This wasn't a plotline I would have come up with of my own accord! This was a challenge response that was originally intended to be a one-shot in three scenes, but ended up as a three-chapter story. It just so happened that the terms of the challenge could be fitted in quite neatly with my plot-idea about Raoul's complaints in that hotel scene...
'I'm calling this challenge "Operation Beautiful Ocean Depths"! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a fic that believably sinks your favourite ship! No cheating with tragedies either... or jumping ships either. Both your characters must walk away happy, whole, and very single.'
I think I was actually the only writer to take up this particular challenge -- the other sacred cows remain untouched -- but it's not quite so admirable a feat given that I managed to 'ship' my characters together pretty strongly just the same :-)
(The fact that the canon plot does involve both tragedy and 'jumping ships', of course, meant that it was possible to present a "Raoul and Christine split up" story meeting the terms of the challenge and still make it a happier ending than the one the characters were otherwise destined to get! Although I note with amusement that one consequence is that I've ended up with yet another plotline in which the Phantom fails to figure significantly at all...)
"To Ease Your Troubled Mind" is actually a completely different version of Raoul and Christine's past, right down to the weather they experience while crossing the Atlantic -- I'm afraid this couple are never going to be tempted to run away to sea! And a very different version of their relationship: this isn't the Christine of The Choices of Raoul who is prepared to fight to get her husband back, but one who avoids conflict at all costs. This marriage went wrong at a more fundamental stage earlier on, and is now pretty dysfunctional -- Christine is 'enabling' her husband's unhappiness, though she doesn't realise it :-(
What Raoul is actually thinking in the carriage at the end there is, of course, "why does she love me?"
My mental image was that the Phantom is busy coming in at the window while Christine is going out at the door, as it were! Which is why the hotel staff, who are in his pay, have to be browbeaten/bribed into letting her out of the building: they know that their employer is counting on making a call in the lady's suite that night, and they know he's not going to be very pleased to turn up and find the rooms deserted, to put it mildly...
Having written one story where Christine really wants to sing the Phantom's song, it occurred to me that it would be equally possible to have a version where she has been practising it nervously and obsessively and is thoroughly sick of it -- given that I was using the original soundtrack for this one anyway. (For some reason I always preferred really obnoxious Raoul in this scene, just as Dear Old Friend works better -- in my opinion -- with the irony of bitter hostility behind the lyrics, rather than using the title at face value.)
I picture this version of Raoul as one of those very physical, noisy-present people of whose shared existence one is always aware ;-) He probably went in for sliding down bannisters as a child and landing with a loud thump...
Ironically enough, the characters are basically proposing to split up because they've remembered that they are in fact rather fond of each other: both represent it to themselves as doing the other a favour. The marriage may have been back on a tolerably even keel for the moment, but that's clearly (to Raoul at least) not a long-term solution...
Incidentally, while a legal separation under the Church removed the right of either party to demand conjugal affections (which is what Raoul is totally failing to explain...) it did not in fact actually remove the duty of marital fidelity! It was nominally at least intended to allow a temporary split, and was terminated under two conditions: death or remarriage... to one another, since you couldn't legally marry anyone else.
I was a little nervous about using the War in what was scheduled to be the final 'happy' chapter -- it seemed a little tasteless -- but 1914 sits there like a stark barrier across the characters' futures if they stay in Europe...
Gustave would have had a bad war, I'm afraid -- precisely the wrong combination of imagination and sensitivity. On the other hand, he does get to marry his best friend's sister! (Laure is five years younger: she would have been a child during the war. Tall girls were not fashionable at this period, so she's pretty self-conscious about it -- how fortunate that Gustave takes after his progenitor :-D)
Gustave comes out of the trenches as a pacifist and internationalist (a life growing up with his mother in various different countries would probably have contributed towards that as well). There was a strong trend towards socialism after the war and the various parties of the left were very active in France (the - misnamed - Radical Party was pretty mainstream). Gustave is one of the 'never again'/'brothers across the borders' school of thought (rather than the 'squeeze the Boche until the pips squeak' brigade): he is naturally idealistic and it's self-evident to him that privilege is wrong and that the common man deserves culture and education and a voice in government. He has a certain talent for public speaking and gets involved full-time in politics...
Raoul, of course, is a chivalrous idiot -- one of those fortunate enough to be gifted with physical courage and limited imagination, at least along those lines: mentally he would have suffered a lot less than Gustave. And he feels too, I think, that he has bought back his honour by serving his country; a little lameness seemes a fair bargain. Ironically I suppose the War probably saved him; the world which formerly condemned him is shaken beyond caring for such things, he is rehabilitated as an injured 'war hero', and the shared experience leads to a warm relationship with an independent adult Gustave. (In canon they do both share a common habit of talking without listening to people ;-p)
This version of Raoul bids fair to become an instinctive Pétainist: the appeal of the Hero of Verdun and his old-fashioned conservative ideals would have been irresistible amid the humiliations of 1940, and since Gustave is likely to progress in precisely the opposite direction after the failure of the Socialist Government of the Thirties they are going to find themselves estranged by WWII. Gustave would be with the communist-backed partisans... unless he was one of the left-wing Assembly members who got shipped off to Algeria for imprisonment and eventual execution :-( But I wanted it to be a happy story, so didn't take it beyond the first stirrings of Mussolini.
It was fun developing Raoul and Christine into a comfortable middle-age. They loved each other as children and they still love each other in that same way... it was just an actual marital transformation of their relationship that this particular couple failed to work out. (One of the very unfair things about fair hair is that, since it tends to darken with age, one of the results of starting to go grey is that you actually look younger!)
That was a rather wistful proposition on Raoul's part, or at least the offer was included -- he's Victorian enough to appreciate a bit of extra padding, and has gained enough experience with hindsight to realise that certain aspects of their marriage were distinctly unsatisfactory. Unfortunately this version of Christine -- unlike the hurt and frustrated wife of the Choices of Raoul -- is Victorian enough to be simply grateful that she has finished with 'all that sort of thing' (that glance across at Our Lady is no coincidence) so he's never going to get the chance to make it up to her...
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