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Teach Me to Live - discussions
Discussions on Teach Me to Live:
Strictly speaking that last line (Gustave's hand slid upwards, hesitantly, into the long fingers of the man who was his father) is a POV breach -- Raoul will never be aware of it -- but it had to be in there for Gustave's sake: poor child, he spends far too much time being passed around as a trophy. He deserves some volition in the matter.
The Raoul-Gustave relationship is more or less reset back to the start here: these versions of the characters have never shared the interaction of "The Choices of Raoul" or even of "Waiting in the Wings", and I'm afraid that, far from regretting not spending time with Gustave, this Raoul is ultimately escaping with a sense of relief from a situation he simply doesn't know how to cope with. His relationship was always with Christine and not the boy -- Gustave was Christine's son, Christine's favourite, and he just doesn't have any model to build on. He knows that the child is hurt and suffering, but his own grief for Christine is consuming him beyond the ability to do anything about it: in the absence of the Erik-alternative and without Anne, I think this version of Gustave would end up badly neglected while Raoul disintegrated in slow motion :-(
He feels guilty about leaving Gustave behind, but I'm afraid that on a personal level he doesn't want him, and he is capable of acknowledging to himself that Erik does. (It is, in a way, a merciful outcome in this context: a Raoul with a closer bond to the boy would suffer even more.) He is just... totally at a loss and coping as best he can with a situation he finds close to intolerable. Raoul is very, very near breaking point at this stage.
I'd actually picture Raoul as more instinctively likely to fight for Gustave on physical grounds than legal ones (perhaps because it's a much more spur-of-the-moment thing)... On the other hand, legally I don't see that Erik has a leg to stand on. There is absolutely no proof of the child's paternity save for the mother's word (for which there is no evidence save hearsay). In fact, there is no evidence that Erik even had sexual relations with the mother, save for his bare assertion of the fact.
Raoul was married to Gustave's mother when he was born, and at the probable time of his conception. If he acknowledges the child as his I doubt any court in the land would entertain Erik's scandal-mongering claims: you cannot take away the son and heir of a well-born foreigner and thrust him into the custody of a shady character with no known history (and no immigration record and hence American citizenship!), even with far more proof than Erik has available. If he tried to take Gustave against Raoul's will he would be regarded as a kidnapper.
Basically, if Raoul is Gustave's mother's lawful husband and he says the boy is his, then no-one has the right to try to make a bastard out of him. The father's acknowledgment is nine-tenths of the law.
The only way that Erik could possibly take Gustave as his son would be with Raoul's acquiescence (and probably active co-operation, though I dare say the American authorities wouldn't look too closely into certifying the formal parentage of a child brought from overseas if no-one was disputing it), or by snatching him and going on the run -- in which case the law would be entirely on Raoul' s side.
Raoul is going to have other practical concerns to worry about: his thoughts about Erik as a potential father are honest enough here. 'Lots of money' plus 'wants child to be happy' are enough to assuage his conscience -- it's as much or more as he ever offered Gustave himself, after all :-(
I don't really see any hint in canon that Erik and Raoul are ever going to tolerate each other: nothing in Erik's portrayal in LND characterises him as experiencing empathy for a defeated enemy, which is basically the way he is viewing the Vicomte here. He despises and distrusts Raoul, who hates and resents him... and he isn't going to relax until the other man is safely removed from the scene. By his lights he is actually being distinctly polite and magnanimous in allowing this little scene at all ("a child that isn't his!"), and it's certainly not being done for Raoul's benefit.
Raoul is trying to be fair (I'm not convinced that Erik is even trying, to be honest), but it is at least partly to assuage his own sense of nagging guilt where Gustave is concerned: painting the boy's new guardian as a "hellspawn demon" would make it obviously impossible to leave him there. He is still furious with resentment and jealousy, and the general sensation that the Phantom is somehow running rings around him intellectually though he is not quite sure how...
And he is busy blaming himself, not entirely rationally, for Christine's death. I'm afraid I suspect from what we see in LND that Erik's self-pity tends more towards a sense of external persecution while Raoul's spirals inwards, and that Erik's grief is probably leading him to blame anyone and everyone but himself at this point -- with Raoul as a prime candidate -- while Raoul is appropriating gratuitous responsibility.
The crying is actually very significant -- and a reference forward to the final chapter :-)
At the start, Raoul is looking for an excuse to despise Erik (whom he is very conscious of as despising him) and seizing upon this: making a spectacle of himself in front of the boy! What right has he -- how dare he? How disgusting!
He also really doesn't want to think of Erik as mourning Christine, which both humanises him and is tantamount to making a claim on her: it's a deeply uncomfortable idea, as is the concept that Erik might be able to express himself freely with Gustave in a way that he himself has never managed.
And simultaneously he is on some level aware that he himself needs to weep for Christine and can't, and that the process is destroying him -- although that isn't yet explicit.
He is trying to be honest; he is painfully trying to be self-aware. But he is not an objective narrator, and the best that can be said is that he is conscious of it.
In this version Erik is paying for the return journey, and Raoul ends up in a second-class inside cabin instead of the first-class staterooms we saw on the "Persephone" :-(
Though it could have been worse: at least he gets a two-berth cabin instead of the four-berth option, so he only has one cabin-mate to get on with -- he has the vestiges of en-suite accommodation rather than the communal facilities down in the steerage -- and this version of Raoul doesn't get seasick :-) As ever, a certain amount of autobiographical experience in there: I travelled to Russia twenty years ago on a one-way ticket in the cheap accommodation of a Baltic cruise liner...
I'm afraid that for this Raoul, Gustave will always be "the child who got in the way": those weeks in Brittany when it was just the two of them again are a very precious memory.
This story was actually drafted during the July heatwave, and shortly after completing it I left the city and went west to the seaside, where it was at least ten degrees cooler...and where I found a postcard of people on the beach in 1904 :-) A case of life imitating art!
It is of course Perros-Guirec to which they walk from Lannion: the 'modern' Perros-Guirec of Leroux' own day (thanks to the time-jump in LND!), with its casino, brash new villas and Parisian -- or 'Perrosian' -- tourists... and the sands at Trestraou where Raoul first rescued Christine's scarf :-) But everybody always does Perros-Guirec: I thought it would be nice to revisit Raoul's aunt in Lannion for a change. (When he goes back to stay at the old inn, he pretends to the woman there -- who recognises him -- that he had come down to Lannion 'on business' and just happened to be in the neighbourhood; so the family obviously retained property in the area.)
That final scene -- "Don't cry, Papa" -- was more or less the whole prompt for the story :-(
This is indeed a very depressing piece: inevitably so, given the timescale of the setting. Raoul is busy disintegrating in a toxic mixture of guilt and helplessness (and acute jealousy), and pretty much hanging onto his sanity by his fingernails.
Of course what Anne is trying to do is to comfort her father in the only terms with which she has any experience ("Maman will make it all better"): she doesn't realise that in the circumstances this isn't the most helpful thing to say... I'm afraid that from the point of view of a child who can't be -- by the chronology of this story -- more than three and a half, "You have to be a good girl now, Miss Anne, because your Maman has gone to be with the angels" (or whatever period euphemism would have been used to tell her of her mother's death) really doesn't mean anything very different to "Your Maman has gone to America": she doesn't have any meaningful concept of either, and she is still confidently expecting Christine to come home. Now that Raoul is back she is certain that her mother will be there any minute :-(
I strongly suspect that once she realises that her mother really has gone forever she is going to fly into (to Raoul) inexplicable panics for the next few years whenever anyone mentions America, this now being inextricably associated in her mind with death and abandonment...
In the final chapter the crying comes back into play: Erik can weep for Christine at Gustave's bedside, but Raoul finds himself unable to yield enough to do so until he is reunited with Anne. (I picture the two scenes as being very similar, but the dynamic is of course different because Gustave is an older child.)
Raoul here does at least have something of Christine left in his life: someone by whom he is loved and needed. Something to live for... (I do wonder what will happen when Erik learns about Anne, which he is bound to do from Gustave eventually: the boy has no reason to take Raoul's hint "not to talk about it" literally. Raoul of course assumes the worst, that the Phantom will covet his daughter as some kind of reincarnation of her mother and/or try to repeat history. I hope that non-badfic Erik isn't quite as fixated as that!)
I'm afraid there won't in fact be flowers on the breakfast table to welcome Raoul's homecoming, because it was Christine who used to arrange for that :-( (Though I can see a ten-year-old Anne reviving the 'tradition' in secret one day, hopeful of surprising a smile out of Raoul on his arrival -- it's more likely to have the opposite effect...)
Anne was of course central to this story all along: I spent a lot of time adjusting hints (e.g. Gustave as "Christine's first-born child", "mothers who cavorted with lovers were dead to the children left behind them", and Raoul asking "What am I to do -- what are we to do?") to try to get the right level of works-in-retrospect implication. Raoul's 'unseemly attitude' towards Anne -- in Baptiste's view -- is of course the amount of fuss he makes of the child, and the way he is happy to allow her to get the two of them into situations entirely unbefitting the Vicomte's dignity: fawning over a baby daughter is, in Baptiste's private opinion, ridiculous behaviour. After all, there are nurses employed for that sort of thing specifically so that the parents can meet their children in a more controlled environment :-p
But yes, that was a deliberate choice of misleading phrasing on the author's part!
I suspect it's actually less obvious to those who take canon knowledge for granted on the subject of Gustave. But so far as I could make out, canon doesn't actually say that Christine never had any children by Raoul... we just don't see her bring them to America :-) So the purpose of Chapter 2 was first to establish that, under the right circumstances, it would have been perfectly natural to leave a small child (in that case Gustave) behind while his parents went on a journey, and then to hint at an earlier attempt at reconciliation that could have resulted in a daughter... Originally, Gustave says explicitly in the opening chapter that Christine thought Anne was "too little" to make the journey to America (this being the story-internal logic as to why she isn't there): but this fell victim to initial attempts at obfuscation, since it made it obvious that Anne was in fact a small child.
(And -- as Raoul realises here and far too late -- if only Gustave had been deemed too young for the journey, a great deal of heartbreak would have been saved all round: Christine would never have left her child abandoned behind her in France, the Phantom would have had no blackmail lever to use on her and Meg would have had no blackmail lever to use on him, since no-one would ever have suspected from the existence of the 'little Vicomte' that Erik had a son. The Girys would not have felt displaced by his decision to make Gustave his heir, Christine would presumably have returned to Gustave in Raoul's company; and depending on how exactly the various confrontations played out in this scenario, Erik might at least have seen Christine again and made his peace with her in the knowledge that she forgives him for having abandoned her, and Raoul might have been reduced to a state vulnerable enough to confess his insecurities to Christine and mend their marriage. What a difference one child's presence makes... but that would be another story. And I don't plan to write that one!)
The idea of Anne as a governess/nursemaid and Raoul's secret mistress was precisely the misdirection I was going for. (She was also at various times a small pet and an elderly relative, but I decided I'd better settle on one 'cover story' and stick to it: I did wonder if anyone would actually swallow that particular theory coming from my direction!)
I suspect that whatever childhood stories Raoul tells Anne, he is not going to promise her that her dead mother will send an Angel of Music to watch over her and inspire her with talent... In fact I'm not sure I can see him encouraging her to take up music at all, the associations -- both from his memories of Christine as a child and from the circumstances of their later lives -- being too painful. Which is a pity, because Raoul did love music once.
On the other hand, an Anne who inherits her mother's talent -- I think the chances are that she would be generally talented rather than outstandingly gifted, though Christine apparently inherited potential genius from her father -- would potentially be under even more pressure to be a 'reincarnation' of the lost woman...
It's a great pity that Raoul would deprive his daughter of music, but thinking about it I can't picture him obliviously settling her down to routine piano lessons: the implications of Christine -- Christine and Gustave -- Christine and the Phantom -- Christine -- are just going to resonate on and on. He is going to shy away from music for a long time...
I don't think he'd play the cruel father and forbid her from any contact with the musical world, especially if she turns out to find a talent for herself after all, but I don't see him taking any steps to try to prompt her into it. I just don't think he could bear to. If she's lucky she may get singing in a convent education.
Also, there's likely to be a financial issue, depending on just how bad Raoul's debts are: for the purposes of this story I had him virtually broke and dependent on the Phantom's charity to get home. (Probably unlikely in reality: after all, he manages to get liner tickets for the three of them at short notice before the performance, and they must have anticipated needing funds in America, even if they were relying on Christine's fee to pay off the outstanding gambling dues.)
Raoul and Anne are probably going to end up in furnished lodgings here, rather than with the 'little house in the banlieue" and small investment income which he calculates they will be able to afford in the case of "The Choices of Raoul"... so yes, he will have to sell Christine's piano, though I doubt he'd do that willingly, even if he would never otherwise open it :-(
Anne's existence gives Raoul motivation to "be strong": her dependence on him is an incentive to hold himself together, as we have already seen during the voyage -- and to a far greater degree when he actually has her needing his attention in person, and when he has to try to help her cope with what will be enormous changes in her life due to their financial situation. (I think he is going to have to find some way to keep her nurse in his employ, both to provide some continuity and because I simply cannot see him coping with the day-to-day needs of a three-year-old girl without help... he hasn't the faintest practical idea. Neither has Erik, of course, but at least Gustave is reasonably self-sufficient.)
I don't think Christine would ever have told Erik about Gustave if he hadn't guessed beforehand and more or less forced her into it: after all, at the point where he is busy threatening the life of his own son she has a sizeable motivation for telling him, yet she still doesn't do so. She clearly never intended for him to know. (It's a pretty combustible secret which he could have used to break up her marriage, as in fact he ultimately tries to do; and if his attempt to 'seduce' Gustave 'to the dark side' hadn't ended up by terrifying the child and driving him away, would he have been quite so self-abnegating in vowing to devote all his worldly goods to the child without ever seeing him again, or would he have made further attempts to take possession of the son as he had done with the mother?)
Gustave may be half Erik's son... but he is half Christine's son, and has been brought up entirely by Christine (or at least not at all by Erik). And Raoul loves Christine... so I don't see any reason in theory why he shouldn't get on very well with Gustave, assuming he isn't the generic child-hating ogre of fan-fiction. Sons can be fun, after all :-) (Indeed in my WW1 story To Ease Your Troubled Mind, I explored the possibility of a Raoul and Gustave with little in common who become close due to shared experiences in adulthood: in that version of events -- in which the family again leave before Christine ever encounters the Phantom -- Raoul really has no reason to imagine that Gustave's paternity might be in doubt, although Christine's conscience leads her to wonder...)
However, I can imagine that traits that were attractive in a girl during courtship might be considered less appealing in a growing son: a Gustave who copies his mother too closely might come across as effeminate.
Conversely I think there's a danger for Raoul that he might want Anne to be too much like her mother: she is after all an individual in her own right (and likely to be as headstrong as he is), but watching her growing up is going to come painfully close to reliving his own memories of Christine in childhood. Trying to live up to the image of a saintly dead mother whom she barely remembers is a burden on any child... and when she learns exactly how her mother did die (and since it's both a scandalous and a painful subject, I can't see her father volunteering the information very readily), that will be pretty traumatic as well: the icon shattered :-(
(It also occurs to me that, in this version, we have to assume that Christine evidently didn't have any qualms about abandoning her daughter in France in order to be with Erik; even if Gustave was closer to her heart, I can't imagine she would have been a neglectful mother to Anne... however flustered she may initially have been by a fresh pregnancy at that point in her marriage! Either she really was prepared to throw all away for love, or she was making a more or less conscious decision (prompted by circumstance) to 'share' the children between herself and Raoul, or she was assuming vaguely that they could all be together again somehow later on...)
I didn't find it improbable that Christine might choose to leave a small child behind in a familiar environment rather than taking her on a journey halfway around the world; it just occurred to me -- after suggesting that a Christine who had left Gustave behind in Paris would never have considered staying in New York -- that according to my version of the story, Christine apparently took just that decision where Anne was concerned! If she stays at Phantasma with Gustave then she is effectively abandoning her daughter in order to take a lover; some women did make that choice, but it wouldn't reflect well on her relative affection for the two children...
I'm not sure that Anne's unquestioning assumption that her father loves her "more than anything in the whole world, except of course Maman" would necessarily be justified by what she will have seen of their marriage over the last year or two, either. But from personal experience I'd say that it is possible Raoul would have confided his feelings more openly in the unquestioning and supposedly uncomprehending hearing of his baby daughter than in the presence of Christine herself... :-(
After Gustave's rejection, Erik's initial reaction is one of abnegation and self-sacrifice (interestingly, it's probably the only echo of that original 'Final lair' decision that we see from him in this musical); he begs Christine not to tell the child who his father is, and indeed tries to stop her deathbed confession the next day. If he adhered to that decision he presumably wouldn't follow Gustave home to France, or at least wouldn't try to kidnap him. Though I can imagine that once the initial revulsion of feeling wore off, he would at least want to keep himself informed of Gustave's progress, and might feel tempted to use his 'influence' to lean on a few important figures who could influence his son's future...
It occurs to me that by a painful coincidence both Raoul and Christine have already grown up motherless; indeed they were both effectively orphaned in their teens and brought up by foster-parents. So history is repeating itself in the case of their children :-(
Strictly speaking that last line (Gustave's hand slid upwards, hesitantly, into the long fingers of the man who was his father) is a POV breach -- Raoul will never be aware of it -- but it had to be in there for Gustave's sake: poor child, he spends far too much time being passed around as a trophy. He deserves some volition in the matter.
The Raoul-Gustave relationship is more or less reset back to the start here: these versions of the characters have never shared the interaction of "The Choices of Raoul" or even of "Waiting in the Wings", and I'm afraid that, far from regretting not spending time with Gustave, this Raoul is ultimately escaping with a sense of relief from a situation he simply doesn't know how to cope with. His relationship was always with Christine and not the boy -- Gustave was Christine's son, Christine's favourite, and he just doesn't have any model to build on. He knows that the child is hurt and suffering, but his own grief for Christine is consuming him beyond the ability to do anything about it: in the absence of the Erik-alternative and without Anne, I think this version of Gustave would end up badly neglected while Raoul disintegrated in slow motion :-(
He feels guilty about leaving Gustave behind, but I'm afraid that on a personal level he doesn't want him, and he is capable of acknowledging to himself that Erik does. (It is, in a way, a merciful outcome in this context: a Raoul with a closer bond to the boy would suffer even more.) He is just... totally at a loss and coping as best he can with a situation he finds close to intolerable. Raoul is very, very near breaking point at this stage.
I'd actually picture Raoul as more instinctively likely to fight for Gustave on physical grounds than legal ones (perhaps because it's a much more spur-of-the-moment thing)... On the other hand, legally I don't see that Erik has a leg to stand on. There is absolutely no proof of the child's paternity save for the mother's word (for which there is no evidence save hearsay). In fact, there is no evidence that Erik even had sexual relations with the mother, save for his bare assertion of the fact.
Raoul was married to Gustave's mother when he was born, and at the probable time of his conception. If he acknowledges the child as his I doubt any court in the land would entertain Erik's scandal-mongering claims: you cannot take away the son and heir of a well-born foreigner and thrust him into the custody of a shady character with no known history (and no immigration record and hence American citizenship!), even with far more proof than Erik has available. If he tried to take Gustave against Raoul's will he would be regarded as a kidnapper.
Basically, if Raoul is Gustave's mother's lawful husband and he says the boy is his, then no-one has the right to try to make a bastard out of him. The father's acknowledgment is nine-tenths of the law.
The only way that Erik could possibly take Gustave as his son would be with Raoul's acquiescence (and probably active co-operation, though I dare say the American authorities wouldn't look too closely into certifying the formal parentage of a child brought from overseas if no-one was disputing it), or by snatching him and going on the run -- in which case the law would be entirely on Raoul' s side.
Raoul is going to have other practical concerns to worry about: his thoughts about Erik as a potential father are honest enough here. 'Lots of money' plus 'wants child to be happy' are enough to assuage his conscience -- it's as much or more as he ever offered Gustave himself, after all :-(
I don't really see any hint in canon that Erik and Raoul are ever going to tolerate each other: nothing in Erik's portrayal in LND characterises him as experiencing empathy for a defeated enemy, which is basically the way he is viewing the Vicomte here. He despises and distrusts Raoul, who hates and resents him... and he isn't going to relax until the other man is safely removed from the scene. By his lights he is actually being distinctly polite and magnanimous in allowing this little scene at all ("a child that isn't his!"), and it's certainly not being done for Raoul's benefit.
Raoul is trying to be fair (I'm not convinced that Erik is even trying, to be honest), but it is at least partly to assuage his own sense of nagging guilt where Gustave is concerned: painting the boy's new guardian as a "hellspawn demon" would make it obviously impossible to leave him there. He is still furious with resentment and jealousy, and the general sensation that the Phantom is somehow running rings around him intellectually though he is not quite sure how...
And he is busy blaming himself, not entirely rationally, for Christine's death. I'm afraid I suspect from what we see in LND that Erik's self-pity tends more towards a sense of external persecution while Raoul's spirals inwards, and that Erik's grief is probably leading him to blame anyone and everyone but himself at this point -- with Raoul as a prime candidate -- while Raoul is appropriating gratuitous responsibility.
The crying is actually very significant -- and a reference forward to the final chapter :-)
At the start, Raoul is looking for an excuse to despise Erik (whom he is very conscious of as despising him) and seizing upon this: making a spectacle of himself in front of the boy! What right has he -- how dare he? How disgusting!
He also really doesn't want to think of Erik as mourning Christine, which both humanises him and is tantamount to making a claim on her: it's a deeply uncomfortable idea, as is the concept that Erik might be able to express himself freely with Gustave in a way that he himself has never managed.
And simultaneously he is on some level aware that he himself needs to weep for Christine and can't, and that the process is destroying him -- although that isn't yet explicit.
He is trying to be honest; he is painfully trying to be self-aware. But he is not an objective narrator, and the best that can be said is that he is conscious of it.
In this version Erik is paying for the return journey, and Raoul ends up in a second-class inside cabin instead of the first-class staterooms we saw on the "Persephone" :-(
Though it could have been worse: at least he gets a two-berth cabin instead of the four-berth option, so he only has one cabin-mate to get on with -- he has the vestiges of en-suite accommodation rather than the communal facilities down in the steerage -- and this version of Raoul doesn't get seasick :-) As ever, a certain amount of autobiographical experience in there: I travelled to Russia twenty years ago on a one-way ticket in the cheap accommodation of a Baltic cruise liner...
I'm afraid that for this Raoul, Gustave will always be "the child who got in the way": those weeks in Brittany when it was just the two of them again are a very precious memory.
This story was actually drafted during the July heatwave, and shortly after completing it I left the city and went west to the seaside, where it was at least ten degrees cooler...and where I found a postcard of people on the beach in 1904 :-) A case of life imitating art!
It is of course Perros-Guirec to which they walk from Lannion: the 'modern' Perros-Guirec of Leroux' own day (thanks to the time-jump in LND!), with its casino, brash new villas and Parisian -- or 'Perrosian' -- tourists... and the sands at Trestraou where Raoul first rescued Christine's scarf :-) But everybody always does Perros-Guirec: I thought it would be nice to revisit Raoul's aunt in Lannion for a change. (When he goes back to stay at the old inn, he pretends to the woman there -- who recognises him -- that he had come down to Lannion 'on business' and just happened to be in the neighbourhood; so the family obviously retained property in the area.)
That final scene -- "Don't cry, Papa" -- was more or less the whole prompt for the story :-(
This is indeed a very depressing piece: inevitably so, given the timescale of the setting. Raoul is busy disintegrating in a toxic mixture of guilt and helplessness (and acute jealousy), and pretty much hanging onto his sanity by his fingernails.
Of course what Anne is trying to do is to comfort her father in the only terms with which she has any experience ("Maman will make it all better"): she doesn't realise that in the circumstances this isn't the most helpful thing to say... I'm afraid that from the point of view of a child who can't be -- by the chronology of this story -- more than three and a half, "You have to be a good girl now, Miss Anne, because your Maman has gone to be with the angels" (or whatever period euphemism would have been used to tell her of her mother's death) really doesn't mean anything very different to "Your Maman has gone to America": she doesn't have any meaningful concept of either, and she is still confidently expecting Christine to come home. Now that Raoul is back she is certain that her mother will be there any minute :-(
I strongly suspect that once she realises that her mother really has gone forever she is going to fly into (to Raoul) inexplicable panics for the next few years whenever anyone mentions America, this now being inextricably associated in her mind with death and abandonment...
In the final chapter the crying comes back into play: Erik can weep for Christine at Gustave's bedside, but Raoul finds himself unable to yield enough to do so until he is reunited with Anne. (I picture the two scenes as being very similar, but the dynamic is of course different because Gustave is an older child.)
Raoul here does at least have something of Christine left in his life: someone by whom he is loved and needed. Something to live for... (I do wonder what will happen when Erik learns about Anne, which he is bound to do from Gustave eventually: the boy has no reason to take Raoul's hint "not to talk about it" literally. Raoul of course assumes the worst, that the Phantom will covet his daughter as some kind of reincarnation of her mother and/or try to repeat history. I hope that non-badfic Erik isn't quite as fixated as that!)
I'm afraid there won't in fact be flowers on the breakfast table to welcome Raoul's homecoming, because it was Christine who used to arrange for that :-( (Though I can see a ten-year-old Anne reviving the 'tradition' in secret one day, hopeful of surprising a smile out of Raoul on his arrival -- it's more likely to have the opposite effect...)
Anne was of course central to this story all along: I spent a lot of time adjusting hints (e.g. Gustave as "Christine's first-born child", "mothers who cavorted with lovers were dead to the children left behind them", and Raoul asking "What am I to do -- what are we to do?") to try to get the right level of works-in-retrospect implication. Raoul's 'unseemly attitude' towards Anne -- in Baptiste's view -- is of course the amount of fuss he makes of the child, and the way he is happy to allow her to get the two of them into situations entirely unbefitting the Vicomte's dignity: fawning over a baby daughter is, in Baptiste's private opinion, ridiculous behaviour. After all, there are nurses employed for that sort of thing specifically so that the parents can meet their children in a more controlled environment :-p
But yes, that was a deliberate choice of misleading phrasing on the author's part!
I suspect it's actually less obvious to those who take canon knowledge for granted on the subject of Gustave. But so far as I could make out, canon doesn't actually say that Christine never had any children by Raoul... we just don't see her bring them to America :-) So the purpose of Chapter 2 was first to establish that, under the right circumstances, it would have been perfectly natural to leave a small child (in that case Gustave) behind while his parents went on a journey, and then to hint at an earlier attempt at reconciliation that could have resulted in a daughter... Originally, Gustave says explicitly in the opening chapter that Christine thought Anne was "too little" to make the journey to America (this being the story-internal logic as to why she isn't there): but this fell victim to initial attempts at obfuscation, since it made it obvious that Anne was in fact a small child.
(And -- as Raoul realises here and far too late -- if only Gustave had been deemed too young for the journey, a great deal of heartbreak would have been saved all round: Christine would never have left her child abandoned behind her in France, the Phantom would have had no blackmail lever to use on her and Meg would have had no blackmail lever to use on him, since no-one would ever have suspected from the existence of the 'little Vicomte' that Erik had a son. The Girys would not have felt displaced by his decision to make Gustave his heir, Christine would presumably have returned to Gustave in Raoul's company; and depending on how exactly the various confrontations played out in this scenario, Erik might at least have seen Christine again and made his peace with her in the knowledge that she forgives him for having abandoned her, and Raoul might have been reduced to a state vulnerable enough to confess his insecurities to Christine and mend their marriage. What a difference one child's presence makes... but that would be another story. And I don't plan to write that one!)
The idea of Anne as a governess/nursemaid and Raoul's secret mistress was precisely the misdirection I was going for. (She was also at various times a small pet and an elderly relative, but I decided I'd better settle on one 'cover story' and stick to it: I did wonder if anyone would actually swallow that particular theory coming from my direction!)
I suspect that whatever childhood stories Raoul tells Anne, he is not going to promise her that her dead mother will send an Angel of Music to watch over her and inspire her with talent... In fact I'm not sure I can see him encouraging her to take up music at all, the associations -- both from his memories of Christine as a child and from the circumstances of their later lives -- being too painful. Which is a pity, because Raoul did love music once.
On the other hand, an Anne who inherits her mother's talent -- I think the chances are that she would be generally talented rather than outstandingly gifted, though Christine apparently inherited potential genius from her father -- would potentially be under even more pressure to be a 'reincarnation' of the lost woman...
It's a great pity that Raoul would deprive his daughter of music, but thinking about it I can't picture him obliviously settling her down to routine piano lessons: the implications of Christine -- Christine and Gustave -- Christine and the Phantom -- Christine -- are just going to resonate on and on. He is going to shy away from music for a long time...
I don't think he'd play the cruel father and forbid her from any contact with the musical world, especially if she turns out to find a talent for herself after all, but I don't see him taking any steps to try to prompt her into it. I just don't think he could bear to. If she's lucky she may get singing in a convent education.
Also, there's likely to be a financial issue, depending on just how bad Raoul's debts are: for the purposes of this story I had him virtually broke and dependent on the Phantom's charity to get home. (Probably unlikely in reality: after all, he manages to get liner tickets for the three of them at short notice before the performance, and they must have anticipated needing funds in America, even if they were relying on Christine's fee to pay off the outstanding gambling dues.)
Raoul and Anne are probably going to end up in furnished lodgings here, rather than with the 'little house in the banlieue" and small investment income which he calculates they will be able to afford in the case of "The Choices of Raoul"... so yes, he will have to sell Christine's piano, though I doubt he'd do that willingly, even if he would never otherwise open it :-(
Anne's existence gives Raoul motivation to "be strong": her dependence on him is an incentive to hold himself together, as we have already seen during the voyage -- and to a far greater degree when he actually has her needing his attention in person, and when he has to try to help her cope with what will be enormous changes in her life due to their financial situation. (I think he is going to have to find some way to keep her nurse in his employ, both to provide some continuity and because I simply cannot see him coping with the day-to-day needs of a three-year-old girl without help... he hasn't the faintest practical idea. Neither has Erik, of course, but at least Gustave is reasonably self-sufficient.)
I don't think Christine would ever have told Erik about Gustave if he hadn't guessed beforehand and more or less forced her into it: after all, at the point where he is busy threatening the life of his own son she has a sizeable motivation for telling him, yet she still doesn't do so. She clearly never intended for him to know. (It's a pretty combustible secret which he could have used to break up her marriage, as in fact he ultimately tries to do; and if his attempt to 'seduce' Gustave 'to the dark side' hadn't ended up by terrifying the child and driving him away, would he have been quite so self-abnegating in vowing to devote all his worldly goods to the child without ever seeing him again, or would he have made further attempts to take possession of the son as he had done with the mother?)
Gustave may be half Erik's son... but he is half Christine's son, and has been brought up entirely by Christine (or at least not at all by Erik). And Raoul loves Christine... so I don't see any reason in theory why he shouldn't get on very well with Gustave, assuming he isn't the generic child-hating ogre of fan-fiction. Sons can be fun, after all :-) (Indeed in my WW1 story To Ease Your Troubled Mind, I explored the possibility of a Raoul and Gustave with little in common who become close due to shared experiences in adulthood: in that version of events -- in which the family again leave before Christine ever encounters the Phantom -- Raoul really has no reason to imagine that Gustave's paternity might be in doubt, although Christine's conscience leads her to wonder...)
However, I can imagine that traits that were attractive in a girl during courtship might be considered less appealing in a growing son: a Gustave who copies his mother too closely might come across as effeminate.
Conversely I think there's a danger for Raoul that he might want Anne to be too much like her mother: she is after all an individual in her own right (and likely to be as headstrong as he is), but watching her growing up is going to come painfully close to reliving his own memories of Christine in childhood. Trying to live up to the image of a saintly dead mother whom she barely remembers is a burden on any child... and when she learns exactly how her mother did die (and since it's both a scandalous and a painful subject, I can't see her father volunteering the information very readily), that will be pretty traumatic as well: the icon shattered :-(
(It also occurs to me that, in this version, we have to assume that Christine evidently didn't have any qualms about abandoning her daughter in France in order to be with Erik; even if Gustave was closer to her heart, I can't imagine she would have been a neglectful mother to Anne... however flustered she may initially have been by a fresh pregnancy at that point in her marriage! Either she really was prepared to throw all away for love, or she was making a more or less conscious decision (prompted by circumstance) to 'share' the children between herself and Raoul, or she was assuming vaguely that they could all be together again somehow later on...)
I didn't find it improbable that Christine might choose to leave a small child behind in a familiar environment rather than taking her on a journey halfway around the world; it just occurred to me -- after suggesting that a Christine who had left Gustave behind in Paris would never have considered staying in New York -- that according to my version of the story, Christine apparently took just that decision where Anne was concerned! If she stays at Phantasma with Gustave then she is effectively abandoning her daughter in order to take a lover; some women did make that choice, but it wouldn't reflect well on her relative affection for the two children...
I'm not sure that Anne's unquestioning assumption that her father loves her "more than anything in the whole world, except of course Maman" would necessarily be justified by what she will have seen of their marriage over the last year or two, either. But from personal experience I'd say that it is possible Raoul would have confided his feelings more openly in the unquestioning and supposedly uncomprehending hearing of his baby daughter than in the presence of Christine herself... :-(
After Gustave's rejection, Erik's initial reaction is one of abnegation and self-sacrifice (interestingly, it's probably the only echo of that original 'Final lair' decision that we see from him in this musical); he begs Christine not to tell the child who his father is, and indeed tries to stop her deathbed confession the next day. If he adhered to that decision he presumably wouldn't follow Gustave home to France, or at least wouldn't try to kidnap him. Though I can imagine that once the initial revulsion of feeling wore off, he would at least want to keep himself informed of Gustave's progress, and might feel tempted to use his 'influence' to lean on a few important figures who could influence his son's future...
It occurs to me that by a painful coincidence both Raoul and Christine have already grown up motherless; indeed they were both effectively orphaned in their teens and brought up by foster-parents. So history is repeating itself in the case of their children :-(