If I were Vicomte (ch3)

[igenlode]

The chapters are still very short, but this one is actually longer than the previous one. (The fact that it's two scenes run together helps.)

Unfortunately, once we get Yann as far as Christine's dressing-room we start running into sections of the story that have already been described in greater detail in canon, so at this stage my version starts skipping wildly; in effect, the idea is that everything happens just as in canon from this point, Yann simply interprets it differently from his counterpart.

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3. L’Officier

La Royale was good to the young Breton sailor. Yann proved quick and obedient, and self-possessed and nimble aloft. He drew the approbation of his officers without incurring the enmity of the sous-officier set over him, and found himself promoted; first among the seamen, then — after completing his first voyage around the world — among the cadets.

No allowances were made for his lack of education, and he was expected to study alongside the rest. Yann set his teeth and puzzled out mathematics and navigation along with the duffers of the class, taking a fierce pride in the speed with which he overhauled these schoolboys. It was at this time that he began to cultivate a moustache.

In the winter that he turned twenty-one he was a slim, bright-haired young man with a boyish freckled face, confident in his profession but shy among women, with whom his lack of experience put him at a disadvantage. In his leisure hours he read voraciously, in an attempt to remedy the deficiencies in his education. When one of the senior lieutenants proposed a party of pleasure to Paris among the young officers in port, since Yann’s ship was laid up for repairs for the next several months he for one accepted eagerly.

For many of them, young provincials that they were, it was their first sight of Paris, and Lieutenant Philippe was hard-put to it to keep his motley charges in order — for the good name of the service, as he snapped on more than one occasion. Their excursion to the Opera was marked by a sizeable degree of disruption in the stalls as the more unruly members of the party passed observation not only upon the dancers on stage, but upon the well-fed bourgeoisie seated around them, and Philippe’s patience was stretched to its limit.

Only Yann remained quiet and enthralled throughout, by the wistful yearning of the violins, to begin with, and then by mounting memories and disbelief. He had never heard opera before, and the spectacle of a grown man throwing his voice about in trills and runs like a shepherd’s pipe was at first bizarre and then simply tedious. The choruses pleased him better, with their echoes of the hearty singing on board ship; as for the women, with their brightly painted faces and their voluptuous airs, he had always heard that females on the stage were no better than common streetwalkers and to his disapproving eye they certainly looked the part.

So when Christine stepped out from amid the chorus, took a breath, and sent a hard little voice out into the auditorium in response to the operatics of the leading lady, he could scarcely believe it was her. The little girl who had sung to the seals on the sands and taken such pleasure in her father’s folk tunes — could she be the same as that crudely-coloured singing puppet up there on stage, who warbled without feeling and went stiffly through her part?

He knew nothing about opera, of course, but the feather-boa around the neck of the Parisian lady in front quivered as she leant over to direct a disparaging remark about “the little Daaé” to her husband in the neighbouring seat, and there could be no more doubt. Yann was torn between shame on her behalf and a wild, confused desire to defend her.

He returned to the Opera again and again. He tried to speak to her backstage. He hid behind pieces of scenery in order to accost her. But she gave no sign that she recognised the young Breton at all. His only consolation was that — far from his imaginings — she did not acknowledge anyone else either.

There came a gala night when the audience went wild, and Yann for all his ignorance began to understand why. Christine was no longer singing the rôle of the maid or confidante in which he had first heard her; she was singing centre-stage, pouring out melody and ornament without end, and her voice was no longer that of the expressionless little doll. In the past weeks he had come to learn a little of opera and to form a preference between one style and another, but even his untutored ear was swept away by the passion and purity in Christine’s voice tonight. Men around him were in tears, and in the boxes above the rich patrons had stilled their conversation to lean forward, drawn despite themselves to the frail girl on the stage.

She sang Juliet, and she was once again the blushing girl in the garden, with her heart in her eyes and in her silver throat in place of the shy movement of her hand in his. She sang Marguerite, who rejects her unworthy lover’s rescue for the glories of heaven, and the agony of that rejection tore through him like a knife of guilt. So when she trembled and seemed to fall, Yann thought at first that this, too, was only a part of her art. But she did not rise; and when consternation began and she was carried off stage, he felt his own blood drain until he was as white as a sheet and on the point of collapse.

~o~

He need not have concerned himself, he thought bitterly now. It would have been different, no doubt, if he had been one of the fashionable crowd, with a fine address in a fancy part of town, and a title to dangle beneath her nose. But Christine Daaé in the wake of her great success clearly had better things to do than pass the time of day with some jumped-up peasant out of her past.

She’d forgotten him. She’d pretended she’d forgotten him, which was worse. And she’d laughed at him, which was worst of all.

He’d done everything he could to try to see her and explain. He’d even written her a letter begging permission to pay her a call, and if he’d had any sense he’d have taken the message from the dead silence he’d received in reply and gone off to find consolation elsewhere.

But it was easy, so easy, to make a fool of a boy with no rank and no position... and so he’d come tearing down here to Perros-Guirec at the first crook of her little finger, only to be faced with that incredible story about an angel in her dressing-room. He’d travelled the world. He held his commission. He wasn’t the naïve country yokel she took him for.

Yann groaned in frustration and turned over in his bed at the auberge du Soileil-Couchant, too strung up and exhausted to sleep. He’d jolted all night in the train and then the stagecoach, wedged upright into a corner of the seat. He’d had no appetite for lunch and had made a poor supper, solitary and miserable by the fire with Christine shut away in her room upstairs. The day seemed endless.

“If I were vicomte,” Yann told himself in a rush of hopeless anger, “I’d have travelled down here in the first place cocooned in luxury. I’d have laughed off these fancies of hers like a man of the world. And instead of tossing up here on a hard bed”—this was an injustice to the inn’s excellent mattresses, but he was in no state to care—”I’d be snugly down there in the parlour with my arm about Christine’s waist and her head on my shoulder, talking over old times and planning our future...”

He broke off. There had come a noise from Christine’s room.

Ten minutes later he had flung on some clothes and was climbing impetuously out into a snowy tree without an overcoat. And an hour after that, chilled to the bone and with his senses reeling in disbelief, Yann was lying senseless on the altar steps of the little church at Perros-Guirec, where he was not found until it was almost too late.