Timeline issues
22 January 2023 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI think I've got a dating problem with my story -- I'd originally envisioned the encounter between Raoul and Agathe taking place at a point when he had wandered off during his sisters' wedding at the end of the summer at Perros-Guirec. But I ended up shifting it to an encounter on the local diligence at the start of his journey back to Perros three years later. Raoul is now stated to be fifteen, which is fine, and makes sense of Perrette's observation that he is a bit naive for his age (mentally comparing him to Philippe, of course, whom she knew when he was a year or so older).
But since Agathe must have been born when Philippe was seventeen-ish (avoiding the gestation lacuna of the TEN LONG YEARS in Love Never Dies!) and Philippe was twenty when Raoul was born, it's going to be quite a push for her to have a eldest daughter of her own who is a visible Chagny by the time of events at the Opera some five/six years later. (Let's see: we are now at the end of summer, Raoul is stated to be fifteen, he will turn sixteen in December, and eventually see Christine again in the New Year gala shortly after he turns twenty-one. So about five and a half years.)
I'd been planning the dialogue for this scene on the assumption that Agathe was a flirtatious girl with a steady sweetheart (or would-be suitor) who is not ready to settle down yet. But I think she probably needs to be married and possibly pregnant already at the time of this meeting, otherwise the little girl is going to be little more than a toddler at the time of the Comte's funeral -- and Philippe has already observed before his death that his putative daughter's eldest girl had a look of Suzanne. The child has to be old enough to recognisably resemble Philippe's sister, and to bear an unmistakable Chagny stamp, and if Agathe isn't married yet her first child can't be more than about four when Philippe notices her.
To my eye all young children are a pretty much undistinguishable mass of unformed features until they get to about eight or so, but at the very least it is implied that Agathe has more than one child by that point (probably more than one daughter, and I'd already mentally written in a younger brother...) I suppose we could just about get the arithmetic working with a little girl of four and a toddler/crawling brother, but Agathe would need to get pregnant pretty much immediately after her passing encounter with Raoul on the coach, and she didn't strike me as being in any great hurry to get married :-p
(Also, she is only three years older than he is, so the timing is quite tight either way. Though women *could* legally marry at fifteen, so a young woman of eighteen with a baby at home is not out of the question -- especially if Bernard the saddler is quite a bit older than his wife.)
I begin to have more sympathy for Lloyd Webber/Leroux's egregious timeline issues :-P
But since Agathe must have been born when Philippe was seventeen-ish (avoiding the gestation lacuna of the TEN LONG YEARS in Love Never Dies!) and Philippe was twenty when Raoul was born, it's going to be quite a push for her to have a eldest daughter of her own who is a visible Chagny by the time of events at the Opera some five/six years later. (Let's see: we are now at the end of summer, Raoul is stated to be fifteen, he will turn sixteen in December, and eventually see Christine again in the New Year gala shortly after he turns twenty-one. So about five and a half years.)
I'd been planning the dialogue for this scene on the assumption that Agathe was a flirtatious girl with a steady sweetheart (or would-be suitor) who is not ready to settle down yet. But I think she probably needs to be married and possibly pregnant already at the time of this meeting, otherwise the little girl is going to be little more than a toddler at the time of the Comte's funeral -- and Philippe has already observed before his death that his putative daughter's eldest girl had a look of Suzanne. The child has to be old enough to recognisably resemble Philippe's sister, and to bear an unmistakable Chagny stamp, and if Agathe isn't married yet her first child can't be more than about four when Philippe notices her.
To my eye all young children are a pretty much undistinguishable mass of unformed features until they get to about eight or so, but at the very least it is implied that Agathe has more than one child by that point (probably more than one daughter, and I'd already mentally written in a younger brother...) I suppose we could just about get the arithmetic working with a little girl of four and a toddler/crawling brother, but Agathe would need to get pregnant pretty much immediately after her passing encounter with Raoul on the coach, and she didn't strike me as being in any great hurry to get married :-p
(Also, she is only three years older than he is, so the timing is quite tight either way. Though women *could* legally marry at fifteen, so a young woman of eighteen with a baby at home is not out of the question -- especially if Bernard the saddler is quite a bit older than his wife.)
I begin to have more sympathy for Lloyd Webber/Leroux's egregious timeline issues :-P
