Igenlode Wordsmith

( D'Artagnan at war )

( Order in which d'Artagnan's friends leave him )

( A whole extra chapter at the end of the French version of 'The Man in the Iron Mask' )


What I was actually trying to do was to ascertain whether it was possible for me to have Venya being asked to play at Mass, in a nod to Nat being asked to play his violin to accompany the Sunday hymns at Plumfield. ( Read more... )

At any rate, I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that it seemed overall in the highest degree unlikely that homespun musical services would be going on anywhere at Bragelonne in the same spirit as those hosted by the Bhaers at Plumfield, whatever kind of religious observance did exist there (and there must surely have been *something* as part of the settled routine of life at that era?) If any singing went on, it seems more likely to have been by the celebrant[s] and unaccompanied -- and a country priest would probably simply read his daily offices, with or without a congregation to participate.

I note that in Chapter 83 of "Vingt Ans Après", Athos and Aramis find a drawing left by d'Artagnan at Peronne with the sinister message "We are being followed" and, understandably disquieted even though the trail they are following is already cold, proceed to gallop frantically for three or four hours until they encounter the giant boulder moved by Porthos, under which the next message lies. We don't know what time they arrived at Peronne, but since they don't appear to have spent the night there and only discovered d'Artagnan's drawing as they were leaving after a failed search of the town, it can scarcely have been before mid-morning at the earliest, especially since the date is early March and they will not have started travelling until winter daybreak.

After galloping all the way from Peronne, they are obliged to allow their horses three hours' rest, and it takes them a further six hours of riding to reach Compiègne, where they learn that d'Artagnan and Porthos were overtaken and captured. This adds up to a minimum of twelve hours' travel, at the end of which we are told that they dined hastily in order to be able to set out again immediately that night (since Blaisois and Grimaud are left behind with instructions to take the spent horses back to Paris "tomorrow") on hired horses. Even if we assume that they set out at dawn from some nearby hostelry and reached Peronne at 8am or thereabouts, it must have been well and truly dark by this point!

( The journey continued further )

( Grimaud and Mme de Longueville )

Some stuff I stumbled across when looking for information on what letters in the 1640s actually *looked* like: https://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/2017/11/early-modern-price-list.html
Note that this is for 1620s France rather than 1640s, but the relative prices at least should give some kind of idea...

Information on letters: https://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/2016/12/envelopes-and-letters-in-17th-century.html

Christopher Lee himself on sword-fighting in film (with demonstrations!), and the advantages of working with stuntmen as opposed to actors :-)

I realised this morning, on coming across a copy of "Jo's Boys", that I couldn't actually *remember* the crackfic idea that I'd had for a crossover of something or other with Jo's school set-up in "Little Men" -- who were the couple I'd vaguely envisioned as filling in for Amy and Laurie as the generous rich relations, and what canon had it been?

Light suddenly dawned again in the middle of my singing practice tonight (concert in a week and a half, alas). It was of course the crackfic idea about Athos' school for gentlemen( Read more... )

I stumbled across the Italian comedy film "Moschettieri del re" by accident (in its Russian dub, under the YouTube title "4 Musketeers are miserable leading a boring peaceful life") and actually enjoyed it a good deal; as a piece of cinema I think this is more successful than the Russian "Return of the Musketeers", and in a not dissimilar vein, being set at about the same period of history and painted with an equally broad brush in terms of fantastic improbability. The fact that as a native English-speaker I was watching it in Russian obviously means that I was missing out on any finer points in the script and wasn't in a position to judge the quality or delivery of the original Italian dialogue in any case, but I thought it worked.
( Read more... )
This film doesn't really have a plot -- beyond the opening gambit of "The Musketeers reunite thirty years later" -- but there is a reason for that. Meanwhile it's a series of episodic adventures towards an unknown end, in the spirit of an ongoing serial or soap opera. It has a decent Athos, which is always a selling-point so far as I am concerned, even if he does have a face like Toby Jones :-p The characters are well-defined and remain consistent to the updated versions of themselves that have been established, and I particularly liked the direction in which the older Aramis was developed here. I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did, and even if it wasn't 'real' Russian it was still good practice!

( And I was able to understand large chunks of it on first hearing )

Apparently Dumas can't decide on the appearance of the Vicomte de Bragelonne :-p

His characters, where it is mentioned, are all mainly dark-haired, with the notable and probably conscious exception of Milady and her son who are both described as distinctively fair( Read more... )

But we are told that d'Artagnan, on observing a rider making a stealthy exit from Athos' home at dawn, reconnut le justaucorps grenat et les cheveux bruns de Raoul, which struck me at the time as being unexpected in a world where practically no-one has plain brown hair... which is why I then noticed with some surprise that when Athos takes him to visit Madame de Chevreuse in Paris, the allusion there is to ses cheveux noirs[...] élégamment partagés comme on les portait à cette époque! However it seemed not implausible that 'cheveux bruns' could simply have been intended to refer to 'dark hair' in general, so I assumed I'd simply misinterpreted the original phrase.

Matters become completely confused, on the other hand, when we reach the epilogue and d'Artagnan refers fondly to the boy as cette chère tête blonde! So I think that all that can be concluded is that Dumas had no very fixed idea in mind and ascribed a random appearance to Raoul at various different points during the construction of his lengthy serial...

(Given that his father is consistently described as dark-haired and his mother fair an intermediate brown would presumably have made sense :-)

Having been through the stage of finding myself surprisingly pleased with this story, I am now back in the more expected reaction of realising that it doesn't sound much like Porthos after all ( Read more... )

---

Think Only This of Me

Athos gave his life to save Charles Stuart. A grieving d’Artagnan must deal with the consequences. And there are some things, at least, that Porthos sees more clearly than any of them.

---

The Seigneur de Pierrefonds blew in from the little park at Bragelonne like a great gust of wind and demanded Mouston, who had made himself scarce somewhere in the depths of the house. But since his attendant was for the moment nowhere to be seen and the establishment was shrouded in the dismal air that had driven him out-of-doors in the first place, he caught up a candlestick and went himself in search of d’Artagnan. He had a certain uncomfortable sense that in abandoning the house of mourning he had likewise abandoned his friend, and now that the winter dusk had enforced his return, it was time to relieve d’Artagnan of his duties and stand guard in his place, so to speak, over the young Vicomte Raoul. For even if the Comte de La Fère had bequeathed his ward into d’Artagnan’s care, Porthos had a firm intention that the boy should become his son also.

They had gone together to break the dreadful news. D’Artagnan had not asked for support in that task, but Porthos had been quite certain that he needed it.

And it had been every bit as bad as he had thought. ( Read more... )

I *think* I've finished my Porthos-fic (which is of course going to need a title, although its filename is clearly going to be 'Porthos'!) I'm not sure that I've entirely captured Porthos' 'voice', either in speech or in thought-patterns, although there were intermittent bits that I was pleased with in that respect -- I may need to go through and try to simplify my convoluted syntax a *lot*...

I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
( Aramis' faith )

---

( Fic length )

As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...

Dates and ages (probably mutually inconsistent)

Athos tells Raoul on their arrival in Paris that he spent seven of the sweetest and yet most bitter years of his life in his old lodgings on the rue Férou (including the further years after d'Artagnan's promotion?)

He appeals to Porthos during the confrontation at the Place Royale on the grounds that "we slept ten years side by side", presumably referring to the length of time over which the two of them served together as musketeers.

( The age of Aramis )