Were the Quagmires at Prufrock before the fire?

[Foxy]

It is reasonable to guess that because the school does not have weekends (memento mori!), they also don't have summers, so they may have just been at school one year, or even three quarters of a year if the school does both spring and summer semesters.

OR if their semesters go by days, a semester might approximately be 90 days, so maybe they have been at the school 270 days?

However, all of this does not fit the timeline I just threw together five minutes ago, so maybe there is some Snicket-time going on here, and a semester is much shorter than usual.

I don't think they were at the school first, and here's why: they would have a parent permission form on file, and they wouldn't have always lived in the orphan shack. In fact, they probably wouldn't have even gotten moved to the orphan shack, because after their parents died, there would still be a parent permission form signed and on file, and I don't think Nero would have cared whether the parents were dead or not, he just wanted the paper signed by a guardian. Although maybe he would have thrown them into the orphan shack because he enjoyed being cruel to people. But either way, they would have been at the dorms at one time or another.

[Hermes]

Ah, the great Quagmire mystery.

The problem is this: in the earlier books there are many indications that the Quagmire fire came before the Baudelaire fire. The Q's were at Prufrock Prep for three semesters; in TCC Lulu refers to an earlier attempt by Olaf to get the Quagmire fortune; in TUA Brett, saying he never believed the accusations against Lemony, refers to the Quagmire affair as something that happened before the Baudelaire fire. But then we get Quigley's story, implying that the Quagmire fire happened after TRR; also there's a line in BBRE suggesting that the logs chopped by the Baudelaires were used to burn the Quagmire mansion.

I agree with Foxy that the Q's can't have been at Prufrock before the fire, because of the orphans' shack; I also think you can't really solve it by changing the length of semesters, because semester by definition means half a year. You can have more than two academic terms in a year, but wouldn't be semesters. (I mean, Prufrock Prep is so odd that if they decided a semester was three weeks we couldn't stop them; but I don't think we should go for such extreme solutions if we can avoid them.)

If Quigley were lying one would expect this to be revealed at some point. The real-world explanation is no doubt to suppose that DH changed his mind; how to work out an in-story explanation I'm not sure.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Aug 29, 2019 8:34:33 GMT -5 Hermes said:

Ah, the great Quagmire mystery.



I agree with Foxy that the Q's can't have been at Prufrock before the fire, because of the orphans' shack; I also think you can't really solve it by changing the length of semesters, because semester by definition means half a year. You can have more than two academic terms in a year, but wouldn't be semesters. (I mean, Prufrock Prep is so odd that if they decided a semester was three weeks we couldn't stop them; but I don't think we should go for such extreme solutions if we can avoid them.)

If Quigley were lying one would expect this to be revealed at some point. The real-world explanation is no doubt to suppose that DH changed his mind; how to work out an in-story explanation I'm not sure.

Hermes! Thank you!!!! I think that too! I'm going to look for the semester definition on M-W and I'll be right back.

Definition of semester:
1: either of the two usually 18-week periods of instruction into which an academic year is often divided
2: a period of six months.

In Lemony's letter to the editor at the end of TMM, Lemony states that the Baudelaires spent half a year in Prufrock Prep. If Hermes is right, the history of TAA happened between 63 to 90 days.

I've never spent a lot of neurons thinking about when the Ququimire fire happened ... But I'll try to write now, to see if it's possible that both the Q mansion fire happened before the B mansion fire and what Quigley said is true. (You will witness my way of thinking about something.)



So for all the facts to be true, the fire of mansion Q must have happened before the fire of mansion B. Let's consider this to be true.



We need to consider that Quigley stated that he spent an unknown period of time inside the tunnel before finding Uncle Monty's house. By the time Quigley arrived at Uncle Monty's house, the Baudelaires had already left.

For what Quigley said to be true, it must be that the length of time that Quiglhey spent inside the tunnel had been considerably long for the following facts to happen: the time between the Q mansion fire and the B mansion fire itself fire of mansion B, the time the Baudelaires spent Mr. Poe, the time the Baudelaires spent with Olaf, the time they spent with Olaf, the time they spent with Uncle Monty.



The question is, did Quigley have water and food inside the tunnel? I don't know I'll look and come back. I returned. There is no indication that Quigley had food or water inside the tunnel. Unless he's lying about the origin of the backpack he has. But we are considering the hypothesis in which Quigley spoke the truth. So the conclusion is that for Quigley to be telling the truth, and the fire had to have happened after the Baudelaire Mansion fire. Then comes the chance that he was lying about the chronology, or the way he survived the fire. But we have reached a dead end: there is no reason for Quigley to lie so specifically. Quigley's account is detailed, and he even reports on physical evidence of where he had been. So honestly speaking, Quigley doesn't seem to be lying.



If Quigley is not lying, then the Q mansion fire happened at the time of the events recorded in TRR or shortly thereafter.

So we need to check because we believe the fire might have happened before the B-mansion fire. Maybe we just misunderstood what was written.



1 - The Q's were at Prufrock Prep for three semesters; "Is it possible that part of that time they spent in normal dorms, and they went to specially designed facilities to accommodate orphans after they actually became orphans?" Answer: No. They said that they spent three semesters in the referred facility for orphans.



A hypothesis arises: and I will resort again to an outlet that I have frequently resorted to.



Daniel Handler duplicates events to confuse you. Q's parents died twice. Once a lie, when they faked their own death or were presumed dead. Anyway, the death was not real.

At this time Ducan and Isadora went to Prufrock Prep. The Q's parents' first "death" was the Quaquimire case to which Lemony's illustrator referred, and it must have been when Olaf tried to steal the emeralds earlier. Later, when their parents revealed they were alive, Ducan and Isadora returned home.

The fire happened, and the parents died again, this time for real. Isadora and Ducan returned to Prufrock Prep again. I think this is the best explanation so far. Interestingly, Daniel Handler must have thought of something like this when he published LSTUA. It was not just a careless change of mind. He actually thought of something, as he put the remark made by Lemony's illustrator when he published LSTUA, which was close to the time he published TSS. Then that's it.

[Dante]

Aug 30, 2019 11:51:17 GMT -5 Optimism is my Phil-osophy said:

Hermes! Thank you!!!! I think that too! I'm going to look for the semester definition on M-W and I'll be right back.

Definition of semester:
1: either of the two usually 18-week periods of instruction into which an academic year is often divided
2: a period of six months.

In Lemony's letter to the editor at the end of TMM, Lemony states that the Baudelaires spent half a year in Prufrock Prep. If Hermes is right, the history of TAA happened between 63 to 90 days.

Half a semester, not half a year; but your calculations are otherwise correct in setting down a period of nine weeks, or three months - or another indeterminate period of time derived from Prufrock Prep.'s idiosyncratic calendar, which is my preferred explanation. The chronology of the series consistently errs on the vague side, and I doubt Handler thought any further than having a broad sense of time he wanted to convey.

In any case, it's a simple enough question of changing intentions and that aforementioned chronological vagueness to me; I've demonstrated in the past that Handler's grasp of internal chronology can be distinctly shaky, as in TGG, which only makes sense if you assume that the calendar goes straight from Saturday to Monday. Handler originally intended that the Quagmires had been at Prufrock Prep. for a long time; later, he wanted the Quagmire fire to have taken place more recently. The two aren't necessarily contradictory, but I also suspect that the fact that they might be is something that was never considered.

Additinoally, it's likely that Quigley wasn't telling the Baudelaires the whole story. But again, that's probably because Handler hadn't decided yet what the whole story was; and since Quigley ended up never returning, it really didn't matter.

[Foxy]

Could it also be that the ... nope. I was going to say, maybe the Baudelaires spent a lot longer with the Poes that we thought, but this doesn't work because If you figure a semester being half a year, the Quagmires have gone to Prufrock Prep for a year and a half, but the Baudelaires haven't aged a year and a half since their fire. But maybe if you just use the amount of days in a semester and add them up (since there are no weekends, and maybe no summer vacation) things still work out?