The initial inspiration for this fic was a PM conversation in which we were discussing that Philippe is basically all in favour of Raoul having a relationship with Christine (he even goes so far, in the book, as to attempt intervene with Christine himself on Raoul's behalf because the boy is so miserable), and in fact is delighted that he's finally showing an interest in the other sex -- he just doesn't want his brother to *marry* her. He wants him to get in some practice and then marry someone more suitable :-D
And somehow or other the idea came up that he'd be quite prepared to set them up together in an establishment together and just tell them to get *on* with it... because the irony is, of course, that in this situation it's far more respectable for someone like Raoul to keep someone like Christine openly as his mistress than it is for him to be seen courting her honourably. Philippe would be entirely happy for Raoul to spend as much time with Christine as publicly as he liked, provided everybody understood that it was on the 'appropriate' footing, e.g. that of nobleman and his acknowledged mistress of the moment, rather than that of an opera-singer with the scion of an ancient family trapped in her toils, turning the screws to secure a disgraceful marriage :-(
It's not a solution that either of them would ever consider of their own accord, but I could certainly see Philippe high-handedly organising his ridiculous little brother a discreet love-nest simply in order for the boy to get it out of his system. It's his canon opinion that Raoul needs to get his leg over, after all :-p
The idea that sparked this story was that actually Christine might have reasons of her own to accept such an offer -- Raoul wouldn't, because he is a blind stubborn idealist with romantic ideas about purity and saving oneself for one's future bride, but Christine I can just about see doing it. Because it *does* solve an awful lot of social problems for them both. If the world sees her as his mistress, then they can do everything that they would do as a married couple -- go out, spend time together and be openly affectionate in public, give one another presents, go away together and be generally inseparable -- without anyone condemning either of them for it. It's the way of the world for a young Vicomte to take a mistress; it's the way of the world for a opera-singer to find herself a noble patron.
If Christine accepts Raoul's offer of marriage, she is potentially ruining his life, even though he isn't currently in any state of mind to lay any weight on that. (And in fact I wrote this story before I learned that Leroux did in fact write a 'deleted R/C scene' for the original serial in which Christine tells Raoul openly that she loves him but can't marry him for more or less exactly the reasons that I put forward as a basis for her decision here; *very* satisfying to have my social analysis and my reading of the characters' relationship so accurately confirmed, even if I can see why the author decided to cut the scene in the eventual edit!)
Of course it is a terrible self-sacrificial risk for Christine to take, because the solution she suggests not only runs the danger of alienating Raoul altogether by cheapening herself in his eyes, but leaves her completely dependent on his remaining loyal to her in the future. He may profess eternal devotion to her now, but if it *does* turn out, as Philippe confidently expects, that once he has bedded her a few times he will eventually get tired of her and move on elsewhere, then in this scenario she will have absolutely no legal or moral claim on him at all. He can pay her off and walk away... or just walk away. And she will then effectively be 'ruined' and unfit for marriage to anyone else, ever.
But self-sacrifice for Raoul's benefit is canonical for Christine (indeed, it's only for that reason that she consistently refuses in the novel to marry the man who she eventually admits that she has loved since they were both adolescents), and while it's a breathtaking degree of trust it's not one that's misplaced. From Raoul's point of view, from that day on they *are* married -- because that's the only way Leroux-Raoul can credibly justify to himself having any kind of sexual relationship with her -- which includes coping with whatever tiffs, quarrels and awkwardnesses that may arise from that; and he never for one instant looks elsewhere, even if he is technically free to do so.
It's not so much, psychologically speaking, that Raoul considers that the act of sex in itself effectively creates a marriage between them... more that he can't justify going ahead with it without committing himself to her *first* ;-p It may not be an official marriage, but in his mind at least there has to be some kind of preceding promise of constancy and fidelity.
The business about Carlotta singing in the salons of her lovers is canon too, although I bet it's one of the incidental passages about people other than Erik that got cut from the public domain translation :-(
"Girls from the opera-ballet" were pretty much synonymous with courtesans in the nineteenth century -- not common streetwalkers, but women of negotiable affections who derived an additional income from a succession of patrons -- and the Ballet Room was a well-known place where Opera subscribers could go in order to make such arrangements. Although Christine has a reputation for being unusually virtuous, everyone in the novel basically assumes she is either covering something up or else holding out for a bigger prize; the first thing the managers say when Count Philippe uses his influence on her behalf (in order to please Raoul) is that if they hadn't already known that he was sleeping with Sorelli they'd have assumed he had an ulterior motive. So it's completely assumed that women on the stage are going to be sleeping around -- which is why Philippe is so absolutely against the idea of Raoul marrying one of them.
It isn't just that Christine isn't well-born enough to marry a Chagny of ancient blood, or that she lacks the fortune that might otherwise have compensated for lack of breeding. It isn't just that she isn't even French by birth. It's the idea that she is on public show in the Ballet Room every time she goes on stage, along with all the others who make their little arrangements in there. It's the idea that being on the stage is practically synonymous with selling your virtue to the highest bidder.
Of course stage performers *did* marry perfectly respectably, and some of them even married into the nobility -- although one imagines it raised gossip and a frisson of excitement for months at the idea of meeting such an exotic creature in a social context. But from Philippe's point of view it would be little short of criminal to let his vulnerable younger brother fall into the scheming hands of an ambitious little social climber who is probably just waiting to see how much money she can get out of his family when they come to buy her off :-(
Being a man's mistress requires rather fewer qualifications than being his wife -- it's acceptable to pick up a girl from the gutter simply because she is pretty, and to escort her to entertainments for your own amusement, but you wouldn't want to foist her on your family. (Raoul's mistress would *not* be invited to dine with his sisters, though she might well host his unmarried friends and their petites-amies -- and his married friends, but without their wives.) Although I get the impression Paris was rather more relaxed about these things than London ("Gay Paree").
Marriage was an alliance between families involving *lots* of paperwork (to the degree that the working poor simply couldn't afford the lawyers' fees and didn't bother to legalise their arrangements). Your choice of mistress was your own affair, with no contracts to be negotiated and no fortunes to be settled.
(Blink and you'll miss it, but Raoul's sisters each inherit a big chunk of the Chagny estates and pass it on to their husbands on marriage, thanks again to Napoleonic legislation, which abolished the rights of primogeniture. Leroux mentions it briefly in passing, assuming his readers would be familiar with the situation...)
The whole story more or less revolves around the various class hypocrisies of what was and wasn't allowable at the era, which is a significant element in the source novel but only lightly touched upon in the musical. (Though even there the managers conclude that Christine's overnight absence is more likely to be explained in the Vicomte's bed than anywhere else... an honourable liaison is not the default assumption where an aristocrat and a chorus-girl are concerned.)
Christine has absolutely no intention of mixing with the Druet and her like on a regular basis, or ever again if possible -- that sort of sniping salon society is utterly alien to her. (And their interest is chiefly in novelty: fresh gossip is the ticket by which they buy their way through the world. Once she ceases to be 'new' she has no value in any case.)
She only agreed to hold a 'house-warming party', somewhat reluctantly, out of the same logic as Philippe -- although for more or less opposite motives. It's the quickest way of spreading news short of making a public announcement, and both of them have reason to present Raoul with a fait accompli for something he would never consent to in advance...
Raoul would elope, though he would much rather have his brother's blessing: both he and Christine are prepared to sacrifice everything, socially speaking, for the sake of the other. But from the Victorian point of view (and from a personal point of view: he has a loving family, she is an orphan) he has far more to lose than she does, and she doesn't want to be responsible for doing that to him. She doesn't want to feel that she has trapped him into marriage at the cost of his entire future and everything he has ever known -- love in a cottage is a wonderful idyll in abstract, but it's one for which he is utterly unprepared despite his best intentions. (Leroux-Christine tells the Viscount repeatedly that they can't get married, but she is prepared to play the lovely game of 'pretend'... until he betrays the fact that he is taking it all too seriously. She agrees to run away in his company -- but not in order to marry: Raoul is to take her somewhere far away from Erik and leave her in safety.)
In this scenario (according to good old 19th century pot-boiler convention) she chooses to make a pre-emptive sacrifice, for fear that allowing him to make his will only result in regrets for both of them. She chooses to call Philippe's bluff: to be *Raoul's* "living bride" without benefit of clergy, in a relation that is ironically far less scandalous than a respectable union -- one that allows her to perform, mends his relationship with his brother, and can be every bit as binding between them as they choose to make it. It's not going to make the Count at all happy in the long run, but that's his problem, and one that is entirely self-inflicted...
It's a plot straight out of Victorian sensational literature: the 'bodice-ripper' genre. The morals of the pure at heart overcome the by-the-book rules of the world... although there's a certain amount of mischief to be poked at the latter.
One reaction I definitely had not anticipated was moral objections from the readers to the idea of Raoul and Christine having any kind of extra-marital relationship!
Given the large number of fanfics that joyfully fantasise about *Erik* and Christine sleeping together without the benefit of marriage -- and of course instantly writhing in ecstacies of mutual fulfilment, because they love each other *so much*, and naturally Erik has read all about hundreds of ways to pleasure a woman in his extensive library, and is the master of every subject he studies despite having zero experience in this line -- I did feel that there was a certain amount of double-standards going on ;-p)
My best guess is that readers are prepared to take it as read that Erik and Christine can't be 'properly' married, so they're entitled to an inherently illicit relationship. Whereas Raoul and Christine could and should get married, and if Raoul doesn't then he's taking advantage of her ('unequal relationship' thing, I suppose).
Plus an associated element of feeling that these are supposed to be the 'virtuous' characters ("vanilla and fluff ship"), while nobody expects Erik to know any better anyway ;-p
(In canon, it *is* out of character for both of them. They're unambiguously of the type that holds out for marriage despite and even because of inhabiting a licentious world; their problem is that that same world disapproves of marriage where the two of them are concerned. So in this story they settle as a result for a mutually binding commitment rather than an actual marriage service...)
Also, the idea that Philippe is effectively pushing them into it -- pimping Christine out -- apparently put people off. Even though it's actually Christine here who is consciously using Philippe to get what *she* wants (a lifetime with Raoul) while frustrating his expectations; she plays his game and comes out on top, as I tried to make clear in Ch3.
Christine and Raoul are both seen to be actively religiously observant in Leroux (Christine makes a point of attending Mass at Perros, Raoul crosses himself and says an automatic prayer at the grave, protests to Mifroid that he is a good Catholic and doesn't believe in ghosts and ghouls and pulls out his rosary when waiting for Christine to choose between the scorpion and the grasshopper) -- not to a degree that would imply any unusual fervour in their era (Christine contemplates the mortal sin of suicide, and lies to both Raoul and Erik), but they're certainly not being depicted as free-thinkers or atheists. Despite fan-fiction authors' attempts to assume that Swedish Christine must have been brought up Protestant (thus making her even more unacceptable to the Chagny family!), it's clear that Leroux took it for granted that his heroine was an ordinary Catholic girl.
So I had them worrying about the question of sin in an extra-marital liaison in this story -- not with obsessive guilt (Raoul's scruples afterwards are much more about the immorality and disgusting lack of self-control he has displayed then about any prospect of damnation for his immortal soul!), but as an issue that would naturally crop up at about the level of STD concerns in a modern-day setting ;-p
Writing a chapter in which the plot effectively requires Leroux-Christine to seduce Leroux-Raoul was quite tricky ;-p
Basically, thanks to his brother's well-meant jokes and hints, Raoul finds himself in the state of mind where absolutely everything seems to present unwanted sexual associations, and the less he wants it the more it keeps happening to him. So he spends most of the chapter trying manfully to rise above such things (*rolls eyes* -- see what I mean? once you start thinking along those lines everything starts sounding suggestive...)
So he does spend an awful lot of time feeling ashamed of himself. And then of course once he's actually got the sex out of his system and can think straight again, he feels *more* ashamed of himself, poor boy :-(
Luckily he has Christine for comfort and reassurance. And luckily her nineteenth-century upbringing hasn't burdened her with any soft-porn expectations about ecstatic mutual fulfilment, so the fact that it really wasn't a very successful experience doesn't dismay her in the least; they love each other anyway, and that's all that matters to her ;-)
This story *really* wouldn't make much sense with Lloyd Webber's characters :-D
Like most of my work, it's very definitely grounded in a very specific canon -- even if I've cheated it a bit by fiddling the timelines in such matters as Raoul's departure for the Arctic (which, for whatever reason, simply never happens here) and the Count's abortive attempt to get Christine to agree to a meeting to discuss Raoul (which, in canon, occurs instead after Raoul's return from Perros-Guirec in a state of collapse).
The novel supplies an intriguing mention that the Comte was so concerned by Raoul's state of health after his return from Perros-Guirec that he actually asked Christine if they could talk; we don't know what he would have said to her, but since the attempt is prompted by his concerns over Raoul's state of mind one can assume that he was intending to demand her intentions in stringing the boy along in such a manner, and probably to try to buy her off. He certainly assumes that her innocence is a pose with some financial angle and that she is hoping for a 'protector'. I imagine his initial proposal would have been to offer her a large sum of money to leave Paris, but for the purposes of this story I've suggested that he was prepared to set her up in her own establishment, like Carlotta.
The final chapter actually came as a bit of a surprise to me: Raoul simply came out with a renewed marriage proposal quite unexpectedly as I was writing the dialogue at the end of Chapter 3, and neither I nor Christine had any idea what to do about it :-P
In the end I split the whole thing off into a new chapter of its own, which worked out well because it meant I could explore their history together in far more detail than was possible when I was busy trying to keep everything carefully non-committal in order to pull the wool over the readers' eyes. (The only problem is that my mind for some reason will keep *insisting* on rolling together the consecutive titles of the two chapters when I look at the story stats and reading the last one as "In which Christine gets laid" :-P)
But writing it was a somewhat nerveracking experience, because I honestly didn't know whether Christine was going to accept the proposal or not. She had spent twenty years in the knowledge that they *couldn't* marry, and creating a stable life for herself involving all the advantages and disadvantages of that situation. Now Raoul suddenly wants to turn all that upside down by suggesting something that he must *know* they can't do; if she was unsuitable Viscountess material when she was twenty and virginal, she is far less so now when she has been his mistress openly for years. And social conventions actually tolerate rather more open behaviour between lovers than between properly married couples, who aren't supposed to engage in distasteful exhibitions of physical affection in public and aren't expected to engage in sex for enjoyment (which is what they're more or less in the opening stages of doing at the precise moment when Raoul ruins the mood by deciding to come out with this bombshell :-p)
By this point in the chronology we've almost caught up with the date when Leroux himself was writing what was intended as historical fiction, set a generation before his own modern-day readers -- as reflected by a couple of comments in the text, i.e. about how the theatre used in those days to be gas-lit, and how back then the owners of opera-boxes did not deign to sublet their boxes to bankers, pork-merchants and foreigners ;-p So, in the perceptions of the characters, times are changing and we are now 'modern', with all the associated changes in social attitude!
Also, Raoul is right: if a middle-aged bachelor marries his longterm mistress, it's a far less interesting scandal than if the young heir to a title takes a wife off the stage. No-one is expecting him to make a respectable marriage alliance any longer, and he and Christine have sons who are old enough to shave. If they get married now, people who have known him for a lifetime are really not going to make a big scandal about it and bar him from their parties as a bad influence on susceptible young ladies; they may refuse to accept his wife into society, but since, being a leading artiste in the cultural world of Paris, she has been invited to attend salons in many of their homes already in her *current* scandalous status, that too might be a bit difficult to justify simply because she is now decently married to the father of her children ;-)
And yes, poor Raoul is still jealous of the past where Christine is concerned ;-p
Raoul wants to marry her properly and have the right to protect her agaimnst spiteful comments and to proclaim himself as hers by right in front of the whole world; he wants to promise her everything and show everyone what she means to him. The idea always did mean more to him than it did to her, I think.
Christine is quite honestly a little humanly tempted by the thought of being Raoul's Viscountess -- of being able to give it all up, thumb her nose at the increasing frustrations of her career, and take her place at his side everywhere she and her children have been shut out all these years because their relationship can never be more than an open secret, socially. But in the end she says yes for Raoul's sake, because he wants it so much; and because it makes him happy, it makes her happy :-)
The unspoken assumption of this version of history, so far as Raoul goes, is that in the absence of any of the dramatic events that intervene in canon Raoul simply retains his naval commission -- which means he is absent a good deal, especially in the middle years of his career -- and goes on to attain a reasonable rank, although, in the absence of an advantageous marriage and undivided loyalties to his profession at the expense of shore life, nowhere near the Admiral's braid that Philippe was hoping for. After twenty years' service he is now a captain of sufficient seniority to have obtained a competent and comfortable dockyard posting somewhere -- not unassisted in the process by his title and his brother's political influence I'm afraid -- and has no intention of going back to sea unless it's absolutely essential for his country's safety; he's done his time and is enjoying the fruits of that in terms of being able to spend a decent amount of time with Christine and his children for a change...
The house: it does of course have certain unwelcome connotations in that it's basically a gilded cage provided at Philippe's whim and dependent on his favour, rather than being a home they chose for themselves.
Christine buys her *own* house out of her own money -- even if it's nothing like as expensive and elegant as the one Philippe provided -- and brings up her own family in messy bourgeois comfort out in the suburbs. And allows Raoul to sleep there sometimes ;-)
Well, quite a lot actually ;-P
The 'cousins' really are simply cousins -- Raoul's children by Christine and Philippe's by Eustacie. In fact, since Eustacie is Raoul's cousin too, that would make their respective children both cousins *and* second cousins to each other :-D
It's just that, as Christine is unmarried, her children aren't officially related to Pierre and his little brother. (Under French law, illegitimate children were actually entitled to inherit if formally recognised by their father, as Raoul does, and I suspect they were entitled to carry his name, but it's easier and clearer to leave them as "the Daaé children" ;-p)
Financially, Raoul would have made his will explicitly in favour of Christine at some point during the period when he was on active duty. Their children inherit from her rather than from him directly; I'm not clear how much of his personal portion of the Chagny estate (the French having the custom of dividing an inheritance rather than practising primogeniture) it would be in his power to will away to a nominally unrelated family.
The house and most of their joint possessions are Christine's anyway; as she observes, technically speaking, one could say that she is keeping him :-) At this stage her income and associated investments -- she has always been very careful -- are more than enough to support herself and the children in comfort, since they're not leading an extravagant social life (no large staff of servants, for example). The earrings and all the other personal gifts they have exchanged over the years are also legally hers, of course -- if he leaves her, he isn't entitled to ask for them back!
If they marry, any existing children of the couple become retrospectively legitimate -- and, so far as I could establish by looking at the law of the time, also thereby take their place in the line of inheritance for Philippe's title, although since he has two small sons already this is fortunately unlikely to be a subject of friction :-)
Unfortunately Philippe tends to get co-opted into the random villain role in POTO fan-fiction (apparently he controls the entire Paris police and can have people (a.k.a the poor innocent Phantom) assassinated on a whim!) -- at least in those stories where Raoul isn't performing that function... I think the logic is that you need a villain to make the Phantom look good by comparison, and Philippe is a useful spare character whom nobody really cares about, so you can just use him... and that most fanfic writers' ideas of French aristocracy are apparently based on "A Tale of Two Cities" :-( In the late 19th century, after two revolutions, an aristocratic title in France conferred no powers whatsoever, other than snob value among other bearers of such titles.
(To be fair, Philippe de Chagny apparently does have friends in high places when it comes to getting his brother a berth on a specific expedition, but I don't think that's by hereditary right; I think it has more to do with moving in the right circles, which is not quite the same thing. He certainly doesn't have the sort of mediaeval prerogative that would allow him to ignore the laws of the land for his own ends.)
In modern-day fics he tends to appear as the older businessman brother who makes snobbish remarks about Christine to his parents behind her back (thus giving her a motive to rupture her engagement to Raoul and seek refuge in sexy older Erik) -- rather than the character who is a whole twenty years older than his brother and genuinely in loco parentis. (Which, according to Napoleonic ideas about the duration and authority of the head of the family, means that Raoul at 21 literally can't get married under French law without the Comte's consent -- presumably why the elopement is planned for Brussels?)
Philippe not only has the right to arrange Raoul's life for him; since Raoul is an orphan, he has the legal *duty* to make sure the boy doesn't do anything stupid. He loves his brother, and Raoul is not doing a good job of convincing him that his behaviour is either sane or reasonable...
Philippe's views on Raoul's excessive virtue are also canon!
This is what happens when you cross-breed 'Phantom' with the period romance genre, and the plot of the whole thing, such as there is -- though, as before, once you start taking into account the characters' actual human emotions it doesn't work so well as farce: Raoul rather kidnapped the story from this point on -- revolves around the hypocritical morality of the upper classes, a significant theme in the original novel. Raoul has one version of the Victorian conscience; Philippe has another, and I don't think he realises quite how hurtful his brother finds his outlook in this particular case.
Raoul isn't proposing to cover anything up -- at the moment his instinct (as the Count correctly surmises) is to rush off and quarrel with Christine, having already tried quarrelling with his brother. In a straight contest between Leroux-Raoul, Leroux-Christine and Leroux-Philippe poor canonically confused Raoul is always going to come out the loser...
The relationship between Raoul and Philippe in the novel is an interesting one, because in addition to playing the strict Victorian guardian the Count clearly *is* very fond of his young brother: there's a touching little scene, for instance, where Raoul comes rushing in to the house horribly hurt and upset by a quarrel he has just had with Christine, and basically all he wants to do at this point is fling himself face-downward on his bed and howl. And Philippe intercepts him in order to embrace and comfort him unconditionally, and very tactfully *doesn't* ask what the matter is (though I imagine he probably had a pretty good idea), because -- as the author notes in an aside -- the very last thing Raoul wanted to admit to at that moment was the humiliating nature of the discovery he had just made...
At one point Philippe actually does offer to use his influence on behalf of Christine's career, not because he approves of her or particularly admires her but simply in order to make Raoul happy. What he *can't* stomach is the idea that a Chagny might actually attempt to marry her, and this mésalliance drives a wedge between what were described in the foreword as "two ever-loving brothers": indeed, Raoul describes Christine to the police as "the only person dearer to me than my beloved brother Philippe".
I imagine that Raoul must have found Erik's senseless murder of his brother when he follows him down into the catacombs very hard to bear. (If the Phantom had only bothered to find out the identity of his visitor before killing him -- he even remarks subsequently upon the stranger's likeness to Raoul! -- he would have discovered that they were on the same side: Philippe would have been delighted to help ensure that Christine Daaé became Erik's wife, thus setting his brother free from her toils...)
Like Dickens, Leroux was writing in weekly instalments for newspaper publication, with the consequent waffly plot structure and padding; it's not the greatest novel in the world, and it's as much a mystery/horror story (how is the Phantom blackmailing the managers? Why is Christine behaving so strangely, and how much is supernatural and how much is, as Raoul suspects, just human trickery?) as it is a romance. The translator describes "the opera house itself" as being one of the main characters, with all the everyday detail about the workings of the Palais Garnier (the retired employees still hanging around, the managers getting into a temper and threatening to sack people, Christine treating the whole building as her 'empire' and taking Raoul round introducing him to people and daring him to follow her out onto the flies: "and you a sailor!" she retorts when he hesitates :-p) being as important as the Gothic elements.
Raoul and Christine have had a happily monogamous relationship for twenty years, with or without benefit of clergy -- the main fly in the ointment is Philippe's resentment of Christine as preventing his brother from making a 'proper' marriage and providing legitimate heirs. (Raoul, as you may have noticed, really doesn't worry too much about whether they are legitimate or not -- they're his children and he lives with them and has helped bring them up...)
But by this point the Count has accepted defeat fairly graciously where Christine is concerned -- it's quite clear that she is *not* going to go away, and she makes Raoul happy, so they have evolved a relationship of mutual respect and rueful liking -- and grudgingly put the matrimonial noose around his own neck some years back, an exercise he has spent the best part of his life in cynically avoiding. The general feeling is that marriage has agreed with him, somewhat to everyone's surprise (including his own); Eustacie makes her aging husband very comfortable and obligingly pops out heirs to their mutual satisfaction (being the mother of the next Count de Chagny is a part of the job description that strongly appeals to her, especially as she may well end up holding the reins until Pierre reaches his majority), and while they don't pretend to be in love with one another she is his cousin and he is pretty fond of her. Fond enough to tolerate a certain amount of unrequited girlish yearnings towards his younger brother (since he can be relied upon to squash them kindly but without encouragement), although not to the degree of permitting her to embarrass the family in public.
Authentic Victorian family values :-p Raoul and Christine have the better of it...
But in the course of writing this I realised that things had actually moved on a good deal between 1880 and 1900 (as Leroux himself mentions in that comment about the pork merchant of his own day "who is perfectly entitled to lounge [in the box of the Marquis of X] with his family since he has paid the marquis for the privilege" whereas in Christine's day such a thing at the Opera would have been unheard-of :-p)
So they probably *could* get married -- especially as 'the people who matter' at this stage have basically given up expecting Raoul to marry at all. Philippe for one is likely to be quite grateful to her for finally making an honest man out of his little brother and legitimising their embarrassing offspring -- whom he really will be glad to accept into the family as promising little de Chagny specimens as soon as he has an excuse to bend his stiff neck to do so :-p He is simply too proud to admit that they exist otherwise, although I suspect him of keeping a surreptitious eye on Georges' naval progress...
Philippe is pretty much reconciled to Christine's existence at this point, I think: he respects her as an artiste, he is resigned/accustomed to her presence as a constant in his brother's life, and on a personal level they rub along well enough together and can be quite pleasant company. Her chief sin lies in being an obstacle to making an advantageous marriage for Raoul, and while he isn't going to be *happy* if Raoul marries Christine now (or isn't going to admit to it, anyway, however much it may regularise/simplify the situation), he's enough of a realist to see that having his brother contract a quiet union with a staid middle-aged female is on the whole the best that can be hoped for at this juncture!
I quite intentionally set out to encourage the readers to assume that Raoul had married for dynastic reasons, when in fact Philippe, having encouraged their young cousin to raise her hopes, ended up by having to quell the family scenes by marrying her himself ;-p
It was originally intended as a 'serves him jolly well right' finale, in which the Count ends up with the unfaithful termagant wife he had intended for Raoul, but having got rather fond of him while writing the first chapter I eventually gave Philippe an easier ride of it. It's a loveless marriage, of course -- Eustacie is thirty years his junior, and he is well aware that she married him for title, money and social position (and because she wants babies, and a husband, any husband, is simply a means of obtaining them; not an uncommon viewpoint even up to a more modern era) -- but in fact starting a family at fifty turns out to mellow Count Philippe, the lifelong bachelor.
He initially resented Christine for winding her toils into Raoul and ruining his plans to marry him off, but having been forced to settle down and supply the requisite heirs himself he has discovered that there is something to be said for the process. And as a result his long-running feud with Christine (whom he quite correctly perceives as having actively set out to subvert his attempt to stop her from marrying Raoul, and to have flagrantly taken advantage of his offer in order to get what she wanted while paying lip-service to his wishes) has faded to a mutual respect and a grudging acceptance of their common link in genuine affection for Raoul. She is not quite his sister-in-law, but she is the mother of Raoul's children -- stubbornly though the Count refuses to acknowledge their existence -- and she is a consistently non-negotiable part of his brother's life.
Philippe, I think, had assumed that once Christine fell pregnant his brother would look elsewhere for entertainment rather than putting up with an increasingly swollen and ungainly bedmate, and they would then be able to get rid of her by sending her off somewhere into the country with a discreet payment to support the child; he certainly didn't expect Raoul to spend his twenties in a state of cheerfully increasing domestication ;-p But since the Viscount isn't technically married, there is always the possibility of getting him to form a 'proper' marital alliance as well; there were plenty of women prepared to overlook their husband's discreet (or even not so discreet) second household if it meant they could get a ring on their own finger and an acknowledged position as mother of the heir. Unfortunately Raoul has no intention of obliging his brother's dynastic ambitions in this matter!
The trouble comes with Eustacie, who is not only genuinely smitten with Raoul (and, since she has only ever known him in a family context, is initially at least unaware of his relationship with Christine) and sets her heart on getting him, rather than just setting her cap at his rank in a mindset of general aspiration, but who is also Family, and thus someone for whom Philippe is doubly responsible and who can make life extremely unpleasant with her scenes. In the end the Count offers to marry her himself simply in order to shut her up... and she accepts the bargain even though Philippe is twenty years older than Raoul, whom she really wants, because Countess is a better rank than Viscount.
Unfortunately she is still in love with Philippe's younger brother, and it doesn't, as both Philippe and Raoul had hoped, go away. She continues to harbour pathetic and embarrassing hopes of crumbs of affection from Raoul and finds excuses to be in his company as much as possible; if Philippe didn't know Raoul's obstinate fidelity to Christine all too well, he might be less inclined to trust them together. As it is, he relies on Raoul's generous nature to be reasonably kind to Eustacie without actively encouraging her, and is content to keep it all 'within the family'. Cynical but pragmatic, as ever. (Philippe *does* care for Eustacie, in his way. As one cares for a much younger cousin or a nervy little dog rather than as one cares for a wife, but he does feel a duty to look after her, and she is in name at least a good wife to him. Since they both benefit by the bargain and neither pretends to be in love with the other, the marriage works well enough... most of the time. And if Eustacie is unhappy, as Christine points out, that's her own fault for hoping to have her cake and eat it.)
She is, of course, horribly jealous of Christine, who is more confident, more sophisticated (Eustacie is still ill at ease in Paris) and above all is secure in Raoul's affections. So Eustacie tries to use the one weapon that she's got, which is that she is young and Christine is, to her eyes at least, middle-aged. It doesn't work.... not as she intends, at any rate. Poor Eustacie, she's an unhappy mix of mercenary motives and juvenile fixation, and Christine would be a lot more sorry for her if she hadn't been so gratuitously spiteful on a sensitive subject.
Eustacie was originally conceived as payback for Philippe's actions, an unlikable self-obsessed woman, but I ended up feeling somewhat sorry for her. She makes the mistake of thinking that she can marry the wealthy elder brother and have an affair with the attractive younger one, but while this would be a perfectly reasonable social ambition, she doesn't really understand either of them. Philippe trusts Raoul implicitly to respect his wife; Raoul tacitly checks for Philippe's permission before he lays a finger on her, even in the most public of scenarios. The Comte is mildly fond of Eustacie and kind enough to her according to his lights; Raoul is sorry for her but stubbornly elusive, and everyone in that ménage pretends politely that everything is perfectly all right. And Eustacie is a titled lady with an indulgent older husband, every luxury that life can offer, and two lovely healthy children, and no doubt makes great play of all her good fortune in front of anyone she thinks can be impressed (as she tries to do with Christine). No doubt she will make her children's lives a misery later on by existing vicariously through them. And no doubt she will be a very merry widow in her forties, and take a succession of lovers while desperately clinging to her good looks far longer than nature would allow...
Philippe has no illusions about his wife, but such arrangements are understood (and if he should ever need to do so, he is more than capable of ending his attitude of amusement and putting his foot down). Provided there is no doubt as to the paternity of their children, he requires only discretion from her in any case.
Meanwhile Christine and Raoul are unashamedly suburban and domestic ;-)
(This one didn't go down quite as I expected (although I admit that what was originally intended as humour got largely overruled by my R/C tendencies -- poor Raoul would insist on taking everything most terribly to heart, and ended up running away with the story from ch2 onwards!) Which was a pity, because I was very pleased with the first chapter when I wrote it; I really enjoyed Philippe's detached, cynical perspective at the expense of the, as he sees it, naïve attitude of Raoul. In fact I appreciated it enough to write a later story entirely from the Count's point of view, although that one is emphatically not humorous...
I'm not sure why I got such weird assumptions on a story that was marked very clearly as a straight R/C pairing from the start, though... Oddly enough, the one reaction I was expecting and *didn't* get was "Oh no, how dare you kill Erik?" I didn't realise that this was because people would be serenely confident that he wasn't actually dead!
(But suicide for a heartbroken Opera Ghost seemed all too inevitable... and preferable to the murder which would have been the alternative from his point of view. Under the circumstances he was only ever going to react by killing Raoul and/or Christine and/or killing himself; killing himself first seemed like the best solution all round ;-p)
In Leroux I get the impression that Christine's purity means as much to Erik as it does to Raoul; if she had been more 'available', however beautiful her voice, I'm not sure she would ever have heard the voice of the Spirit of Music behind her walls. Erik more or less accepts (at the beginning) that he can't have her, I think -- but he certainly doesn't want her to have 'earthly' relationships. Allowing her to tantalise the timid Viscount into unhappiness with a 'pretend engagement' is one thing, given that Raoul is too honourable so much as to kiss the girl (it's Christine in the end who has to take the initiative, daring as that is for her era). Having her not only sleeping with Raoul but cheapening herself by being publicly known as his mistress -- reducing herself to the same level as all the other performers of easy virtue -- would be absolute torture for Erik, I imagine. A final level of betrayal, worse than if she had simply married someone else.
Unfortunately the idea that the characters might be able to cock a snook at Brother Philippe by taking his idea and subverting it to their own advantage -- book-Christine is gentle but determined, as we see when in canon she refuses the Count's earlier request for a meeting -- doesn't seem to have come across to the readership, who appeared to see him as 'winning' by pushing events onto his terms (even if he comprehensively fails to get what he wants out of it).
