Igenlode Wordsmith

Summary post of all the surviving material on my long-pending "Double Agents de Chagny" WW2 AU story, prompted by betweensunandmoon:

(extracts from an email conversation - with text emoticons :-p)

17 Sep 2013
I am seriously tempted by Pika-la-cynique's throwaway suggestion of a Paris-based Second World War version "featuring the Double Agents de Chagny playing collaborateurs and hosting champagne parties for the Nazi top brass, while secretly in touch with the Phantom, explosives expert and leader of the underground sabotage movement, reluctant allies for La Cause..."

Well, 'tempted' isn't the word. The possibilities are there all right, but I simply don't know enough about the setting (and more importantly [eyes] its mythology: not what *really* happened, but the heroic tropes) to write it. I can't use a supply of gangster/pirate movie references, swashbuckler conventions, background stage experience, basic social mores or re-reading of the source material (because, being AU, there *isn't* any) to provide standard plot themes for Occupied France, and don't know enough about daily life under those conditions to sketch in the background. But tantalisingly, I know just enough to have vague ideas of the potential ("Scarlet Pimpernel" meets "Colditz")... and to realise that, given the possibly explosive effects of fiddling with a sore point in someone else's history, it would need an awful lot of research! ( first thoughts )

( initial suggestions for the story )

( Raoul's backstory )

( Christine and the Phantom in cabaret )

( Philippe's death )

7 Jan 2019
The other bit I remember that doesn't seem to be mentioned here anywhere is that (as hinted above) it was actually a shot-down English airman being smuggled in the bed of the lorry, they take him back to the flat for the night, he gets Christine's luxurious marital bedroom, and Christine and Raoul end up in Raoul's single bed in the dressing-room together :-p