Fans of Vicomte Raoul de Chagny

In the book Raoul is certainly not a pompous, wealthy figure (or for that matter in the musical). I think what fans tend to forget is that from Raoul's point of view, title, wealth, possessions etc. are nothing special; he has always had them, and they have never made him particularly happy. He isn't some footballer who measures his worth by the fact that he once earned a hundred pounds a week and is now paid twenty thousand a week, and waves this achievement in girls' faces. Raoul was *born* into an ancient family, yet the happiest time in his childhood -- and quite possibly his whole life -- was when he was chattering to Breton peasants in the company of Christine. ( Read more... )

The Phantom of the Opera: A Case Study of Severe Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features - no, not the Phantom, but Christine! In this medical study, the Phantom is presented as a hallucinatory response to the stress of Christine's bereavement and her feelings for Raoul, which 'ground her' and combat her suicidal ideation -- "The candle flame which earlier represented her father's hold on Christine now becomes a means of breaking that pathological bond. Her ability to make her father's soul take flight allows Christine to give herself to Raoul" ;-D

The narrator of "The Phantom of the Opera" claims as supporting 'evidence' for his story that he found the initials RC among those left on the wall of the Communards' dungeon where Erik imprisoned Raoul. But unless Raoul was a very quick worker (and if we are to believe Erik's story, the young man was at best semi-conscious when he was taken to be chained up in the dungeon: le parfum de Mazenderan l'avait rendu mou comme une chiffe) he simply didn't have time to make any such carving.

Erik tells the Persian that, having made certain Raoul was in a place where no-one could hear any cries for help, he returned to the side of Christine, who was waiting for him. Then they go through all the forehead kissing business and weep together, and as a sign of his changed intentions towards her Erik goes off to fetch Raoul on the spot. Raoul can't have been in the dungeon for any longer than the time of that tearful interview (and was presumably still fairly groggy from 'le parfum de Mazenderan' when he was removed from it!)

He could just about have managed to draw his initials faintly on the wall with some rough object, I suppose. He certainly couldn't have managed the sort of carving you see on the walls of the Tower of London. I've tried adding my own initials to the parapet of a slate bridge alongside hundreds of others, and was seriously impressed by the time and workmanship displayed by the Victorians in contrast to our own efforts, which would have washed/brushed away in a couple of days -- and that was soft slate. Even the relatively plain WWII initials represented some soldier sitting down with his pocket-knife and an hour or so to spare on a sunny afternoon, rather than simply scratching over and over again with a bit of stone.

Given that the dungeon walls were underground and not exposed to any weathering, I suppose a rough whitish scratch might have survived thirty years for the narrator to find it -- though it's hard to imagine that it would be visible alongside carvings made by prisoners with endless days on their hands. But under the circumstances, to be honest, it's hard to imagine Raoul quietly sitting down and setting out to write his name on the walls immediately after he'd been chained up in the depths of the Opera (quite possibly without light, unless Erik was feeling generous). It's the sort of thing you do when you're reconciled to a long imprisonment and are looking for occupation, not in the first moments of desperation, with the woman you've risked your life to rescue being subjected to unknown degradations at the hands of your mutual captor...

Frankly, I think Leroux had lost track of the timeline. Not for the first time :-p

After 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...)

This is the story I vaguely remembered but couldn't track down again when discussing authors who liked to write about Raoul 'suffering beautifully' -- not a particularly common trope.

Puzzle Pieces by lourdesmont

It's an epic if somewhat amateurish saga that is typical of its era of the fandom -- the difference is that it was an R/C story amidst a sea of fiction about E/C's tortured relationship. I'm not sure I can honestly include it as a fic rec (for the same reasons that it never made it into my favourites or my R/C community), but it is a landmark of its day.

(Although having just been writing and researching the train service from Paris to Lyon and Dijon, I can't help finding myself now wincing at chapter 3, in which our protagonists travel cross-country on a sleeper service for three days in order to reach Lyon -- I came across a similar episode in a "Frozen" story where the characters spend days on a nonstop train journey from the North of England to London, a trip that could be made in a matter of hours as early as 1848. I think US authors tend to mentally picture 19th century European railways on the scale of the American continent.)

To anyone who was interested in Kim Newman's Angels of Music crossover between Charlie's Angels, "Phantom of the Opera" and just about every pulp fiction you can think of written or set in the 19th century:

I discovered that somebody has uploaded what appears to be a pirated copy of the text of the entire novel (so far as I could check against the Google Books preview) onto fanfiction.net as a POTO/Sherlock Holmes crossover https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12890290/1/( Read more... )