Britanniques were disbanded prior to that campaign], although we know from a reference dropped in an earlier chapter that at least one generation of Chagnys did emigrate to London. And I believe it was the Dutch/Belgian cavalry that notoriously broke and galloped all the way back to Brussels, so while it's possible the Vicomte was attached to that, I have a feeling he was more likely to have been a member of the younger generation who returned to their fathers' homeland and jumped at the opportunity to fight for France in the glorious campaigns of the Grande Armée. There was an awful lot of French cavalry, and it got quite badly mauled, so desertion under those circumstances seems quite plausible.)
I just wish I were happier with this story overall. It was a good idea, but I'm getting the feeling that the way I've written it isn't going to be psychologically convincing. Having a bust-up between Hertha and Raoul at this stage -- she is about to threaten to leave him and go 'home' -- might help a bit in that respect....