The truth was slow to percolate into my brain which was struggling with an investigation that was constantly stubbing its toe on events which looked at first sight as if they had some sort of extraterrestrial dimension. There were times when I was ready to give up beating my brains and clutching at—but never catching—insubstantial will-o’-the-wisps. But in the end I got my proof that my intuition had not misled me and I was rewarded for all my efforts the day I became absolutely certain that the Phantom of the Opera had been more than just a ghost.
On the day in question I’d spent long hours immersed in the Memoirs of a Theatre Manager, a lightweight book by the over-sceptical Moncharmin who during the whole of his tenure at the Opera never understood any facet of the Phantom’s behaviour and took every opportunity to debunk the idea, even when he was the first victim of the baffling financial sleight-of-hand business which happened inside the ‘magic envelope’.
Feeling thoroughly depressed, I’d just left the library when I bumped into the General Administrator of our National Academy, a very sweet man, who was chatting on the stairs to a small elderly party with a lively manner and dandyish appearance. He introduced me at once. The Administrator knew all about my research and how eager I was to discover the whereabouts of Monsieur Faure, the examining magistrate in the famous Chagny case, who had retired. No one knew what had happened to him, whether he was dead or alive. And now, the first thing he’d done on returning to Paris from Canada where he had spent the last fifteen years, was to come to the offices of the Opera in search of a complimentary seat in the house. This tiny old man was Monsieur Faure in person.
We spent a good part of the evening together and he gave me a full account of what he had made of the Chagny case at the time. Lack of evidence had forced him to conclude that the Viscount had been mad and that his brother’s death had been an accident. Yet he was still convinced there’d been some terrible quarrel between the two brothers over Christine Daaé. He couldn’t tell me what had become of either Christine or the Viscount. Naturally, when I brought up the Phantom, he just laughed. He’d also been fully informed of those strange manifestations which at the time had seemed to indicate the existence of an exceptional being who lived permanently in one of the more mysterious recesses of the Opera House itself. He had also known about the business of the ‘envelope’, but had found nothing there worth retaining the attention of an officer of the law appointed to investigate the Chagny case. He had barely spared a few moments to hear the statement of a witness who had turned up willing to swear that he’d actually met the Phantom. This man—the witness—was none other than the person all Paris called ‘the Persian’. He was a familiar figure in the Opera to all season-ticket holders. The judge thought he was deluded.
As you can imagine, I was keenly interested by this matter of the Persian. I wanted to locate this valuable, first-hand witness, if it were not too late. My luck was in once more. I managed to track him down to the small apartment he had in the Rue de Rivoli which he had never left and where he would die five months after my visit.
At first, I was wary. But once the Persian, with childlike candour, had told me everything he knew at first hand about the Phantom, and had given into my keeping proofs of his existence and especially the letters of Christine Daaé which cast dazzling light on her appalling fate, there was no possible room for doubt! No, no! The Phantom was no myth!
I am quite aware that people have hit back at me by saying that perhaps her correspondence was not genuine, that it could well have been forged from beginning to end by a man whose imagination was obviously overheated from reading too many sensational novels. But happily I was able to come up with a sample of Christine’s handwriting which wasn’t part of the famous packet of letters and so could undertake a comparative study which removed all uncertainties.
I also thoroughly investigated the Persian and came to see him as a man of integrity incapable of devising a plot designed to dupe the majesty of the law.
Actually this is also the view taken by the most eminent people who have had anything to do to a greater or lesser extent with the Chagny case, often friends of the family, to whom I showed all my documents and set out all my deductions. From that quarter I received the most generous encouragement. If I may, I will in this context reproduce a brief extract from a letter written to me by General D.
‘Dear Sir,
‘I cannot urge you too strongly to publish the results of your investigations. I clearly remember that a few weeks before the disappearance of the great singer, Christine Daaé, and the events which sent the whole of the Faubourg Saint-Germain into mourning, there was much talk of the Phantom in the foyer of the ballet, and I do believe that people only stopped discussing it after the official outcome of a case which so gripped the public. But if it is at all possible, and I believe it is having heard what you have to say, to explain those events by reference to the Phantom, then I beg you, sir, tell us more about him. However mysterious the Phantom might seem at first, he will always be easier to explain than that dark tale in which ill-intentioned persons are determined to see two brothers who had loved each other all their lives tearing each other to pieces.
‘I remain, etc.’
In the end, file in hand, I went back and again explored the Phantom’s vast domain, that grim monument which he made his empire, and everything that my eyes saw, everything my mind had pieced together, fully confirmed the documents shown me by the Persian. And then an amazing discovery was made which was the final culmination of all my work.
You will remember that recently, when a hole was being dug in the cellars of the Opera where the phonographed voices of artists were to be buried, a workman’s pick laid bare a corpse. Here was my proof! That the body was what remained of the Phantom of the Opera! I persuaded the Administrator himself to touch it, with his hand, and now I do not care a jot if the newspapers say that what was found was a victim of the Commune.*
None of the unfortunates who were massacred in the cellars of the Opera during the Commune are buried on that side. I will spell out later where their skeletons are to be found, which was a long way from the huge crypt where all sorts of provisions were stored during the siege. Actually I stumbled on their trail while looking for the remains of the Phantom of the Opera and would never have found them if it hadn’t been for the amazingly serendipitous accident of the burial of those living voices!
But we shall speak another time of that corpse and about what should be done with it. But for now I want to close this necessary foreword by thanking those overly modest participants, such as Inspector Mifroid of the Paris Police (originally called in to make the preliminary inquiries following the disappearance of Christine Daaé), or the Opera House’s former secretary, M. Rémy; the former Administrator M. Mercier; the former chorus master, M. Gabriel; and most particularly the Baroness of Castelot-Barbezac who was once ‘little Meg’ (and is not ashamed of it), the most charming star of our magnificent corps de ballet, oldest daughter of the respectable Mme Giry, now deceased, who formerly looked after the Phantom’s box in the theatre. They assisted me greatly and thanks to them I can now, with the reader, relive those hours of pure love and terror.1
CHAPTER 1
Was it the Ghost?
ON the evening which Messrs Debienne and Poligny, the Opera’s outgoing Directors, had chosen to present their last gala concert as a way of marking their departure, the dressing room of La Sorelli, one of the leading ballerinas, was suddenly invaded by half a dozen of the young ladies of the corps de ballet who had just left the stage after ‘dancing’ Polyeucte.* They came tumbling through the door in total disorder, some choking with forced, nervous laughter, and the rest giving little yelps of terror.
La Sorelli had wanted to be alone for a moment to ‘run through’ the few words she was shortly to say in the foyer as a tribute to Messrs Debienne and Poligny, and it was with rising ill temper that she looked on as the scatterbrained flock pushed in behind her. She turned and was alarmed
to see such panic. It was the sweet little Jammes girl—pert, Grévin-style* nose, forget-me-not-blue eyes, cheeks full of roses, and a lily-white throat and shoulders—who accounted for it in four words, in a quavering voice almost extinguished by horror.
‘It was the ghost!’
And she turned the key in the lock.
La Sorelli’s dressing room was done out with dull, official elegance. A full-length mirror, a divan, dressing table and clothes presses made up the basic furnishings. A few engravings hung on the walls, souvenirs of her mother who had known the glory days of the old Opera House in the Rue Lepeletier: portraits of Vestris, Gardel, Dupont and Bigottini.* The dressing room seemed palatial to the minxes of the corps de ballet who had to share accommodation where they spent their time singing, quarrelling, cuffing their dressers and coiffeuses and buying each other little glasses of blackcurrant liqueur or beer or even rum right up until the time when the call-boy rang for their entrance.
La Sorelli was very superstitious. When she heard Mlle Jammes mention a ghost, she shuddered and said:
‘Silly girl!’
But since no one was readier to believe in ghosts in general and in the Opera’s very own spectre in particular, she immediately demanded to be told everything.
‘You saw him?’ she asked.
‘As clearly as I see you now!’ wailed Mlle Jammes who, sensing her two legs about to give way, collapsed on to a chair.
Immediately young Meg Giry—eyes black as olives, hair like ink, swarthy complexion, her poor diaphanous skin stretched tight over her poor delicate bones—added:
‘If it was him, he’s ever so ugly!’
‘Oh yes!’ chorused the other girls.
And they all started talking at the same time. The ghost had appeared in the shape of a gentleman in evening dress who had suddenly loomed up before them, in the corridor, without their knowing where he’d come from. It happened so quickly that anyone would have thought he must have walked through the wall.
‘Pish!’ said one of them who had more or less kept a cool head, ‘you lot see ghosts everywhere!’
It was true. For a good few months all anyone had talked about in the Opera House was this ghost in black tie and tails who walked like a shadow all over the building from top to bottom, never spoke to anyone (and no one dared say a word to him) and the moment he was spotted he vanished without anyone being able to say where to or why. He walked soundlessly, the way genuine ghosts do. At first, people had laughed and made fun of a spectre who was got up like a gentleman or an undertaker. But the legend of the ghost had soon reached colossal proportions among the young ladies of the corps de ballet. They all claimed to have encountered this unearthly being and said they’d been victims of his tricks—and those who laughed loudest were not necessarily those who felt safest. Even when he chose not to show himself, he would reveal his presence in incidents farcical or lethal for which superstitious minds (which meant virtually everybody) made him responsible. If there was an accident, or one of the girls played a practical joke on one of the other dancers, or a powder-puff went missing, everything was blamed on the ghost, the Ghost of the Opera!
But when it came down to it, who exactly had seen him? After all, you come across a good many gentlemen in black ties in the Paris Opera who are not ghosts. Still, he had one special habit which none of the other men in tails do: this one got himself up to look like a skeleton.
At least so the girls said.
And naturally, his head was a death’s head.
Was there anything to it? The truth is that this tale of the skeleton had grown out of the description of the ghost given by the chief stage-setter and scene shifter, Joseph Buquet. He had really seen him. He had run across—you couldn’t say ‘had come face to face’, because the ghost didn’t have one—a mysterious figure on the narrow staircase near the footlights that goes straight down into the area under the stage. He’d seen him for just one second—the ghost had run off—but the memory of what he had briefly glimpsed had left an indelible mark on his mind.
Here is what Joseph Buquet would tell anyone who asked:
‘He’s tremendously thin and his coat hangs on a bag o’ bones. His eyes are so deep-set you can’t hardly make out the pupils which never move. In fact, all you can see is two great big black holes like sockets in a dead man’s skull. The skin is stretched over the bones as tight as a drum, it’s not white but a sickly sort of yeller.’ E got no nose to speak of, you can hardly see it side on, and the fact that there’s no nose to see is the most’orrible sight! Three or four brown strandy wisps across his forehead and behind his ears is all he’s got in the way of hair.’
Joseph Buquet had tried to follow the strange apparition but in vain. The figure had vanished as if by magic and he’d been unable to find any trace of him.
The stage-setter was a serious, reliable, sober man, with not much imagination. What he said was heard with amazement and keen interest, and soon others came forward saying that they too had seen a man in a dress suit with a skull for a head.
Sensible persons who got wind of the story always began by saying that Joseph Buquet was the victim of a practical joke played on him by one of his assistants. And then occurred a series of incidents so odd and inexplicable that the coolest heads began to get worried.
Now an officer in the fire brigade is a brave man. He’s not scared of anything, least of all of fire!
Apparently the fireman in question,1 who had gone down to inspect the basements, cellars and vaults had ventured a little further than usual, had suddenly reappeared on the stage, ashen-faced, shaken and trembling, eyes popping out of his head, and almost fainted into the arms of the Jammes girl’s worthy mother. And the reason? He had seen, at eye level, coming towards him, a fiery head which had no body! I say again: an officer of the fire brigade is not a man who is afraid of fire.
His name was Papin.
The whole corps de ballet were quite unnerved. To begin with, this fiery head did not fit Joseph Buquet’s description of the ghost. The fireman was thoroughly interrogated, the stage-setter was questioned again, and in the end the young ladies convinced themselves that the ghost had several heads which he changed as the fancy took him. Naturally they were soon imagining that they were in the greatest danger. If a fireman did not hesitate to faint, then a ballerina and first and second dancers were perfectly entitled to invoke all sorts of excuses for the terror that made them scuttle as fast as their thin stick legs could carry them whenever they passed a dark recess of some badly lit corridor.
So much so that, to protect a building bedevilled by such baleful forces, insofar as was humanly possible, La Sorelli in person, accompanied by the entire corps de ballet and even the girls in the beginners’ classes in their tights, had—the day after the business with the fireman—gathered round the table by the porter’s lodge, on the side of the court where the administrative offices are, and on it placed a horseshoe which everybody other than a spectator entering the Opera was obliged to touch before putting one foot on the bottom tread of the staircase. Otherwise he or she would become fair game for the occult power which had taken possession of the building from cellars to attics!
I have no more invented the horseshoe, alas, than the rest of this story. It can still be seen today on the table in the lobby just by the porter’s lodge as you go into the Opera House through the court where the offices are located.
That gives a fairly clear idea of the state of mind of the dancers on that evening as we follow them into La Sorelli’s dressing room.
‘It was the ghost!’ the Jammes girl had cried.
The uneasiness felt by the dancers went on deepening. Now a tense silence filled the room. The only sound was that of rapid breathing. In the end, Jammes, showing all the signs of genuine fear, had flattened herself against the furthest corner of the wall and whispered a single word:
‘Listen!’
And indeed they all seemed to hear a rustling on the other side of the door. Not a
sound of footsteps. It was like light silk brushing against the wooden panels. Then, nothing. La Sorelli tried to look less scared than the others. She moved to the door and in a toneless voice demanded:
‘Who’s there?’
But no one answered.
Then, feeling all eyes were watching her slightest move, she forced herself to be brave and said very loudly:
‘Is there anyone behind this door?’
‘Yes! There is! Of course there’s someone behind the door!’ repeated olive-eyed Meg Giry, heroically holding La Sorelli back by her net skirt… ‘You mustn’t open the door! O Lordy, don’t open it!’
But La Sorelli, grasping the stiletto she always carried with her, screwed up her courage, turned the key in the lock and opened the door while the dancers backed away as far as her private inner sanctum and Meg whimpered for her mother:
La Sorelli looked bravely out into the corridor. It was deserted. A gas flame fluttering like a butterfly in its glass cage cast an uncertain red glow into the heart of the surrounding gloom but failed to make any impression on it. Then she quickly closed the door again with a deep sigh.
‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no one there!’
‘But we saw him!’ said Jammes as she inched her way back to her place next to La Sorelli. ‘He must be there somewhere, outside, prowling round. I’m not going back upstairs to get changed. We should all go down to the lobby together, at once, for the speech, and then all go back up together.’
At the same time, she devoutly touched the small sliver of coral which was supposed to protect her against evil spells. Simultaneously La Sorelli furtively used the tip of the pink thumbnail of her right hand to make a Saint Andrew’s cross on the wooden ring on the third finger of her left hand.
One famous reviewer wrote: ‘La Sorelli is tall for a ballerina, beautiful, with solemn, sensual features and a waist as supple as a willow branch. Most people reckon her to be “a fine figure of a woman”. Her hair, as yellow and fine as spun gold, frames a smooth brow under which are set emerald-green eyes. Her head on a long, elegant, haughty neck sways gently, like a feathery plume. When she dances, she moves her hips in a manner that is not to be described but her whole body quivers with unutterable voluptuousness. When she raises her arms and bends forward before launching into a pirouette, thus revealing the contours of her bosom, or when the arch of her delicious body brings out the curve of her thigh, the sight is said to be enough to make a man blow his brains out.’
The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics) Page 4