Comment on A Cabal of Paris

  1. Deiseach (Guest) on Chapter 2 Sun 30 Dec 2018 07:00PM UTC

    I get the impression that Aramis may have been born the wrong side of the blanket; the result of a fling by a minor noble or local gentry, gets provided for by "well my dear I'll marry you off to one of my tenants to preserve your good name, give you a reasonable for your station dowry, and of course once the boy is old enough he can be sent to the local monastery for a career in the Church, that will provide him with an education, get him nicely settled, and get him out of all our hair".

    So Aramis is written off as soon as born by dad and his legitimate family, dad feels he's done all that can reasonably be expected of him and mom and baby are most definitely not to turn up with any demands in future (shades of Aramis arranging for ex-lover and bebby to be packed off to Normandy out of the way?), sweet smol yong Aramis gets packed off to the Jesuits or nearest order to get an education and start on that clerical career and everyone washes their hands of him (mommy and her new family aren't too inclined to want the disgrace of illegitimacy hanging around anyway, since peasants/peasant farmers can be really fussy about that kind of thing when it comes to marrying the sons and daughters of such a family - for Aramis' half-siblings to make respectable marriages the bastard brother would need to be out of the way so everything might be known via gossip but would be treated as over and done with and not to be mentioned openly).

    That's why nobody seems to turn up looking for him, or why as you all say, he doesn't seem to have made use of family connections to smooth his path. He really has had to make his own way, with the only support whatever introductions and acquaintances with various clergy that he can scrape up, and with only the help of his pretty face, mild behaviour, natural talents for scheming, and the uncanny way enemies just ran themselves onto his sword three or four times while he was doing nothing but holding it out, excavate for himself a place in the intrigues and plots of the machinery of power.

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    1. Deiseach (Guest) on Chapter 2 Sun 30 Dec 2018 07:10PM UTC

      This headcanon arises out of local gossip about late 19th century minor gentry who broke up the estate that remained in the family because he had a habit of banging the female members of the tenantry, then marrying them off once they got pregnant and getting the men to marry them by carving out farms from the land. Do this often enough and you don't have much of the not that big to start with estate remaining :-)

      There was also sufficient gossip going around about "Well, Tom thinks Joe is his grandfather, but his real grandfather is Sir So-and-So because of this, and the reason Tom doesn't know it is because Harry his dad doesn't know it, because naturally his step-dad and his mother didn't want to tell him 'you're my kid but not his kid and he only married me for a bribe of land', but this being a small rural area somebody always knows the skeletons in the family closets".

      Honestly, by comparison, Athos really is Father of the Year for stepping up to his responsibilities, taking in Raoul, and turning his life round to raise the kid respectably and set him a good example!

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