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vicomte_de_chagny2021-09-17 11:26 am
igenlode) wrote in vicomte_de_chagny2021-09-17 11:26 am
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Measurements in Leroux
I've always had a problem when writing POTO-based fanfic, in that my instinctive metaphors are all based on Imperial units (inches/yards/miles), and France was metricated by law under the Revolution (although fortunately the attempt to introduce a metric week and the decimal day failed to catch on :-p)
But because I'm familiar with English literature, having characters speak or think in terms of metric measurements in a 19th-century setting feels deeply jarring to me, as it's something I associate with extreme modernity. The result is that I end up trying awkwardly to work my way around the issue altogether, by having characters think in terms of body parts -- which is of course what the Imperial measurements are based on! -- or days and hours of travel, rather than distances.
In an attempt to see how Leroux (who was after all living in a society that had been metricated for over a hundred years) handled the issue in its original context, I searched my download text of the French edition for the string "metre" and couldn't find it at all ... which would help explain why it feels so instinctively wrong to associate Raoul or Christine with metres and centimetres!
The obvious metric reference is of course "Deux cent mille kilos sur la tête d'une concierge"... which is also, it transpires, the *only* occurrence of the string "kilo" in the entire text :-p
Even in the passages where I'd expect to find distances mentioned, such as the description of Box No.5 in Ch7, Raoul's descent from the window of the auberge and his trailing of Christine through the snowy streets, or his journey from the station in the diligence, no actual measurements occur. Very odd. I wonder if this was a conscious choice by the author to avoid being tied down to anything specific, just as he avoids giving any definite dates (but manages to give two mutually contradictory ages for Raoul!), or a stylistic quirk of the era.
But because I'm familiar with English literature, having characters speak or think in terms of metric measurements in a 19th-century setting feels deeply jarring to me, as it's something I associate with extreme modernity. The result is that I end up trying awkwardly to work my way around the issue altogether, by having characters think in terms of body parts -- which is of course what the Imperial measurements are based on! -- or days and hours of travel, rather than distances.
In an attempt to see how Leroux (who was after all living in a society that had been metricated for over a hundred years) handled the issue in its original context, I searched my download text of the French edition for the string "metre" and couldn't find it at all ... which would help explain why it feels so instinctively wrong to associate Raoul or Christine with metres and centimetres!
The obvious metric reference is of course "Deux cent mille kilos sur la tête d'une concierge"... which is also, it transpires, the *only* occurrence of the string "kilo" in the entire text :-p
Even in the passages where I'd expect to find distances mentioned, such as the description of Box No.5 in Ch7, Raoul's descent from the window of the auberge and his trailing of Christine through the snowy streets, or his journey from the station in the diligence, no actual measurements occur. Very odd. I wonder if this was a conscious choice by the author to avoid being tied down to anything specific, just as he avoids giving any definite dates (but manages to give two mutually contradictory ages for Raoul!), or a stylistic quirk of the era.
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I may get round to rewriting it at some point...
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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 :-(