Just over six thousand words, in the end -- almost exactly the same as Chapter 4. I haven't made any attempt to unwind the *two* flashback/framing device set-ups in this chapter, although I did try to make it a bit more clear when we finally caught up to the present again. I think the only 'present-day' passage in the entire chapter is the brief one between the return to "she had felt afraid to show her face in the street" and the section following "as I observed to Raoul in the early hours of that evening" -- the course of the actual conversation with Madame Firmin, and only that :-(

Chapter 7 — “It Will Be At Midsummer”

It was months before I set foot again in the Opera Populaire. Indeed, there was gossip abroad that the opera would never reopen; that the cost of repairs would be too great, and audiences would never return to the scene of a disaster so widely reported in such lurid terms. Raoul had tried to keep the illustrations in the papers from me, but I had seen them: images of screaming women holding aloft their infants, and dying men at one another’s throats. It was all fanciful, so far as I could tell — certainly there had been no babes in arms, nor any other women that I had seen amid the crowd in the pit, where the crush in ordinary times was unsuitable for skirts, and where the panic had been at its worst — but to my knowledge at least three people had died, and the reality of it had been nightmarish enough. The outcry against the management was immense, and poor Madame Firmin confided to me that she had felt compelled to retire to the country to avoid the opprobrium.

Finally, chapter 6. (There have been a total of 27 hits since I posted chapter 5, although I don't know how many of those actually got as far as the new chapter).

I *am* pleased with the 'Music of the Night' paragraph... (darkness that sang with a thousand voices like the stars).

Chapter 6 — “He’ll Stop at Nothing”

The story came out of Christine first hesitantly, under Raoul’s incisive questioning, and then in a stumbling rush. Some of it I did not learn until much later; at some things of which she would not speak I only ever guessed.

Perhaps she herself did not know the depths of her heart, or shrank to lay them open. I never asked her — though I often wondered, in the months afterwards — if she had suspected that every word she let slip that night would go straight to the ears of the one who had perpetrated upon her the deception she described, and who would regard her appeal for help as an unforgivable betrayal.

Christine did not tell us everything. But what she did say was enough to bring down disaster upon the Opera House and upon those of us present on that roof, herself most of all.

Unusually I ended up deleting several sentences from this chapter altogether rather than editing them, because I decided they were just unnecessary -- I remember thinking that the subtext in the chapter was very clever at the time, but it may have been a little too clever for its own good, because after a year or so's delay I can no longer remember myself exactly what all the characters were supposed to be assuming respectively about what was going on :-(

I note that Meg somehow turns up in the corps de ballet after the quick scene change despite supposedly being dressed for a walk-on part (did she execute an incredibly quick change into block shoes and tutu?) -- I suspect that's left over from the movie, where Meg is in the cast but *not*, so far as I remember, in the Act 3 ballet, and possibly I ought to change either the one reference or the other... The trouble is that I'm reluctant to lose either, which is simply authorial laziness!

[Edit: time for some more cuts, I think, to make credible Hertha's momentary assumption that Christine is talking about Raoul when she says 'he' will never let her go -- and to omit the whole paragraph about Raoul looking relieved to have their embrace interrupted. We've already got Hertha saying that he basically looked trapped rather than guilty, and it makes more sense of her assumption that Christine is running away from her as a result.

Edit: no, we need something in there, or it makes no sense that Hertha accepts his protective behaviour at the end of the chapter without feeling betrayed by it.]

Chapter 5 — “An Accident... Simply an Accident”

It was another opening night. Another glittering, chattering crowd, with the orchestra playing a well-worn warhorse of an overture: Albrizzio’s “Il Muto” had been a staple feature at opera houses across Europe for over eighty years, since the days when Italian opera reigned supreme. The new management was playing it safe in their choice of programme, and to judge by the packed house tonight it had been a prudent decision. ( Read more... )

And we're finally back to the mesmerism I spent so much time researching in January last year (like my recent worries over Hertha's Vienna address after I discovered that my 'fictional' street was in fact a real street of an unusual name which exists in Munich, not Vienna -- all the frantic research for a plausible real address with the right connotations for the family ended up as literally one word in the finished story ;-p)

I also discovered in the process of editing that Raoul had 'appeared abruptly older' several times in the course of the chapter, in addition to having already done so in Ch2; this is what happens when you write painfully slowly and forget which phrases you have previously used ;-p I managed to cut it down to a single, less repetitious occurrence...

Chapter 3 — “As if Awoken from a Dream”

I did not reach home until after midnight, and there was no shared supper of champagne and laughter, but only a cold collation that was put together for me in haste and eaten alone in a chilly salon downstairs. It was a far cry from the sparkle of wine-glasses and good company chez Valestre, where we’d planned to dine.

But Christine Daaé was nowhere to be found, there was no-one in authority from whom Raoul could get a straight answer, and I’d been more shaken by those dizzying moments at the door than I wanted to admit. ( Read more... )

And finally, after almost eighteen months, we have an edited and proofread chapter 2!

Chapter 2 — “We Can Make it Work”

I’d been married to Raoul for nine months, but I’d known him since we’d first come to Paris.

We’d left Vienna and the big house on the Praterstraße after my brother Rudolf died. It had been a hot summer, and he’d gone swimming with his friends and taken a chill that turned into a fever. I could still remember those last days, with all the windows shuttered and my mother drifting like a ghost through empty room after empty room, in those apartments that had once been so full of music and eager talk.

Without Rudi, nothing had ever been quite the same. My father had taken us first to Baden Baden, then to Paris, where he had business interests. My mother’s piano stood unplayed and she rarely left our lodgings. I was lonely and awkward, a growing girl in a city that made little distinction between Viennese and the hated Prussians. We’d been outsiders back home, though my grandfather had been baptised as a Christian, but somehow it had never seemed to matter. Now I was an outsider and a foreigner.

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