Mrs. Lestrange, Mr. Lestrange & Barty's loyalty

[elfundeb at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 40623

In a message dated 6/26/2002 6:30:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
skelkins at attbi.com writes:

> The 
> only female Death Eater that we know of is the mysterious Mrs. 
> Lestrange, and she is both married to another DE *and* (if she is 
> indeed the Pensieve woman) a person of unusual charisma, dedication, 
> and strength of will.  In other words, she is just the sort of woman 
> that you often find as the sole exception to the rule in a male-
> dominated organization -- and she had an in through her husband, as 
> well.
> 
My first reaction to this was that if two of the four Pensieve defendants 
were Mrs. and Mrs. Lestrange then Voldemort really is dismissive of women -- 
because in the graveyard he extolls their virtues as if they were a single 
person (and under the historic common law, they were, and the one was the 
husband) and promises to honor them both beyond their dreams.  However, 
neither of the two unidentified men in the Pensieve gives any reason to be 
impressed with them or their loyalty.  One is staring blankly and the other 
was "nervous-looking."  They never say a word.  They look, well . . . 
defeated.  Mrs. Lestrange, assuming it was she, puts them all to shame, 
sitting like a queen in her chains.  Only Mrs. Lestrange and her harangue and 
Crouch Jr., who actually tried to fight off the dementors who came to take 
them away (more about Crouch Jr. below), showed any fight in them.  Mr. 
Lestrange doesn't deserve any credit; indeed, if he has no more backbone than 
that, his wife could've eaten them for breakfast every morning.

But then I began to wonder if maybe Mr. Lestrange wasn't there at all.  I 
think the circumstantial evidence certainly suggests that Mrs. Lestrange was 
there -- she clearly demonstrated the faithfulness that Voldemort cites in 
the graveyard and there aren't any good candidates.  But the unidentified men 
there with her act as though she could have swallowed them whole.  

Mrs. Lestrange says "We alone were faithful!" in the Pensieve, which seems to 
match Voldemort's statement, "They went to Azkaban rather than renounce me."  
  However, there were already quite a few DEs in Azkaban at the time -- 
Travers and Mulciber -- and why not Mr. Lestrange?  I think anyone in Azkaban 
gets to claim to have been loyal to Voldemort.  I also think it would have 
been pretty easy for Mrs. Lestrange to have convinced the authorities that 
she wasn't involved the first time the suspects were rounded up, but perhaps 
less so for her husband.  So perhaps Mr. Lestrange was already in Azkaban at 
the time of the trial. 

So under this scenario, Mrs. Lestrange is working hard to revive Voldemort in 
part because she wants to get her husband out of Azkaban.  She rounds up the 
others, who (except for Crouch Jr.) act in the Pensieve like they're rather 
sorry they let themselves get talked into this.  She organizes the little 
visit to the Longbottoms to get information on Voldemort's whereabouts.  She 
picks them because of the Longbottoms' popularity.  She takes Crouch Jr. 
along because he knows the Longbottoms and that will get them in the door.  
She's the one who does most of the torturing, and it's her idea to torture 
Mrs. Longbottom; if she can be a secret DE, so can Mrs. Longbottom be privy 
to Auror secrets.

And when it fails, and she is sentenced to Azkaban, she's still defiant, 
because living alone and pretending she wasn't involved just doesn't appeal 
to her.  Why not?  She has nothing to lose.

That's my alternative theory, anyway.  I don't think there's any canon 
disproving it, despite the fact that Voldemort talks about them as though 
they were one person.

Now for Crouch Jr.:

> Aesha asked:
> 
> > In my opinion, the moment that 
> > Barty Jr. started crying and screaming to his daddy that he didn't 
> > do it, and so on and so forth- well, he denounced the Dark Lord. 
> > How is that loyal? 
> 
Elkins responded:

> It isn't, very.  I agree with you.  I don't think that Voldemort 
> knows about it.
> 
I think I've been converted to a modified version of the theory that Barty 
Jr. was innocent.  Not really innocent, but innocent enough so that all of 
his statements in the Pensieve are nominally true.  Because if that's the 
case, nothing he did in the Pensieve was disloyal to Voldemort.  

Barty Jr. says 3 things in the Pensieve regarding his involvement:

"Mother, stop him, Mother, I didn't do it, it wasn't me!"

"I didn't do it, I didn't do it, I didn't know!"

"Father!  Father, I wasn't involved! No! No! Father, please!"

None of these statements is a direct renunciation of Voldemort.  They claim 
only that he wasn't involved in a specific event.  The truth of these 
statements depends on just what he didn't do and wasn't involved with and 
didn't know.  If his job was to get the Longbottoms to open the door, if he 
didn't know in advance what Mrs. Lestrange intended to do, and if Mrs. 
Lestrange (and perhaps her other companions) did all the actual torturing, 
then all his statements are true assuming Barty Jr. is limiting his denials 
to whether he personally did the torturing for which they are being tried -- 
which is the gist of the crime of which he is accused (yes, there's also a 
reference to capturing Frank, but that's probably what the other two men were 
there for -- to capture Frank when the door was opened.  

So, if he let the others do all the work, I think he can be legitimately 
hailed as a faithful servant.

Debbie
(in a totally unrelated aside, my family went to the zoo yesterday where we 
saw a "basilisk lizard" -- and it was 100 percent green, a very, very 
Slytherinish green)


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