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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
GASTON LEROUX
The Phantom of the Opera
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID COWARD
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
GASTON LEROUX was born to middle-class Norman parents in 1868. After leaving the Collège d’Eu near Dieppe in 1886, he enrolled as a law student in Paris, was admitted to the Bar in 1890, and practised as a lawyer until 1893 when he became a legal correspondent for Le Matin, one of Paris’s leading dailies. He later became its theatre critic but also covered stories of many kinds at home and abroad. He travelled widely, notably to Russia where he reported on the Revolution of 1905. Meanwhile, attempts to make his name as a writer of fiction and plays made little headway until 1907 when he resigned from Le Matin and published Le Mystère de la chambre jaune, which was a huge success. It is the most original of all the ‘sealed chamber’ mysteries and was greatly admired by Agatha Christie. He commanded large fees for novels filled with horror, mystery, and catacombs which were first published in instalments by newspapers and magazines before appearing in volume form. Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) was translated into many languages, has been turned into a score of films, and was set to music several times before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical brought Erik, the Phantom, to a global audience in 1986. Leroux moved to Nice in 1909 with his children who remembered him as a jovial man. During the war, he published anti-German tales as his contribution to keeping up morale. In 1919, he became briefly involved in the French cinema industry before returning to his regular writing routine. He died suddenly in 1927, aged 59. The obituaries remembered his charm and kindness and acknowledged him as the heir of Alexandre Dumas and the last king of serial fiction.
DAVID COWARD is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Leeds. He is the author of A History of French Literature (2002) and many translations, most recently Paul Morand, Hecate and Her Dogs (2009). For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited nine novels by Alexandre Dumas and translated titles by Maupassant, Sade, Beaumarchais, and Diderot. Winner of the 1996 Scott-Moncrieff Prize for translation, he reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and other literary periodicals.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Gaston Leroux
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Appendix: The Paris Opera House
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
GASTON LEROUX trained as a lawyer, was a leading French journalist for over a decade, and wrote thirty-four novels, nine long tales, and six plays. He was also a pioneer of the silent cinema for which he produced half-a-dozen film scenarios. Even before he died in 1927, a further nine films were adapted from his novels and since his death his work has been regularly plundered for stage, screen, television, and radio. The global success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of The Phantom of the Opera has been a cultural phenomenon. But perhaps the most strikingly original of the many adaptations of Leroux’s novel remains Hollywood’s version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, which was directed in 1925 by Rupert Julian to such effect that it was banned in Britain for four years as too horrifying for general distribution. Since 1986, when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical was first staged, Leroux has been known primarily as the author of The Phantom of the Opera. But for seventy years before that, he was remembered rather as the creator of two heroes who remain embedded in French popular culture. The first was Joseph Joséphin, alias Rouletabille, the youthful journalist of the fictitious newspaper L’Époque, who solved crimes using reason, inference, and psychological intuition rather than the observation of physical evidence in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. The second was ChériBibi, a wrongly imprisoned convict who, despite repeated attempts to clear his name, is remorselessly hounded by a malignant fate.
Though Leroux twice attempted to establish himself as a novelist, it took a disagreement in 1907 with the management of Le Matin, the leading Paris daily newspaper, to push him to break with journalism and become a full-time author. He quickly made a considerable name for himself at home and abroad with his classic ‘sealed chamber’ story, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907): the mystery of the yellow room was brilliantly solved by Rouletabille using brainpower alone. From the start, Leroux wrote only when a newspaper editor first offered him a
contract. All his novels first appeared in instalments often over a period of months before being published in volume form. This arrangement gave Leroux a freer hand than if he had been contracted to publishers with strict genre criteria for the sector of the market which bought the books they sold. It meant that as long as he provided fast-paced, exciting copy punctuated by cliffhanging climaxes, he could follow his storytelling instincts without being pigeonholed as a writer of crime fiction or romance or mystery or fantasy. Gaston Leroux made the most of his freedom and reaped the rewards.
He appeared on the literary scene at the tail end of a long history which was then coming to a close. Since 1836, when newspapers first began to accept advertising as a way of reducing their cover price, serial fiction had been used as a means of boosting circulation. It generated brand loyalty by using as bait exciting stories issued in instalments which ended with the irresistible words: ‘To be continued in our next number’. The first kings of the roman feuilleton, or serial fiction, were Eugène Sue (Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3)) and the unstoppable Alexandre Dumas, creator of the Musketeer saga, The Count of Monte Cristo, and many more. In the second half of the century, even literary novels were regularly prepublished in newspapers and periodicals before appearing as free-standing volumes.
During the Second Empire (1852–70) and the Third Republic which replaced it, an army of feuilletonistes, with newcomers like Ponson du Terrail, Paul Féval, and Jules Verne leading the charge, were catering for new tastes. The public never wearied of the staple diet of historical dramas, crime in high places, and adventures in the underworld of Paris. But slowly readers widened their interest and demanded ‘extraordinary voyages’, fantasy, adventures of all kinds, crimes of all colours, science fiction (featuring mad scientists, green rays, and weird inventions), and social and sentimental dramas (usually problems of marriage, heiresses cheated of their inheritance, and the struggles of upwardly mobile working-class heroes). By 1900, when the literacy rate had risen to 83 per cent and Parisians bought 4 million newspapers daily, the market for such sensational, sentimental, and sometimes raffish reading matter had further split into new constituencies (juvenile, female, male, and so on), books had become cheaper and publishers regularly issued collectable volumes to which they added illustrations, which were absent from the newspaper serial. Readers now preferred to own the book rather than waiting for it over many weeks and by the eve of the Great War, the serial format had transferred to the cinema. There Louis Feuillade’s tales of vampires, Arthur Bernède’s chronicles of Judex, Righter of Wrongs, and the wicked crimes of Fantômas, Man of Mystery, made large audiences hold their breath and challenged Hollywood imports which featured the perils of Pauline, Pearl White, and Elmo the Mighty. Popular fiction kept a reduced hold on the newspaper outlet, however, and Michel Zévaco (1860–1918), who specialized in historical fiction, made his name and a considerable fortune as a feuilletoniste. But the title of Last King of the roman feueilleton goes to Gaston Leroux.
Leroux was born in Paris in 1868 a month before his parents were married in Rouen. He was the oldest of the four children of a substantial building contractor who worked on Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of the château at Eu, near Dieppe, on the Normandy coast. His mother was the daughter of a court usher. In 1880 he was sent to board at a school in Eu where he was an excellent pupil and a keen sportsman. He passed his bacalauréat in July 1886 with good grades and in October enrolled in law school in Paris. He was not assiduous in his legal studies, preferred the company of writers, and—very occasionally—found magazines ready to accept poems and short articles. It was probably around this time that, if legend is to be believed, he squandered a large inheritance after the early deaths of both his parents. In 1889, he graduated from law school and was immediately called up for his military service which was, however, reduced to just two months in recognition, it seems, of his responsibilities towards his younger siblings. He found an opening in chambers in Paris and began a career as a courtroom lawyer in 1890.
The following year, he met André Antoine, future director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon, and Robert Charvay, a journalist on L’Écho de Paris. While still representing clients in court, he acted as Charvay’s secretary and contributed a handful of sonnets to his paper. In 1893, he gave up law and began writing for the daily Paris which, in January 1894, sent him to report on the trial of the anarchist Auguste Vaillant, who had exploded a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies. His coverage impressed the editor of Le Matin, a leading Paris daily, who offered him a job as its legal correspondent. Until 1907, when he resigned, he reported many high-profile trials, including those of other notorious anarchists, of Émile Zola (author of ‘J’Accuse’) in January 1898, and of Dreyfus at Rennes in August of the following year. But he also acted at different times as Le Matin’s parliamentary correspondent, theatre critic, and, after 1901, chief reporter, covering a range of political, foreign, social, and cultural subjects. In 1896, he had been one of only six journalists who accompanied Félix Faure, the French president, on an official visit to Russia and in 1904 was again chosen for the visit of President Loubet to Italy. In the early 1900s, he was given a roving brief which took him to many countries including North Africa (where he was shot at while covering the unrest in Morocco) and, several times, to Russia where he witnessed the first Revolution of 1905.
As a journalist he was resourceful and took his responsibility to inform and enlighten the public very seriously. He raised a number of questions of public interest, always from a moderate liberal point of view. He questioned the value of capital punishment, for he had seen too many executions of defendants found guilty of murder whose trials he had attended. He took up issues of public health, investigating the link between infant mortality and bad and adulterated milk, and campaigning for improvements to the capital’s water supply which was suspected of spreading typhus. He promoted scientific progress, especially advances in medicine, and held clear political views which emerge most clearly from his coverage of events in Russia where he lived between February 1905 and March 1906. Tsar Nicolas he thought weak, and he regarded Nihilists as the Russian equivalent of France’s anarchists. But what he saw of brutal Tsarist repression somewhat modified his view of the Nihilist opposition. Clearly the Russian regime was living on borrowed time. Russia’s future surely was as the kind of democratic republic which was his ideal. It would be created by the educated middle class with the support of the proletariat. The danger lay in extremes of right- and left-wing opinion. For if he was suspicious of Bolsheviks and France’s nascent French trade-union movement, his libertarian social conscience remained undented. It spilled over into plays with which he hoped to make his fortune. La Maison des juges (The House of the Judges, staged by his old friend Antoine in 1906) was an attack on the inadequacies of the legal system. Le Lys (1908; translated as The Lily for its Washington production in 1909) argued in favour of the right of a woman to marry according to her own, not her family’s wishes. Alsace (1913), staged on the eve of the Great War, was forthrightly patriotic and outspokenly anti-German.
Journalism was Leroux’s route to the modestly attenuated form of individualism often encountered in progressive liberals of the time. But he owed more than political views to his profession, for it exerted a profound influence on his fiction. He made his greatest creation—Rouletabille—a journalist, and journalism both sharpened his intellectual curiosity and supplied him with a store of information on which he continued to draw. The Romany community he had met in Saintes-Maries-des-Mers on an assignment in the Camargue in 1901 resurface in several novels (the young Erik is taught to do magic tricks by gypsies), while Russia was the setting for novels published before and after the Great War. He remembered reports of intriguing stories by colleagues and, in The Phantom, even borrowed a headline announcing the death of a concierge killed by a falling chandelier in the Paris Opera in 1896. He recycled dramatic incidents, such as the Bruce-Portland Affair of 1907 in which it emerged that a duke had f
urthered his nefarious activities by using subterranean tunnels dug under his château. But journalism also shaped much of the tone and focus of his fiction. The habit of reporting the present made him more interested in writing stories about the contemporary world than about forward-looking fantasy and backward-looking history. His experience as a journalist had also taught him how to gain and hold the attention of the public and the value of embedding his narratives in documented reality. Footnotes claim that places and events are historique (authentic) while references to books and newspaper articles (usually from Le Matin) and books are designed to root the most outrageous fruits of his imagination in scientific, historical, and otherwise verifiable ‘truth’. Leroux was happy in the present and it was there that he set nearly all his fictions.
The year 1907 was an important one in his life: he ceased being a journalist and Le Mystère de la chambre jaune brought success. The following year, L’Illustration, advertising the appearance of its sequel, Le Parfum de la dame en noir (The Perfume of the Lady in Black) invited readers to
picture a ruddy face under a thatch of curly hair, a pair of intelligent eyes and a friendly smile, an open hand-shake, an affable, congenial paunch, quick, neat movements quite unexpected in a man of such portliness, and a ready, articulate tongue which is the mark of a smooth and supple mind.
He was a good-natured man who enjoyed life, the fruits of his labours, and family life. His first marriage to Marie Lefranc in 1899 had been short-lived and since 1902 he had been living with Jeanne Cayatte by whom he had two children who both remembered his ability to make them laugh. He worked in an upstairs room and when he finished a book, he would come out on to the balcony and fire a pistol in the air. It was the signal for the family to rush into the kitchen, bang pans with spoons, smash crockery, and make a great deal of noise.
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