I changed the name of the old midwife in What's In a Name? from Mère Mégane ("Old Mother Mégane") to Albine, after discovering that people were interpreting this as an anachronistic attempt to call the character 'Meg-short-for-Megan' :-O

To be honest I don't know *where* I got the name from (unlikely to have been from modern Americanised pop culture as I don't read that sort of French!) Possibly subconsciously from Messrs Renault, although I would guess that I was probably simply looking for a rare name -- e.g. not drawing from the standard Phantom writers' limited female palette of Marie/Louise/Jeanne/Blanche/Angelique! -- that would alliterate...

I have just (three years too late!) remembered that the female equivalent of Honoré is "Honorine" (which explains why there was no "Honore" :-p) Of course I could theoretically change Mlle Gilberte Lancard back to Honorine Lancard, but she feels like a Gilberte to me by this point...

I don't believe it. Apparently I was a little too good at making up credible names for Scandinavian coastal communities -- there actually *is* a port of Halmstad, and not only that but it is a major Swedish city which people may well have have heard of, and which is located in quite a different region from my fictional Norwegian 'Halmstad' :-(

(The only reason I found this out was that I noticed I had changed the name to "Halvestad" halfway through Chapter 24 -- unfortunately I subsequently evidently completely forgot not only that I had done so, but the reason for the change. Like Tolkien, I tend not to go back in my manuscripts and alter earlier versions of names, but generally carry any changes forward from that point, and this has come back to bite me!)

Oh well, the ability to alter this sort of thing is one of the benefits of not publishing-as-you-go. I should probably warn my beta-readers, although I do wonder if they would actually pick up on the discrepancy :-(
(It's not really fair to ask people to read with an eye to continuity when it is up to three months between chapters...)

[Edit: "Alvestad" might be better than "Halvestad", which is Dutch!]

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
  

(Cross-posted from a comment on vicomte_de_chagny, since I know I'll never look for it there, and had enough trouble finding the reference to material that only existed in an untagged comment in my own blog...)

One interesting thing about Leroux's reference to the initials RC carved into the wall of the Communards' dungeon is how it relates to the particule question -- it implies that, to a Frenchman, Raoul's initials are self-evidently RC, not (as I've seen in fanfics where a handkerchief embroidered with Raoul's initials forms part of the plot) RdC, or even R.D.C.
(I wondered if I ought to drop the particule on typing up, but having now done five chapters -- 15,000 words/31 pages of manuscript/Plot Point Four -- I've stuck with having Lancard refer to him as 'de Chagny". Having him address Raoul as 'Chagny' just seemed rude and weird when I was typing it....)

And here as a placeholder is the list of names used in the first two-thirds of the Swedish story, excluding the final third which is currently drying out under a heavy weight after having replacement endpapers glued in :-p

Full list of names in the Swedish story (unless I introduce any more OCs in the final chapters!)( Read more... )

Unbelievably, after my problems with Lancard and Lagarde and sister Clémence, I've now discovered that, having bestowed the name Bajet upon the senior servant at the château de Chagny, I'd already used it for the name of a sailor at the end of plot point four. Since it's well over a year since I wrote that scene (and the line in question was actually an edited interpolation), I can't imagine where my subconscious dragged the name up from.

Rather than try to come up with another random sailor's name, it probably makes more sense to re-use one of the future survivors for this bit-part role (very, very 'bit' -- he just gets yelled at to fetch the surgeon). Of course, at the time when this chapter was written none of them actually existed yet... I've gone for Boudon ('the other big one'), who is the least well characterised and generally gets the least to do.