I started off with Christine's age, giving the various lapses of time that are stated or can be guessed at (e.g. the prize she brought home from the Conservatoire was two years before the new managers took over the Opera) and concluding that an age of 20-21 seemed pretty consistent with the details given, although this was probably coincidental given Leroux's general attitude to dates :-p I also mentioned that I'd used the concept of a teenage Christine being too young to sing opera as a plot point in my current fanfic, where ALW-Christine gives it as a reason to explain why she joined the ballet chorus instead -- she was waiting and studying on her own until she had a hope of being sufficiently developed for the management to take her seriously ;-)
Then I located and quoted the two lines in the original novel where Raoul's age is mentioned: the well-known one on his first introduction, where we are told that he was twenty-one but looked more like eighteen, and the other one where he is driven half out of his mind by visions of Christine laughing at him while cavorting with a string of other lovers, and contemplates suicide although he is 'twenty years old'. And I suggested that this was most probably simply a case of Leroux rounding off his figures (and also of the euphony of the sentence in question, since "vingt-et-un ans" is considerably clumsier as a parting shot than the more general "vingt ans").
I can't be bothered to go back and locate all the supporting quotations from the original French, I'm afraid :-(
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branchandroot
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Date: 2021-09-27 12:02 am (UTC)I started off with Christine's age, giving the various lapses of time that are stated or can be guessed at (e.g. the prize she brought home from the Conservatoire was two years before the new managers took over the Opera) and concluding that an age of 20-21 seemed pretty consistent with the details given, although this was probably coincidental given Leroux's general attitude to dates :-p
I also mentioned that I'd used the concept of a teenage Christine being too young to sing opera as a plot point in my current fanfic, where ALW-Christine gives it as a reason to explain why she joined the ballet chorus instead -- she was waiting and studying on her own until she had a hope of being sufficiently developed for the management to take her seriously ;-)
Then I located and quoted the two lines in the original novel where Raoul's age is mentioned: the well-known one on his first introduction, where we are told that he was twenty-one but looked more like eighteen, and the other one where he is driven half out of his mind by visions of Christine laughing at him while cavorting with a string of other lovers, and contemplates suicide although he is 'twenty years old'. And I suggested that this was most probably simply a case of Leroux rounding off his figures (and also of the euphony of the sentence in question, since "vingt-et-un ans" is considerably clumsier as a parting shot than the more general "vingt ans").
I can't be bothered to go back and locate all the supporting quotations from the original French, I'm afraid :-(