Richard jumped.
‘Not you too!’
‘What d’you mean, not me too? It’s only natural…’
‘What do I mean, M. Lachenal? What do I mean?…’
‘… only natural I should tell you what I think after what I saw…’
‘And what exactly did you see, M. Lachenal?’
‘What I saw, as plain as I see the nose on your face, was a black shadow riding a white horse that was the spitting image of Caesar.’
‘Why didn’t you chase after this white horse and the black shadow?’
‘I did, sir. I ran after them and I yelled, but they took off at an amazing lick and vanished in the darkness of the under-gallery.’
M. Richard stood up.
‘That’s all, M. Lachenal, you may go… We shall lodge an official complaint against the Phantom.’
‘And you’ll send all my stable-men packing?’
‘Of course! I give you good day, sir!’
M. Lachenal nodded and left.
Richard was fuming.
‘I want you to pay that idiot off at once!’
‘But he’s a friend of the junior minister!’
‘And he goes to Tortoni’s for a preprandial drink with Lagréné, Scholl and Pertuiset,* the lion hunter,’ added M. Moncharmin. ‘We’ll have the entire press breathing on our necks. He’ll blab the tale of the Phantom and we’ll be a laughing stock. And if we become ridiculous, we’re finished.’
‘Oh very well, we’ll say no more about it,’ said Richard who was already thinking about something else.
At that moment, the door burst open. The usual porter could not have been at his post for Mme Giry walked in unopposed. There was a letter in her hand and she could not wait to speak:
‘Beg pardon, excuse me, but this morning I got a letter from the Phantom of the Opera. He said I was to come and see you and that you’d have something to give me for…’
She did not finish her sentence. She saw Firmin Richard’s face: it was convulsed. The respectable Director of the Opera House looked as if he were about to explode. So far the only outward sign of the rage which shook him was the crimson flush of his wild face and the incandescent flash of his glaring eyes. He did not speak. He couldn’t speak. But suddenly he was moved to act. First, his left arm seized the picturesque person of Mme Giry and twirled her round so unexpectedly that her rapid pirouette extracted a shriek from her. Then it was his right foot, the good right foot of the same Director, which planted the sole of its shoe on the black taffeta of a skirt which had never ever, in such a place, suffered such an outrage.
It happened so fast that when Mme Giry found herself outside in the lobby, her head was still spinning and she didn’t know what was going on. Then she realized what had happened and the Opera House rang with her indignant shrieks, wild protests and death threats. It took three porters to get her down to the administrative courtyard and two constables to eject her into the street.
At about the same time, Carlotta, who lived in a small house in the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, rang for her maid who brought her post to her in bed. Among the correspondence was an anonymous letter which said:
‘If you appear tonight, be warned that something very unpleasant will happen when you open your mouth… and it will be a fate worse than death.’
This threat was written in red ink, in a halting, dislocated scrawl.
After reading it, Carlotta lost her appetite for breakfast. She pushed away the tray on which her maid had brought her steaming hot chocolate, sat up in her bed and thought deeply. This wasn’t the first letter of its kind that she’d received, but never had one been quite so threatening.
On the other hand, she was convinced she was the victim of countless petty jealousies and usually said that she had an unknown enemy who was bent on destroying her. She claimed he was hatching some devious plot, a cabal against her which would be activated one of these days. But, she added, she was not a woman to be so easily intimidated.
The truth was that if there really were a cabal it was the one orchestrated by La Carlotta herself against poor, unsuspecting Christine. She had not forgiven Christine for the success she had scored when she had stood in for her as a last-minute replacement.
When she’d been told about the extraordinary reception her understudy had been given, La Carlotta had been instantly cured both of an incipient attack of bronchitis and a fit of the sulks directed at the management. Thereafter, she gave no indication that she had any intention of terminating her contract. She had striven with all her might to ‘cut out’ her rival by persuading powerful friends to use their influence with the Directors to ensure that Christine was given no further opportunities for fresh triumphs. Certain newspapers which had begun to rave about Christine’s talent now wrote only of the glorious gifts of La Carlotta. Not least, when they met in the theatre, the famous diva said the most outrageous things about Christine and did everything she could to make life unpleasant for her.
La Carlotta had neither heart nor soul. She was… a voice!… but a wonderful voice, of course. Her repertoire included everything capable of tempting any ambitious artist, not only the works of the German masters but of the French and Italians too. Never until now had anyone heard La Carlotta sing a wrong note, nor be deficient in the voice-power necessary to render any passage of her immense repertoire. Her voice had range, it was powerful and admirably accurate. But no one would have said of her what Rossini told La Krauss after she’d sung, in German, ‘Sombre forests!’:* ‘You sing with your soul, my dear, and you have a beautiful soul!’
Where was your soul, Carlotta, when you danced in the stews of Barcelona? Where was it later, in Paris, when you sang vulgar songs on cheap stages as an ‘artiste’ of the music-hall? Where was it at private sessions staged by your lover for his betters, when you unleashed the power of that versatile, wondrous voice which could sing of the purest love and the coarsest pleasures with the same cold perfection? O Carlotta, if you ever had a soul and mislaid it, you should have rediscovered it when you became Juliette or Elvira or Ophelia or Marguerite! For others have risen from humbler beginnings and been purified by art abetted by love!
Truly, when I think of all the petty vexations and spitefulness Christine Daaé had to put up with from Carlotta at that time, I can barely contain my anger. No wonder I express my feelings as sweeping generalizations about art in general, and the art of singing in particular, which will certainly not please Carlotta’s many admirers.
When La Carlotta had done reflecting on the threat contained in the letter she had received, she got up.
‘We’ll see,’ she said… And with a determined snort, she uttered a few choice oaths in her native Spanish.
The first thing she saw when she looked out of the window was a hearse. The hearse plus the letter were enough to convince her superstitious mind that the threat was genuine and that she ran a serious risk that evening of being confronted with real danger. She summoned every last one of her admirers to her house, told them that during the evening’s performance she would face a cabal organized by Christine Daaé, and urged them to respond in kind by packing the auditorium with her, Carlotta’s, own supporters. There was no shortage of them, was there? She counted on them to be prepared for any eventuality and to drown out the hecklers if, as she feared, they made trouble.
M. Richard’s private secretary called to get the latest news of La Carlotta’s health. He went away with assurances that she was perfectly fit and, even if she were ‘at death’s door’, she vowed she would still sing the role of Marguerite that evening. The secretary had come with his chief’s special recommendation that the diva should take no risks, remain indoors and protect herself against draughts. After he left, La Carlotta could not help sensing a link between this highly unusual and very unexpected advice and the threat contained in the letter.
It was five o’clock when another anonymous letter came through the post. The writing was the same as that of the first. It was terse:
&nbs
p; ‘You have a cold. If you are sensible, you will see that it would be madness to sing tonight.’
La Carlotta gave a bold laugh, shrugged those magnificent shoulders and released two or three notes to settle her nerves.
Her friends were as good as their word. That night, they were all at the Opera, but they looked in vain for the wild conspirators they were there to silence. With the exception of a handful of outsiders, a small number of respectable citizens with placid faces that reflected no purpose other than of listening to music which they had long approved of, the audience consisted entirely of regulars whose refined, unwarlike, civilized manners ruled out any possibility of a riot. The only unusual thing was the presence of Messrs Richard and Moncharmin in Box 5. La Carlotta’s friends thought that maybe both Directors had caught a whiff of possible trouble and wanted to be in the auditorium to stop it as soon as it began. But that was not the real reason, as the reader knows: both Directors were thinking only of the Phantom.
‘Nothing! In vain a word in wakeful vigil I seek to hear
From nature and the Lord of all creation;
Yet no voice whispers in my ear
One single word of consolation!’
The famous baritone Carolus Fonta had just begun Faust’s first summons to the powers of darkness when M. Richard, who was sitting in the Phantom’s usual place—first chair on the right in the front row—leaned across to his colleague in the best of spirits and said:
‘Have any unearthly voices whispered a word in your ear lately?’
‘Careful! Let’s not be hasty,’ M. Moncharmin replied in the same amused vein. ‘The performance has only just begun and, as you know, the Phantom does not usually come until the middle of the first act.’
Act I passed off without incident. This came as no surprise to La Carlotta’s supporters since Marguerite does not sing in Act I. When the curtain came down, the Directors looked at each other with a smile.
‘One down!’ said Moncharmin.
‘The Phantom’s late,’ said Firmin Richard.*
Moncharmin, ever a man for a joke, said:
‘Actually, quite a good house for a theatre which has a curse on it!’
Richard managed a superior smile and pointed out to his colleague a large, rather vulgar woman dressed in black sitting in the middle of the stalls sandwiched between two ordinary-looking men in broadcloth frock coats.
‘What sort of “patrons” are they?’ asked Moncharmin.
‘Those “patrons”, my dear fellow, are my concierge, her brother and her husband.’
‘You gave them free tickets?’
‘Of course… My concierge has never been to the Opera… this is her first time… and since she’ll be coming every night from now on, I wanted her to have a good seat before she starts showing other people to theirs.’
Moncharmin asked him to explain. Richard told him that as a temporary measure, he’d persuaded his concierge, in whom he had every confidence, to fill the post vacated by Mme Giry.
‘Talking of Mme Giry,’ said Moncharmin, ‘are you aware she intends to make a complaint against you?’
‘Against who? The Phantom?’
The Phantom! M. Moncharmin had almost forgotten all about him.
In fact the mysterious ghost had done nothing to remind Messrs Richard and Moncharmin of his existence.
Suddenly the door of their box was flung open to reveal the panic-stricken figure of the stage manager.
‘What’s the matter?’ they both asked, astounded to see the man there at that moment.
‘The matter’, said the stage manager, ‘is that it seems supporters of Christine Daaé have organized a cabal against La Carlotta who is absolutely furious!’
‘What’s the trouble now?’ said Richard with a frown.
But the curtain rose on the village fair and the Directors gestured to the stage manager to go.
When he’d gone, Moncharmin leaned over and said in Richard’s ear:
‘So Daaé has friends, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Richard, ‘she does.’
‘Like who?’
Richard glanced across at a grand-tier box opposite occupied by just two men.
‘The Count de Chagny?’
‘Yes. It was he who recommended her to me… and so warmly that if I didn’t know he was… er… close to La Sorelli…’
‘Fancy that,’ murmured Moncharmin. ‘And who is the pale young fellow sitting next to him?’
‘His brother, the Viscount de Chagny.’
‘Shouldn’t he be in bed? He looks ill.’
The stage rang with carousing songs. Drinking set to music. The cup triumphant.
‘Wine or beer, beer or wine
No matter which: fill this glass of mine.’
Students, solid citizens, soldiers, girls and their mothers danced merrily in front of an inn named after the god Bacchus.
Enter Siebel.
Christine Daaé looked wonderful in male clothes. The bloom of youth and her melancholy grace had an instant impact. La Carlotta’s supporters immediately assumed that her entrance would be greeted by an ovation which would show how her cabal planned to behave. But an ovation at this stage would have been inappropriate, totally the wrong move. It did not happen.
On the contrary, when Marguerite crossed the stage and had sung the only two lines of her role in this act,
‘No, sirs, I am not maid nor pretty
And do not need your kind civility,’
La Carlotta was given a tremendous reception. It was so unexpected and so uncalled-for that members of the audience not in the know looked at each other and wondered what on earth was going on. But the act again ended without incident. Everyone thought: ‘It’ll happen in Act II’. But a few, who seemed slightly better informed, agreed that ‘they’d kick up a storm’ at the start of the ballad of the King of Thule, and hurried off to the subscribers’ door to tell La Carlotta.
The two Directors left their box during the interval to find out more about the cabal the stage manager had talked about. But they were soon back in their seats shrugging their shoulders and treating the whole business as so much nonsense. The first thing they saw when they entered was a box of English chocolates on the front armrest. Who’d put it there? They went out and questioned all the box-attendants but no one knew anything about it. This time, when they got back, they saw a pair of opera glasses next to the sweets. They looked at each other. Neither felt like laughing. They remembered what Mme Giry had told them… and then… they thought they could feel a strange kind of draught… They sat in silence, distinctly uneasy.
The stage showed Marguerite’s garden:
‘Lovely flowers, hear my plea:
Will you speak my love for me?’
As she sang, with her bouquet of roses and lilac in her hand, Christine looked up and saw the Viscount de Chagny in his box. Thereafter, her voice did not seem to sound as assured, as pure, as crystal-clear as usual. Something was masking it, dulling it, though it was unclear what it might be… But underneath it were notes of fear and trembling.
‘Odd girl,’ one of La Carlotta’s supporters said in an almost audible whisper from his seat in the stalls. ‘The other night she was sublime and this evening she’s bleating like a nanny-goat. She’s got no experience, no technique!’
‘Gentle flowers, in you I trust
Speak for me! You must!’
The Viscount held his head in his hands and wept. Behind him, the Count bit savagely on the end of his waxed moustache, gave a shrug and scowled. For the Count, ordinarily so cool and controlled, to display his innermost feelings so blatantly, he had to be very angry indeed. And so he was. He had seen his brother return from a short, mysterious trip in an alarming state of health. The explanation he’d given had not put the Count’s mind at rest. Anxious to know what to make of it all, he had asked to see Christine Daaé who had the effrontery to say that she was not at home either to him or his brother. He assumed that there was some abominable scheme
afoot. He could not forgive Christine for making Raoul suffer, but he was even less prepared to forgive Raoul for letting Christine make him suffer. Oh, what a mistake he’d made in taking up with a singer whose single triumph was a mystery to everyone!
‘May one bloom upon her lips
Plant at least one melting kiss!’
‘The artful hussy!’ the Count muttered.
And he wondered what she wanted… what her expectations were… She was a good girl by all accounts; everyone said she had no lovers or protectors of any kind… This Angel of the North was a sly little minx!
Behind the curtain of hands which hid his adolescent tears, Raoul had no thoughts except of the letter he had received when he’d got back to Paris where Christine, fleeing from Perros like a thief in the night, had preceded him.
‘Dear friend of former days,
‘You must be brave and never try to see or talk to me again… If you love me at all, do this for me. Dear Raoul, I will never forget you. Above all, you must stay away from my dressing room. It’s more than my life is worth. And yours too.
‘Your Christine’
Thunderous applause greeted the entrance of La Carlotta.
The garden act unfolded with the usual turns of the plot.
When Marguerite finished singing the ballad of the King of Thule, she was given an ovation. She was given another when she came to the end of the Jewel Song:
‘I laugh to look at my reflection
And see my beauty’s fine perfection!’
Now sure of herself, sure of her supporters in the audience, sure of her voice and of her success, no longer afraid, La Carlotta held nothing back, but gave everything with passion, fire and wild abandon. Her performance was without restraint or modesty… She had ceased to be Marguerite: she was Carmen.* The applause rose to new heights and her duet with Faust seemed to be building towards another triumph for her when suddenly, out of the blue, an awful thing happened.
Faust was down on one knee:
‘Let me gaze upon your face:
Here the moon’s pale hue
Shines down upon this place
And lights your beauty too.’
The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics) Page 12