The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics)

by Gaston Leroux

  In 1909 he moved his family to Nice, partly because of the climate but also because of the proximity of numerous casinos. His gambling proved an expensive habit and obliged him to keep turning out new books. His experience of the professional world of letters ensured that he reaped the maximum material rewards for his considerable labours. By 1910, he was the highest paid of all the suppliers of romans populaires. He wrote only when he had a commission but then he followed a strict routine. He rose at 5 a.m., exercised, dressed, and wrote between 8 and 11 a.m., when he was not to be disturbed. After a break, he lunched at 1.15 p.m., napped between 2 and 3 p.m., and worked again until 6 p.m. After an hour at his club where he enjoyed the company of friends, he dined at 7.30 p.m., then strolled with his family, if fine. If wet, or if he had not written the four pages a day which he set himself, he went back to his study.

  He left Nice only for pressing professional reasons such as the publication of new novels which followed at regular intervals or the production of plays which he adapted from his own books. In 1912, his stage version of Le Mystère de la chambre jaune was given a mixed reception but the following year, Alsace, which was performed with his brother Jo playing opposite the great Réjane, was a success. The same year saw the release of Balaôô, the first of the many films based on his novels.

  When war was finally declared on 2 August 1914, he was 46 years old. Convinced that Germany had ‘stolen’ Alsace-Lorraine in 1870, he was eager to serve, but a weak heart excluded him from the general mobilization. Instead, he decided to contribute to the war effort not by the sword but by his pen. Where other novelists chronicled the horrors of war, Leroux took the fight to the enemy. Five of his six wartime novels are anti-German and highly critical of the Kaiser, the Krupp armament machine, and beautiful spies who, like Mata Hari, undermine the French war effort from within—but do not fool Rouletabille for an instant. While John Buchan and Erskine Childers quickly established stories about spies in Britain, Leroux single-handedly invented the patriotic spy-thriller for the French. But he also carried his campaign to boost morale by turning to the silver screen.

  In 1916, the publication of his novel L’Homme qui vient de loin was timed to coincide with the release of a film version produced and directed by René Navarre. Navarre was a star actor who had played the master-criminal Fantômas in Louis Feuillade’s hugely popular serials. After the War, Leroux began writing his own scenarios and worked with Navarre on La Nouvelle Aurore, a sixteen-episode serial which marked the screen debut of Chéri-Bibi. Again, the novel of the same name was published simultaneously in Le Matin.

  Leroux was enthusiastic about the new medium and its power to enhance his success. He had always taken a keen interest in commercializing his work. His second novel, La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (The Double Life of Théophraste Longuet, 1904), had started life as a publicity stunt: the text included clues which astute readers could solve and thus claim the seven ‘treasures’ buried in seven locations in Paris. To launch Le Sept de trèfle (The Seven of Clubs, 1921) playing cards were slipped surreptitiously into pockets where they were found by amazed citizens, including, it was said, the President of France.

  In September 1919, with Navarre and another popular novelist, Arthur Bernède, he launched the Société des Cinéromans, a company with studios and offices in Nice which made films and published the novel-of-the-film simultaneously. Leroux contributed three titles: Tue-la-mort, Le Sept de trèfle, and Rouletabille chez les bohémiens before the company was taken over in 1922, when Leroux withdrew. But as one door shut, another opened. The same year, he met Carl Laemmle who secured his agreement to film Le Fantôme de l’Opéra which duly emerged from Hollywood in 1925 in a blaze of publicity.

  Meanwhile the flow of novels continued. Leroux never broke faith with popular fiction which he had always been ready to defend. But it was an uphill battle. His rejection by snobbish Parisian intellectuals had long been an irritation. In Le Fauteuil hanté (The Haunted Chair, 1911), his only really comic novel, he had satirized the French Academy by showing how that august assembly elected to its ranks a man who could neither read nor write. So when, in 1920, Marcel Prévost, an exponent of the currently fashionable ‘psychological’ novel, made public his disapproval of the crudely sensational roman feuilleton, Leroux responded tartly. The greatest masterpieces of Balzac or Stendhal, he said, relied on both psychology and drama, and good popular fiction, though written for less sophisticated tastes, did the same. Even so, his stock rose in the 1920s when he was increasingly sought out by newspaper interviewers.

  His private life continued to be a source of contentment. In 1917, he at last obtained a divorce and married Jeanne Cayatte. He continued to write, changed his publishers from time to time, and went his quiet way. He remained loyal to the province of his birth (he sent Rouletabille to his old school at Eu, Chéri-Bibi hailed from Dieppe, and Erik was born in Rouen), was happily settled on the Côte d’Azur, yet remained, as his son recalled, devoutly Parisian. The American film of The Phantom of the Opera opened in Nice in January 1926, but there is no confirmation that Leroux was present. Perhaps he was on business in Paris where Henri Jeanson recalled seeing him as he

  strolled along the Boulevards, cane in hand, all-conquering hat, paunch well to the fore… eyes sparkling with delight behind his pince-nez… As he approached the Café Napolitain, he would step out to avoid succumbing to temptation, but when he reached the Place de l’Opéra he would make a sharp about-turn, retrace his steps and sit at a table outside… The perpetual motion of Paris, its beating heart, its rhythm, the smiles of its women, the smell of the place, left him struck all of a heap.1

  Then, suddenly, in April 1927, without warning, he was rushed to hospital in Nice suffering from acute uraemia. He did not survive the operation. He was 59.

  The obituaries, universally kind, paid tribute to his powers of invention and acknowledged him as the true heir of Dumas père. Le Figaro also called him ‘the most convivial, the best of companions, a delightful comrade and the most loyal of friends’. Few disagreed but no one wondered how a mild, clubbable bourgeois, an astute man of business, and devoted family man could have written such brooding, menacing fiction.

  He was, of course, working in a long-established tradition. His books ring with echoes of the Gothic. Ghosts and monsters, gloom and horror, tunnels and catacombs, mayhem and retribution: Leroux ransacked the repertoire of the roman populaire. He was not afraid to acknowledge his masters. Le Roi mystère (King Mystery, 1908) reworks Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and Chéri-Bibi updates the Jean Valjean of Hugo’s Les Misérables. But Leroux, who was proud of his large library, drew on many sources. The Phantom of the Opera has a fiend, a princess, and a prince who re-enact scenes from the dark dramas of Bluebeard, Don Juan, and Beauty and the Beast. They also summon up ancient mythologies, of which the most obvious shows Raoul/Orpheus descending into hell in search of Christine/Euridice. But Erik comes primarily of a long line of nineteenth-century monsters. He is a descendant of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1819) and Hugo’s Quasimodo and Gwynplaine (Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831; L’Homme qui rit, 1869). But there is, too, enough of the night about him to recall Robert Louis Stevenson’s vicious Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s sinister Dracula (1899), for Erik too sleeps in a coffin and Christine confesses that she has never seen him in daylight. But he is also an instance of the mad genius who, as in the novels of Jules Verne and any number of early science fiction writers, used technology as a new form of magic to further their goal of bending the world to their will.

  Leroux’s borrowings also extend to plot and its trappings. In Le Château des Carpathes (The Carpathian Castle, 1892), Jules Verne dramatized the conflict between an older aristocrat and a young Count for the affections of Stilla, an Italian soprano who dies mysteriously on stage, while the menacing Svengali, in George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), transforms an artist’s model into a diva by hypnosis. There are also atmospheric reminiscences of the brooding tales of Edgar
Allan Poe. Erik’s appearance in his red costume at the Opera Ball recalls The Masque of the Red Death, his physical condition that of the doomed hero of The Fall of the House of Usher; while the form taken by his torture chamber is as much a psychological and physical ordeal as the Jesuits’ furnace of The Pit and the Pendulum.

  But Leroux was more than a petty pilferer. The Phantom of the Opera is a very skilled, teasing mix of realism and illusion. From the start, the narrator, who signs himself ‘GL’ (a false identity, of course, one of many scattered through his novels), assures us that the story he tells is absolutely true, having been pieced together from eyewitness accounts, his own researches, public archives, newspaper reports, and other documentary sources. To prove his good faith, he uses the participants to tell most of the tale, as if their quantity is a guarantee of authenticity. His multiple narrators begin with the oral testimony of ‘la petite Jammes’, Joseph Buquet, and Mme Giry, move to quotations from the supposed Memoirs of Moncharmin, and end with the Persian, whose ‘personal papers’ are reprinted at length. The settings—the interior of the Opera House, the Bois de Boulogne, the inn and the church at Perros—also have the feel of reality, and the references to the operas performed are historically accurate.

  Yet despite this avalanche of ‘truth’, the narrative creates only uncertainty. Leroux is skilled at muddying the waters and the narrative’s default position is semi- or total darkness. Even the few exterior scenes are nocturnal or at best, as in the Perros interlude, crepuscular. The gloom breeds claustrophobia and nightmares into which we are drawn. Moreover, as in a number of Leroux’s other novels, there is for many pages an empty space at the centre of The Phantom of the Opera. It surrounds the ominous, invisible figure of the arch-fiend who seems magically capable of anything: he sings, plays the violin, throws his voice, speaks through walls, writes avant-garde music, climbs over rooftops, and looms like a spectre in a bad dream. In a crisis characters ‘doubt the evidence of their senses’. But we are equally unsure of what we read and struggle to locate the elusive line separating the real from the supernatural.

  Leroux makes our task harder by undermining our assumptions and expectations. The spine of the narration is broken when the managers and performers of the Opera, who do most of the early running, are dropped and the Persian, until then hidden from us, appears in Chapter 13. Up to that point, despite the chill of horror, the tale is relieved by a certain melodramatic staginess and a measure of humour. But the further we proceed, the deeper and darker the mystery grows. We are disorientated with talk of shadows, enigmas, and fate expressed in language which has a tendency to overheat. The vocabulary is highly charged—fear becomes terror, a tremble turns into a shudder—and the breathless punctuation scatters exclamation- and suspension-marks like blood on the walls of a crime scene. Leroux’s italics do not simply discharge their function of emphasizing words but ironically subvert them by implying an alternative or even opposite meaning. They announce or prepare bad news, hint at things not said and things unsayable, and generally create doubt, fear, and apprehension. What does Erik mean when he says that many people will soon be dead and buried? The italics also serve as stage directions which allow us to visualize characters through their gestures and hear the fear or dread or suspicion in their voices. By such devices, Leroux carefully controls what he wants us to know, for he consistently keeps answers from us. We must wait a long time to learn why the Directors want a safety pin or why Raoul has to keep his arm raised, at eye level, as he descends with the Persian into Erik’s subterranean domain.

  Handing out facts and footnotes and multiple narrators with one hand and withholding answers with the other, Leroux keeps us permanently wrong-footed. And he deepens the confusion by adding comic touches to the mayhem, thus suggesting that we are watching not a tragedy, not even a drama, but the stagiest of melodramas which is not real but mere entertainment. He takes tetchy prima donnas, a prickly concierge, and pompous bourgeois gentlemen from the theatrical tradition of Feydeau and Labiche, while his fumbling policemen are imported from popular crime fiction which generally preferred amateur to professional detectives. Mme Giry’s feathered hat, the toad in La Carlotta’s throat, the incomprehensible charade performed in the foyer de la danse by Messrs Richard and Moncharmin are more straightforwardly farcical. We smile at them and may begin to be reassured that the blood is only tomato sauce after all and fiery heads no more than faux-scary Halloween masks. But then Leroux calls us to order. Once the Persian declares war on Erik and leads Raoul down to the house on the lake, the sense of foreboding becomes grimmer and Leroux’s fertile imagination takes us to new and unambiguous levels of horror. Christine sees Erik’s ghastly face; Erik must confront his unmasking; Raoul and the Persian fight for their sanity and then their very lives in a mirror maze of unexpected cruelty … Leroux takes his characters to the edge of endurance. Erik cracks in a surrealistic, terrifying stream of interior monologue which confirms our suspicions that he is, after all, criminally insane.

  Then, with a bold wave of Leroux’s wand, the horror disappears and we are returned to the fusty Louis-Philippe salon which is now as calm as a convent infirmary. With another wave of his wand, Erik has not only returned to sanity but is capable of making the most generous of gestures. Raoul and Christine board a train at the Gare du Nord, Erik goes into a decline and dies, and the Persian comes to terms with his long duel with Erik. Normality has been resumed and we are reassured.

  But are we? All along, Leroux has persuaded us to believe in an impossible fantasy and then plunges us into a drama which is intensely human. It is only when we escape from the hothouse he creates that we realize that he has left many questions unanswered. How is the lake lit by a bluish light? Was Erik really shot on Raoul’s balcony? What happened to the Chagny inheritance?

  But the greatest question of all is what to make of Erik. Christine learns to pity, respect, and admire not only the Angel of Music but the noble and generous-hearted man who gave her back to Raoul. The Persian, who knows him better than anyone, cannot decide whether he is a cruel sadist or a tortured genius. The narrator sees a man who is more sinned against than sinning: dealt a cruel, impossible hand by nature, dismissed by his mother (whose horrid furniture he treasures as a link to the maternal warmth he has never known), hardened by rejection, desensitized by the Sultana, cast out by society, a hermit as a last resort, he is doomed to serve a whole-life sentence in the prison of his ugliness. But ‘GL’ does not try to explain Erik’s behaviour by his physical defects. Some readers, however, assuming that his appearance is the key to his character, have attempted a diagnosis. Perhaps a strain of inherited syphilis could account for his ‘dead’ flesh and a rare genetic disease such as congenital porphyria his facial disfigurement. But most forms of gargoylism are normally accompanied by physical debilities and, often, mental disturbance. Even at about 50 (his age according to the internal chronology of the novel), Erik is physically and mentally undiminished, as capable of feats of agility and strength as he is of using his intelligent brain. Again, Leroux leaves us with an uncertainty.

  ‘GL’, however, has no doubts: he believes Erik to be innocent of the crimes attributed to him. He is a good man pushed beyond endurance. The proof? Does he not return the Directors’ money? And, save for Joseph Buquet who dies of curiosity and the automatic operation of the torture chamber and not by Erik’s deliberate hand, he is guilty only of frightening a small number of people. And is he not transformed and redeemed by the power of love? Surely this too is evidence of his inherent goodness? It was something that happened more often in fiction than in life, though the curative effect of a woman’s touch is not undocumented (see note to p. 267). On the other hand, ‘GL’ never wonders if Erik was lying when he said that the chandelier fell of its own accord and that Comte Philippe drowned by accident. And since anyone can slip a ring on a dead man’s finger, how can he be sure that the skeleton found on the shore of the lake is really Erik’s?

  It is unlikely tha
t Leroux himself believed the clichés of sentimental fiction and, as an experienced courtroom lawyer, would surely not have given Erik the benefit of the doubt. But he obviously enjoyed creating mysteries only some of which he resolves. He eventually provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for the fiery head unsupported by a body that so terrifies Papin, the fireman. In the same way, the Epilogue is clearly intended to provide closure. It resembles the scene in the library of a crime novel in which the detective unmasks the murderer, explains what has happened, and ties up the loose ends. But Leroux leaves many matters open and threads dangling. Where do Raoul and Christine travel from the Gare du Nord? Will ‘GL’ ever persuade the authorities to look for the house by the lake? Surely, one English reader suggested to Leroux’s heirs in 1972, if the manuscript of Don Juan Triumphant could be found, all doubts about Erik would be removed at a stroke. In a sense, The Phantom of the Opera is an immense practical joke, or rather a double hoax. Having frightened us with a ghost, Leroux tells us that Erik is flesh and blood. Then, when we are adjusting to Erik as a criminal lunatic, he switches again and asks us to feel pity for him. And ultimately, relying on ‘GL’’s lenient view of the man, he turns Erik’s death into one last mystery. Leroux, a Master of Fictional Traps, makes the fantastic real and the real mysterious.

  But the atmospheric story of Erik, two lovers, and a Persian rationalist is ultimately a human reality which still has the power to intrigue and move. Leroux has been admired by writers as different as Jean Cocteau, Raymond Queneau, and Agatha Christie and his rehabilitation as a serious writer, which began around 1960, has been amply confirmed. The Phantom of the Opera has been translated into English, Norwegian, Czech, Hebrew, German, Danish, and Japanese. Authors, often taking starling liberties with the text, have produced more prequels and sequels than can be counted. It has been many times adapted for stage, radio, and television, and filmographers list around twenty-five cinema versions. Three ballets, numerous graphic books and cartoons, a Phantom on ice, several rock operas, and around fifteen musicals have kept the drama alive. An estimated 18 million people worldwide have seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 Phantom, and its sequel, Love Never Dies, has not disappointed the many ‘phans’ who exchange information and their enthusiasm on dedicated Internet sites. Erik has joined the likes of the Lady of the Camellias, Tarzan, and James Bond in the ranks of iconic heroes of popular culture who have escaped the limits of fiction and embedded themselves in the collective psyche. The Phantom of the Opera is no longer a French possession: it has become part of the world’s cultural heritage.