Marriage legality
Sep. 21st, 2019 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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vicomte_de_chagnyAfter spending a long time looking at the ins and outs of French law of this era, which incidentally revealed that the age at which a young man could legally get married without permission from the head of the household was twenty-six, not twenty-one -- presumably why Raoul needs his older brother's consent and can't just marry Christine out of hand -- and that the major part of a marriage celebration in 19th-century France concerned the signing of the contracts, not the church service, since unlike in England a religious marriage wasn't actually legally valid (people tended to do both), I noticed that what Leroux actually says about Raoul and Christine at the end of the book is simply that they "went to search out a priest in some secluded spot". Presumably in order to get married.
Which is to say that Raoul, who can have had no idea that his brother was dead, had apparently decided to give up on any idea of getting legal permission for a valid marriage under French law, and was happy to go off and cohabit with Christine in a union that might have been recognised by God but certainly wouldn't have been recognised by the French State if they had ever returned ;-p
(Apart from the fact that in fact Philippe was dead, courtesy of Erik's siren-guarded lake, and that the question of when exactly Raoul and Christine left the country and when they learned of the Comte's death and Erik's death respectively is one of the chronological details about which Leroux is very confused...)
Which is to say that Raoul, who can have had no idea that his brother was dead, had apparently decided to give up on any idea of getting legal permission for a valid marriage under French law, and was happy to go off and cohabit with Christine in a union that might have been recognised by God but certainly wouldn't have been recognised by the French State if they had ever returned ;-p
(Apart from the fact that in fact Philippe was dead, courtesy of Erik's siren-guarded lake, and that the question of when exactly Raoul and Christine left the country and when they learned of the Comte's death and Erik's death respectively is one of the chronological details about which Leroux is very confused...)
