Strictly speaking that last line (Gustave's hand slid upwards, hesitantly, into the long fingers of the man who was his father) is a POV breach -- Raoul will never be aware of it -- but it had to be in there for Gustave's sake: poor child, he spends far too much time being passed around as a trophy. He deserves some volition in the matter.
The Raoul-Gustave relationship is more or less reset back to the start here: these versions of the characters have never shared the interaction of The Choices of Raoul or even of Waiting in the Wings, and I'm afraid that this Raoul is ultimately escaping with a sense of relief from a situation he simply doesn't know how to cope with. His relationship was always with Christine and not the boy -- Gustave was Christine's son, Christine's favourite, and he just doesn't have any model to build on. He knows that the child is hurt and suffering, but his own grief for Christine is consuming him beyond the ability to do anything about it: in the absence of the Erik-alternative, I think this version of Gustave would end up badly neglected while Raoul disintegrated in slow motion :-(
He feels guilty about leaving Gustave behind, but I'm afraid that on a personal level he doesn't want him, and he is capable of acknowledging to himself that Erik does. (It is, in a way, a merciful outcome in this context: a Raoul with a closer bond to the boy would suffer even more.) He is just... totally at a loss and coping as best he can with a situation he finds close to intolerable. Raoul is very, very near breaking point at this stage.
I'm afraid that for this Raoul, Gustave will always be 'the child who got in the way': those weeks in Brittany when it was just the two of them again are a very precious memory. It's partly Christine's fault as an inexperienced mother, in allowing herself to become totally wrapped up in her small child to the degree that her husband (who was still very young) feels totally excluded: of course it's partly Raoul's fault as well for wanting Christine all to himself, not recognising that she has other responsibilities now... And it's partly that -- because of their bad start or for some random reason -- Raoul simply doesn't feel a bond with this particular child. Gustave was just born at the wrong time (and to the wrong father, but unless Raoul is picking up on that subconsciously at this point he isn't aware of that issue).
I'd actually picture Raoul as more instinctively likely to fight for Gustave on physical grounds than legal ones (perhaps because it's a much more spur-of-the-moment thing)... On the other hand, legally I don't see that Erik has a leg to stand on. There is absolutely no proof of the child's paternity save for the mother's word (for which there is no evidence save hearsay). In fact, there is no evidence that Erik even had sexual relations with the mother, save for his bare assertion of the fact.
Raoul was married to Gustave's mother when he was born, and at the probable time of his conception. If he acknowledges the child as his I doubt any court in the land would entertain Erik's scandal-mongering claims: you cannot take away the son and heir of a well-born foreigner and thrust him into the custody of a shady character with no known history (and no immigration record and hence American citizenship!), even with far more proof than Erik has available. If he tried to take Gustave against Raoul's will he would be regarded as a kidnapper.
Basically, if Raoul is Gustave's mother's lawful husband and he says the boy is his, then no-one has the right to try to make a bastard out of him. The father's acknowledgment is nine-tenths of the law.
The only way that Erik could possibly take Gustave as his son would be with Raoul's acquiescence (and probably active co-operation, though I dare say the American authorities wouldn't look too closely into certifying the formal parentage of a child brought from overseas if no-one was disputing it), or by snatching him and going on the run -- in which case the law would be entirely on Raoul' s side.
Raoul is going to have other practical concerns to worry about: his thoughts about Erik as a potential father are honest enough here. 'Lots of money' plus 'wants child to be happy' are enough to assuage his conscience -- it's as much or more as he ever offered Gustave himself, after all :-(
I don't really see any hint in canon that Erik and Raoul are ever going to tolerate each other: nothing in Erik's portrayal in LND characterises him as experiencing empathy for a defeated enemy, which is basically the way he is viewing the Vicomte here. He despises and distrusts Raoul, who hates and resents him... and he isn't going to relax until the other man is safely removed from the scene. By his lights he is actually being distinctly polite and magnanimous in allowing this little scene at all ("a child that isn't his!"), and it's certainly not being done for Raoul's benefit. And yes, he is being consciously generous in "allowing" the Vicomte to take his wife home for burial -- a journey which, incidentally, is taking place at Erik's expense -- rather than having her interred in New York in a tomb of his own unique design where he could visit and pay his respects as often as he liked...
But he has Gustave: the living Gustave. And with that memorial in his possession he is prepared to be generous, in his own way.
Raoul is trying to be fair (I'm not convinced that Erik is even trying, to be honest), but it is at least partly to assuage his own sense of nagging guilt where Gustave is concerned: painting the boy's new guardian as a "hellspawn demon" would make it obviously impossible to leave him there. He is still furious with resentment and jealousy, and the general sensation that the Phantom is somehow running rings around him intellectually though he is not quite sure how...
And he is busy blaming himself, not entirely rationally, for Christine's death. I'm afraid I suspect from what we see in LND that Erik's self-pity tends more towards a sense of external persecution while Raoul's spirals inwards, and that Erik's grief is probably leading him to blame anyone and everyone but himself at this point -- with Raoul as a prime candidate -- while Raoul is appropriating gratuitous responsibility.
The crying is actually very significant -- and a reference forward to the final chapter.
Here, Raoul is looking for an excuse to despise Erik (whom he is very conscious of as despising him) and seizing upon this: making a spectacle of himself in front of the boy! What right has he -- how dare he? How disgusting!
He also really doesn't want to think of Erik as mourning Christine, which both humanises him and is tantamount to making a claim on her: it's a deeply uncomfortable idea, as is the concept that Erik might be able to express himself freely with Gustave in a way that he himself has never managed.
And simultaneously he is on some level aware that he himself needs to weep for Christine and can't, and that the process is destroying him -- although that isn't yet explicit.
He is trying to be honest; he is painfully trying to be self-aware. But he is not an objective narrator, and the best that can be said is that he is conscious of it.
On board ship he has the unpleasant experience of dreaming that he has woken up from a nightmare and then discovering that the nightmare is real, and it's the treacherous memories of 'reality' that are the lie -- his waking mind knows that Christine is dead, but his subconscious mind has as yet only the memory of all those years of marriage to draw upon. Raoul has spent his entire adult life with Christine; he doesn't know how to exist without her. He has no experience of solitude or loneliness or loss or all the things that have made the Phantom what he is. He has no idea how to cope.
At this point he's busy disintegrating in a toxic mixture of guilt and helplessness (and acute jealousy), and pretty much hanging onto his sanity by his fingernails: he keeps circling round the idea of suicide and thrusting it away again. And he needs to cry for Christine, but he can't...
In this version Erik is the one paying for the return journey, and Raoul ends up in a second-class inside cabin instead of the first-class staterooms we saw on the "Persephone" :-(
Though it could have been worse: at least he gets a two-berth cabin instead of the four-berth option, so he only has one cabin-mate to get on with -- he has the vestiges of en-suite accommodation rather than the communal facilities down in the steerage -- and this version of Raoul, unlike the one in "To Ease Your Troubled Mind", doesn't get seasick :-) As ever, a certain amount of autobiographical experience in there: I travelled to Russia twenty years ago on a one-way ticket in the cheap accommodation of a Baltic cruise liner...
Groscek was originally just a one-line reference intended to create a bit of period colouring; like Célestine in "The Choices of Raoul", his role in the story grew as it went along. I was trying to demonstrate that Raoul has all the prejudices of his class and his era (so having to share a cabin with an old Eastern European Jew is symbolic of his reduced circumstances) but that he is capable of rising above these and perceiving the man as a fellow-human being. He is still going to categorise him mentally as 'the Jew', but it doesn't mean that he can't actually sympathise and (more difficult) feel gratitude towards him...
Groscek does manage to help Raoul (the first person who really does so after Christine's death, I think, with the possible exception of Miss Fleck, who tries but fails). He knows a lot about death -- he lost his own wife and grown son long ago under tragic circumstances -- and to him the dead are still very much present. His instinct is to treat Christine 'as a person', as it were, which is an acknowledgment that means a lot to the grieving man.
It is of course Perros-Guirec to which they walk from Lannion: the 'modern' Perros-Guirec of Leroux' own day (thanks to the time-jump in LND!), with its casino, brash new villas and Parisian -- or 'Perrosian' -- tourists... and the sands at Trestraou where Raoul first rescued Christine's scarf :-) Lots of fan-fictions have Christine revisiting Perros-Guirec and the house where she used to stay with her father (and Professor and Madame Valerius, who were paying the rent, although that part tends to get forgotten!) I thought it would be more interesting for a change to have Raoul and Christine go to Lannion, which is where the little boy is said to have been living with his aunt when the children first met; fan-fiction never writes about that!
Believe it or not, this plot was actually conceived as an idea for a humorous crack-fic: but when you put in the actual human emotions involved rather than playing with characters like chess pieces, of course it's not funny at all. It is the most appalling suffering and grief.
It was originally inspired by something that I read in another writer's work, where Raoul remarries and has a daughter who by some strange genetic quirk is almost identical to Christine... to whom she is not in any way related! It occurred to me that there is actually no reason why Christine herself could not have had a daughter during those ten long years, and it might thus be amusing to speculate that the reason why Raoul doesn't get on with Gustave is simply that the two parents are 'playing favourites' -- that Raoul loves the little girl best and Christine favours the little boy. So one could then have a spoof story that tweaks the fans' tails by showing poor defeated Raoul coming home leaving his son in Erik's proud possession... only to reveal, ta-da!, that the child he actually cares about is still safely back in France. Erik has killed 'his Christine' but Raoul still has his copy. Raoul wins.
Hence the original reason for the 'teaser' structure... Of course when I actually came to write it, I discovered that it was completely impossible -- for me at least -- to get any degree of humour out of the characters' suffering in any such set-up, and what was intended as an irreverent one-shot came out as very straight tragedy. Also, the idea that Raoul's intolerance of Gustave is simply the result of his favouring Anne doesn't really work out, because it had to predate Anne's birth by some considerable period... but I did want to bring out the idea that Raoul isn't inherently incapable of loving their children; he just doesn't bond with Gustave in particular. It happens, for no good reason...
Anne's parents are good Catholics, so naturally they named her after the mother and cousin of Our Lady ;-) Hence the nickname Sainte-Anne, although that's also because she is, by and large, a sweet-natured and well behaved child.
Her birth must have seemed something like a miracle at that point in their marriage. (Amazing what a release from stress -- not to mention actual conjugal relations! -- will do to increase conception probabilities...)
In this story at least, Raoul really wasn't mature enough to cope with children when Gustave was born; he simply resented his wife's untimely pregnancy and withdrew from her both before and after the baby's arrival :-( Christine made mistakes in focusing too much on the child, but it wasn't by any means all her fault... But all that -- and feelings of guilt about it -- was mixed up in his subsequent feelings about Gustave.
So when they had another child six or seven years later and he found that he felt quite differently about her -- that everything just 'clicked' the way it was supposed to, and he wasn't inherently doomed to be a Bad Father after all -- it came as a complete revelation: "he had never known that such things could be".
But I'm afraid he probably did neglect Christine a bit because of Anne; he rationalises it to himself, saying that after all, she has Gustave and their son has always seemed to be the centre of her life... but Anne loves him unconditionally, and Christine is a grown woman with whom his relationship is inevitably more complicated, and it's tempting to avoid the conflicts in their marriage by concentrating on the child :-(
I suspect that in those years he probably talked to Anne about Christine and his feelings for her more than he actually did to Christine, simply because the little girl was too small at that point to give any sign of understanding, and it was tantamount to pouring out his emotions into the uncritical ear of a favourite hound: what he doesn't realise is that she almost certainly picked up on what he was saying long before she was able to talk coherently at all. Certainly when Anne concludes that her father loves Maman more than anything else in the world, this may be from observing what is not said between them but is unlikely to be based on her parents' daily conversation at this point :-(
The idea of Anne as a governess/nursemaid and Raoul's secret mistress was precisely the misdirection I was going for. (She was also at various times a small pet and an elderly relative, but I decided I'd better settle on one 'cover story' and stick to it: I did wonder if anyone would actually swallow that particular theory coming from my direction!) I spent a lot of time adjusting hints (e.g. Gustave as "Christine's first-born child", "mothers who cavorted with lovers were dead to the children left behind them", and Raoul asking "What am I to do -- what are we to do?") to try to get the right level of works-in-retrospect implication.
Raoul's 'unseemly attitude' towards Anne -- in Baptiste's view -- is of course the amount of fuss he makes of the child, and the way he is happy to allow her to get the two of them into situations entirely unbefitting the Vicomte's dignity: fawning over a baby daughter is, in Baptiste's private opinion, ridiculous behaviour. After all, there are nurses employed for that sort of thing specifically so that the parents can meet their children in a more controlled environment :-p
Canon doesn't actually say that Christine never had any children by Raoul... we just don't see her bring them to America :-) So the purpose of Chapter 2 was first to establish that, under the right circumstances, it would have been perfectly natural to leave a small child (in that case Gustave) behind while his parents went on a journey, and then to hint at an earlier attempt at reconciliation that could have resulted in a daughter... Originally, Gustave says explicitly in the opening chapter that Christine thought Anne was "too little" to make the journey to America (this being the story-internal logic as to why she isn't there): but this made it too obvious that Anne was in fact a small child.
(And -- as Raoul realises here and far too late -- if only Gustave had been deemed too young for the journey, a great deal of heartbreak would have been saved all round: Christine would never have left her child abandoned behind her in France, the Phantom would have had no blackmail lever to use on her and Meg would have had no blackmail lever to use on him, since no-one would ever have suspected from the existence of the 'little Vicomte' that Erik had a son. The Girys would not have felt displaced by his decision to make Gustave his heir, Christine would presumably have returned to Gustave in Raoul's company; and depending on how exactly the various confrontations played out in this scenario, Erik might at least have seen Christine again and made his peace with her in the knowledge that she forgives him for having abandoned her, and Raoul might have been reduced to a state vulnerable enough to confess his insecurities to Christine and mend their marriage. What a difference one child's presence makes... but that would be another story. And I don't plan to write that one!)
That final scene -- "Don't cry, Papa" -- was more or less the whole prompt for the story :-(
Of course what Anne is trying to do is to comfort her father in the only terms with which she has any experience ("Maman will make it all better"): she doesn't realise that in the circumstances this isn't the most helpful thing to say... I'm afraid that from the point of view of a child who can't be -- by the chronology of this story -- more than three and a half, "You have to be a good girl now, Miss Anne, because your Maman has gone to be with the angels" (or whatever period euphemism would have been used to tell her of her mother's death) really doesn't mean anything very different to "Your Maman has gone to America": she doesn't have any meaningful concept of either, and she is still confidently expecting Christine to come home. Now that Raoul is back she is certain that her mother will be there any minute :-(
I strongly suspect that once she realises that her mother really has gone forever she is going to fly into (to Raoul) inexplicable panics for the next few years whenever anyone mentions America, this now being inextricably associated in her mind with death and abandonment...
In the final chapter the crying comes back into play: Erik can weep for Christine at Gustave's bedside, but Raoul finds himself unable to yield enough to do so until he is reunited with Anne. (I picture the two scenes as being very similar, but the dynamic is of course different because Gustave is an older child.)
I created Anne to give Raoul a reason to live; because without her, or someone like her, I really think he would probably kill himself after "Love Never Dies" :-( He has created the most enormous burden of guilt to add to his natural grief, and he has lost everything: his wife, his heir, his source of income, his faith in his marriage, his family inheritance, his self-belief, his good name... What does he have to go home to, other than scandal and ruin? What is the point of going on, when he can at least make a gesture with his death towards atoning for something?
If Christine had caught a fever and died, say, he would have been devastated, but he would have recovered. He might well have remarried: oddly, it's the people who are very uxorious who often do. But for her to leave him in such circumstances and then die, when he thought he was trying to do the right thing for her... I think it would destroy him utterly :-(
So it makes the most enormous difference first of all to know that he is loved and needed by someone in this world, and secondly to know that there is still something worthwhile that he and Christine created between them -- "the final legacy of their life together". Anne-Élisabeth is a tangible part of their marriage: something good that has come from both of them, and proof that there was a time when he loved and was loved, that not everything in their life together had to be bad.
Anne's existence gives Raoul motivation to "be strong": her dependence on him is an incentive to hold himself together, as we have already seen during the voyage -- and this is the case to a far greater degree when he actually has her needing his attention in person, and when he has to try to help her cope with what will be enormous changes in her life due to their financial situation. (I think he is going to have to find some way to keep her nurse in his employ, both to provide some continuity and because I simply cannot see him coping with the day-to-day needs of a three-year-old girl without help... he hasn't the faintest practical idea. Neither has Erik, of course, but at least Gustave is reasonably self-sufficient.)
I do wonder what will happen when Erik learns about Anne, which he is bound to do from Gustave eventually: the boy has no reason to take Raoul's hint "not to talk about it" literally. Raoul of course assumes the worst, that the Phantom will covet his daughter as some kind of reincarnation of her mother and/or try to repeat history. I hope that non-badfic Erik isn't quite as fixated as that!
I'm afraid there won't in fact be flowers on the breakfast table to welcome Raoul's homecoming, because it was Christine who used to arrange for that :-( (Though I can see a ten-year-old Anne reviving the 'tradition' in secret one day, hopeful of surprising a smile out of Raoul on his arrival -- it's more likely to have the opposite effect...)
I think there's a danger for Raoul that he might want Anne to be too much like her mother: she is after all an individual in her own right (and likely to be as headstrong as he is), but watching her growing up is going to come painfully close to reliving his own memories of Christine in childhood. Trying to live up to the image of a saintly dead mother whom she barely remembers is a burden on any child... and when she learns exactly how her mother did die (and since it's both a scandalous and a painful subject, I can't see her father volunteering the information very readily), that will be pretty traumatic as well: the icon shattered :-(
It occurs to me that by a painful coincidence both Raoul and Christine have already grown up motherless; indeed they were both effectively orphaned in their teens and brought up by foster-parents. So history is repeating itself in the case of their children :-(
I suspect that whatever childhood stories Raoul tells Anne, he is not going to promise her that her dead mother will send an Angel of Music to watch over her and inspire her with talent... In fact I'm not sure I can see him encouraging her to take up music at all, the associations -- both from his memories of Christine as a child and from the circumstances of their later lives -- being too painful. Which is a pity, because Raoul did love music once.
On the other hand, an Anne who inherits her mother's talent -- I think the chances are that she would be generally talented rather than outstandingly gifted, though Christine apparently inherited potential genius from her father -- would potentially be under even more pressure to be a 'reincarnation' of the lost woman.
It's a great pity that Raoul would deprive his daughter of music, but thinking about it I can't picture him obliviously settling her down to routine piano lessons: the implications of Christine -- Christine and Gustave -- Christine and the Phantom -- Christine -- are just going to resonate on and on. He is going to shy away from music for a long time...
I don't think he'd play the cruel father and forbid her from any contact with the musical world, especially if she turns out to find a talent for herself after all, but I don't see him taking any steps to try to prompt her into it. I just don't think he could bear to. If she's lucky she may get singing in a convent education.
Also, there's likely to be a financial issue, depending on just how bad Raoul's debts are: for the purposes of this story I had him virtually broke and dependent on the Phantom's charity to get home. (Probably unlikely in reality: after all, he manages to get liner tickets for the three of them at short notice before the performance, and they must have anticipated needing funds in America, even if they were relying on Christine's fee to pay off the outstanding gambling dues.)
Raoul and Anne are probably going to end up in furnished lodgings here, rather than with the 'little house in the banlieue" and small investment income which he calculates they will be able to afford in the case of "The Choices of Raoul"... so yes, he will have to sell Christine's piano, though I doubt he'd do that willingly, even if he would never otherwise open it :-(
I don't think Christine would ever have told Erik about Gustave if he hadn't guessed beforehand and more or less forced her into it: after all, at the point where he is busy threatening the life of his own son she has a sizeable motivation for telling him, yet she still doesn't do so. She clearly never intended for him to know. (It's a pretty combustible secret which he could have used to break up her marriage, as in fact he ultimately tries to do; and if his attempt to 'seduce' Gustave 'to the dark side' hadn't ended up by terrifying the child and driving him away, would he have been quite so self-abnegating in vowing to devote all his worldly goods to the child without ever seeing him again, or would he have made further attempts to take possession of the son as he had done with the mother?)
Gustave may be half Erik's son... but he is half Christine's son, and has been brought up entirely by Christine (or at least not at all by Erik). And Raoul loves Christine... so I don't see any reason in theory why he shouldn't get on very well with Gustave, assuming he isn't the generic child-hating ogre of fan-fiction. Sons can be fun, after all :-) (Indeed in my WW1 story To Ease Your Troubled Mind, I explored the possibility of a Raoul and Gustave with little in common who become close due to shared experiences in adulthood: in that version of events -- in which the family again leave before Christine ever encounters the Phantom -- Raoul really has no reason to imagine that Gustave's paternity might be in doubt, although Christine's conscience leads her to wonder...)
It also occurs to me that, in this version, we have to assume that Christine evidently didn't have any qualms about abandoning her daughter in France in order to be with Erik; even if Gustave was closer to her heart, I can't imagine she would have been a neglectful mother to Anne... however flustered she may initially have been by a fresh pregnancy at that point in her marriage! Either she really was prepared to throw all away for love, or she was making a more or less conscious decision (prompted by circumstance) to 'share' the children between herself and Raoul, or she was assuming vaguely that they could all be together again somehow later on. I didn't find it improbable that Christine might choose to leave a small child behind in a familiar environment rather than taking her on a journey halfway around the world -- but if she stays at Phantasma with Gustave then she is effectively abandoning her daughter in order to take a lover; some women did make that choice, but it wouldn't reflect well on her relative affection for the two children...
After Gustave's rejection, Erik's initial reaction is one of abnegation and self-sacrifice (interestingly, it's probably the only echo of that original 'Final lair' decision that we see from him in this musical); he begs Christine not to tell the child who his father is, and indeed tries to stop her deathbed confession the next day. If he adhered to that decision he presumably wouldn't follow Gustave home to France, or at least wouldn't try to kidnap him. Though I can imagine that once the initial revulsion of feeling wore off, he would at least want to keep himself informed of Gustave's progress, and might feel tempted to use his 'influence' to lean on a few important figures who could influence his son's future...
Return to Contents / return to Phantom of the Opera fan-fiction page
