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Post by B. on Feb 16, 2012 14:37:06 GMT -5
I was just thinking about the Baudelaire parents involvement in VFD. Obviously we know they were active participants at one point or another, but is there any evidence that they were still involved in VFD when they had their children? Or did the stop to protect them? Were their parents in VFD behind the children's backs?
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Post by Christmas Chief on Feb 16, 2012 15:39:11 GMT -5
Some hints of activity are suggested when the Baudelaires tell us, for instance, about their parents' evening at La Forza del Destino. When Beatrice and Bertrand had children, I imagine their days of grand expeditions and risky ventures were stilled, or at least kept to a minimum as hiding such information from their children would undoubtedly prove a tireless task. It would appear that while the Baudelaire parents' lifestyle as philanthropists and morally upright people never changed, their involvement in V.F.D. did.
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Post by Hermes on Feb 16, 2012 15:57:17 GMT -5
There's a story told in The End about something that happened when Sunny was a few weeks old, which clearly involved some kind of secret VFD operation, though the children weren't aware of that aspect of it. Also, in BBRE there's a suggestion that the parents had sent the children out of the house so that they could secretly meet someone.
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Post by B. on Feb 16, 2012 16:07:36 GMT -5
I agree. And there are also all those dinner parties mentioned....an in TAA they mention their parents going out but comming home early and Bertrand saying how awful it was to hear someone who could not play the violin. The way it describes the Baudelaires being home alone suggests that they were left in the mansion alone quite regularly. Where were there parents? It's very possible this was involvement of VFD. Hermes: That thing in TE wasn't it? *Goes to bookshelf and grabs TE* Here it is....Chapter 5: Sunny was talking about an afternoon long ago, during an unusually hot autumn in the city. The Baudelaire parents had some business to attend to, and brought along the children, promising to stop at the ice cream store on the way home. The family had arrived at the banking district, pausing to rest at the Fountain of Victorious Finance, and the Baudelaires’ mother had hurried into a building with tall, curved towers poking out in all directions, while their father waited outside with the children. The hot weather made Sunny very cranky, and she began to fuss. To quiet her, the Baudelaires’ father dipped her bare feet in the water, and Sunny had smiled so enthusiastically that he had begun to dunk Sunny’s body, clothes and all, into the fountain, until the youngest Baudelaire was screaming with laughter. As you may know, the laughter of babies is often very contagious, and before long not only were Violet and Klaus also jumping into the fountain, but the Baudelaires’ father, too, all of them laughing and laughing as Sunny grew more and more delighted. Soon the Baudelaires’ mother came out of the building, and looked in astonishment for a moment at her soaking and giggling family, before putting down her pocketbook, kicking off her shoes, and joining them in the refreshing water. They laughed all the way home, each footstep a wet squish, and sat out on their front steps to dry in the sun. It was a wonderful day, but very long ago—so long ago Violet and Klaus had almost forgotten it themselves. But as Sunny reminded them, they could almost hear her newborn laughter, and see the incredulous looks of the bankers who were passing by. But it is this paragraph which strongly implies there undertaking in VFD shortly after Sunny was born: On that faraway afternoon in the banking district, for instance, trouble could be found in the corridors of the towered building, where the Baudelaires’ mother was handed a weather report and a naval map that would reveal, when she studied them by candlelight that evening, far greater trouble than she had imagined, and treachery could be found just past the fountain, where a woman disguised as a pretzel vendor took a photograph of the laughing family, and slipped her camera into the coat pocket of a financial expert who was hurrying to a restaurant, where the coat-check boy would remove the camera and hide it in an enormous parfait glass of fruit that a certain playwright would order for dessert, only to have a quick-thinking waitress pretend that the cream in the zabaglione sauce had gone sour and dump the entire dish into a garbage can in the alley, where I had been sitting for hours, pretending to look for a lost puppy who was actually scurrying into the back entrance of the towered building, removing her disguise, and folding it into her handbag, and this morning was no different.
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Post by Dante on Feb 16, 2012 16:09:45 GMT -5
While there are some areas of V.F.D. where you can clearly raise a child and get on with the job as normal - consider the Widdershins family - then the Baudelaire parents seem to have settled. Or have they? I don't think there's ever any mention of them going to work, which could easily be some sort of volunteer business disguised. I think it likely that their work became much more low-key except in extremely desperate situations. Alternatively, perhaps sitting back and planning and processing information and not having to shift far from base was always what they were particularly good at - but on the other hand, they seem to have been involved in lion-taming at some point, too... I guess that, like most adults, they had their grand adventures at some point before settling down, for their children's sake and their own.
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Post by B. on Feb 16, 2012 16:17:37 GMT -5
That passage under their house did not go unused, I believe. Wasn't there also one time that they were angry Klaus had removed the atlas from the top shelf? I always thought it implied that they were worried he'd seen something he shouldn't have.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Feb 16, 2012 18:23:12 GMT -5
We can be almost certain the atlas, and the books accompanying it, had to do with V.F.D. Klaus states this later on when the Baudelaires are trying to find Widdershin's poetry. The Baudelaire parents apparently kept a fair number of books from their active days in the organization, implying they never truly abandoned their work.
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