Igenlode Wordsmith

Letters from Napoleon to the Chief of his secret police:

"These five persons will be arrested at the same time, and sent with courier horses to the Temple that very day. Whether they are guilty or not of the act they are now accused of, I have been displeased with them for a long time."
"Give orders to have Mr. Kuhn, the American consul at Genoa, put under arrest, for wearing a Cross of Malta given him by the English, and as being an English agent. His papers will be seized, and an abstract of them made, and he will be kept in secret confinement until you have made your report to me. This man, having received a foreign decoration, ceases to be an American. I am sorry, by the way, you should have communicated with the ambassador of the United States. My police knows no ambassadors. I am master in my own house."
"I see in your report, one from the police commissary at Bordeaux, to the effect that the nobility did not attend the ball given by Senator Lamartinière. I wish for details on the subject, and desire to be informed, family by family, as to the persons referred to in this document"
"Order the goods of the Abbé Ratel to be sequestered. I am informed he still has something left under other people’s names."

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/letters-law

The Emperor pays close personal attention to those individuals who displease him, and very little to the law...

I turned up some of my old research about the running costs/ticket prices etc at the Opera Garnier (weirdly, this appears to have been a totally *different* set of research from the additional values cited in my existing post of assorted opera research!)

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While trying to find out which operas were actually produced at the Palais Garnier during the early 1880s (in order to give Raoul and Philippe a plausible production to attend for the third chapter of my Christmas story!), I came across a very useful book mentioning various facts about opera in Paris, for example https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KSQGZOTQKmwC&pg=PA2

The Opera might take 20,000F in ticket sales from a single performance, which puts Erik's 'salary' into perspective -- on the other hand, it cost 16-17,000F per night to stage an opera at all.( Read more... )

Having coming across Apsley Cherry-Garrard's picture pretty much by chance as a mental image for Arctic Raoul (interestingly, apparently he was actually dark-haired; the fair/white beard in the photo was an unexpected side-effect of the extreme cold), I then stumbled across a discarded copy of his autobiographical account of the Antarctic, "The Worst Journey in the World". It's a massive tome about seven hundred pages long (counting a hundred pages or so of historical introduction by both the author and the editor)... and it turns out to be absolutely fascinating.

'Cherry' was intelligent and observant, sometimes palpably schoolboyish and sometimes painfully mature, he had access to all the archive material and personal diaries from the expedition records (he was supposed to be writing up the official report, before he decided he couldn't produce the sort of detached dry document they wanted), and he couldn't half *write*. ( Read more... )

( Tealin )

One more quirk of the Napoleonic legal system (in addition to the business of needing the father's permission to marry if you were under the age of twenty-five): couples could not be divorced 'by mutual consent' if the husband was under the age of twenty-five -- or if they had been married for less than two years.
So if Raoul wanted to divorce his wife and remarry to Christine, he would have to have brought his concubine into their common residence first, and get Hertha to divorce him, because otherwise they are deemed too young to know their own minds. (Not a completely unreasonable legal attitude, although an unexpected one!)

And the 'concubine' in question couldn't be Christine herself, because the guilty party is not permitted to marry his accomplice subsequent to the divorce. ( Read more... )

I had a look at the Beauvais problem and the details of what I had actually written in the last two chapters, and concluded that the choice of location is probably all right as it stands.
( Travel data )

I think all that is reasonably consistent, after all, with the idea of a four- or five-hour journey. It can be done there and back in a day if you are willing to make a very long day of it, although you wouldn't do so all that often, but if you are elderly or travelling with luggage it would normally be a one-way trip.

On the other hand it wouldn't be completely out of the question to rewrite it to specify a railway component — I haven't created any plot element that's absolutely dependent on coach travel. Note however that Leroux did have Raoul planning to elope long-distance by coach in canon: on ne devait pas prendre le chemin de fer pour dérouter le fantôme! (Ironically I took it absolutely for granted in Arctic Raoul that the protagonists would be travelling from Paris to Chagny by railway...)

I'm not sure what's going on, but my Internet access in general seems to be degraded this morning, probably due to rain in the wires -- I hope this will post, as a lot of pages are showing up either with their images missing, their CSS absent, or simply blank ("Error: no document source").

Here at any rate is one of the more bizarre discoveries I made while researching beliefs in Animal Magnetism circa 1840-50: the Snail Telegraph.

It has lately been stated, by M. Allix, on the authority of M. Benoit in Paris, and of another discoverer, (also, I believe, a Frenchman, who is now in America,) both of whom, during the last ten years, have been employed in working out the discovery, which they had severally and independently made, although they are now associated to work it out, that this magnetic sympathy is remarkably developed in snails; that these animals, after having once been in communication or in contact, continue ever after to sympathise, no matter at what distance they may be. And it has been proposed to found, on this fact, a mode of communication between the most distant places. ( Read more... )

I've managed to get myself enmeshed in more complicated timeline implications by dropping references without having a clear plan beforehand.

In chapter 1, Raoul is stated to be twenty-one years old and to have a forthcoming birthday (presumably his twenty-second). At the time of Christine's performance, he has been married for nine months. Hertha knew him when he was seventeen.

So far in chapter 2, Hertha has a conversation with her parents about marriage "the summer I turned nineteen" (at which point she has presumably known Raoul for a couple of years; I was carefully vague about how old she was when her brother died and about how long they spent in Baden Baden). She has another conversation with her mother "over a year later" on the eve of her marriage to Raoul, for which "the final arrangements had taken months". At some earlier point -- presumably months earlier, so possibly in the spring or summer in which she turns twenty -- she has a conversation with Raoul himself, when he tells her that his father is dying and "can't last out the year" and effectively proposes marriage, while "it would be some months yet before he was twenty-one". Raoul's father then dies three weeks after the wedding, and we get immersed in the complications of 19th-century mourning rituals. ( Read more... )

I think I've finished my first chapter of the "Raoul's wife" story, although I still haven't decided on a definite name for it. ( Read more... )Meanwhile I'm busy trying to establish a credible surname for Hertha's family — a quick glance at Wikipedia yields the rather unpromising information that the number of Jews in Vienna actually ballooned after 1867, so whatever her father's reason for coming to Paris in the late 1870s it certainly wasn't because the environment at home had become unwelcoming. Fortunately the plot doesn't actually require that...

I wanted him to be a Baron, which seemed fairly generic and an acceptable level of alliance, and Wikipedia does at least confirm that this is an appropriate title for a self-made family. They don't have to have a title at all, but I feel that marrying a banker's daughter would probably be more socially acceptable if she could be deemed foreign nobility rather than simply filthy rich.

I think they're probably not actually Jewish but descended from Jews or converted a generation or so back, because the number of actual noble Jewish families in Vienna was very small and verifiable, whereas the number of Austrian nobles and quasi-nobles who were allied with Jewish families at some point in their ancestry was high: Austrian History Yearbook. I don't think the story is going to go into any of this in any detail, but I ought to get it straight in my head.

Other useful lists of surnames:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_Jew
  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_barons_of_Austria-Hungary