![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Measurements in Leroux
Sep. 17th, 2021 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'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.
