She did not even notice his baleful eyes on her and chatted on quite naturally:
‘Yes, forbids it… though not in so many words… What he actually said is that if she got married, he wouldn’t have anything more to do with her… That’s all!… Also that he’d go away for ever!… You’ll appreciate that she won’t let the Angel of Music go, it’s only natural.’
‘You’re right,’ said Raoul in a subdued whisper, ‘quite natural.’
‘Anyway, I thought Christine had told you all about it when she ran into you at Perros. She went there with her “friendly spirit”.’
‘Really? She went there with her “friendly spirit”?’
‘What I mean is he’d arranged to meet her at M. Daaé’s grave in Perros cemetery. He promised to play The Resurrection of Lazarus there, on her father’s violin.’
Raoul got to his feet and, in the voice that won’t take no for an answer, said firmly:
‘Madame, you will now tell me where this so-called “spirit” lives!’
The old lady did not seem particularly put out by his brashly direct question. She raised her eyes skyward and replied:
‘In heaven above!’
Her naivety disconcerted him. Such plain, simple belief in a spirit that came down from heaven each night and dropped in at the dressing rooms of singers of the Paris Opera, took his breath away.
But now he suddenly understood the mind of a young woman raised by a superstitious fiddler and this lady who believed in mumbo-jumbo. He shuddered to think of the consequences.
‘Has Christine kept herself pure?’ he blurted, despite himself.
‘On my hope of Paradise I swear it!’ said the old lady who this time seemed outraged by his question… ‘and if, sir, you have any doubts on that score, I really don’t know why you came here!’
Raoul twisted his gloves.
‘How long has she known this “spirit”?’
‘About three months… yes, it’s three months since he’s been giving her lessons…’
The Viscount opened his arms wide in a gesture of despair, then dejectedly dropped them again.
‘The spirit gives her lessons?… Where?’
‘Now that she’s gone away with him I couldn’t say. But up to a fortnight ago, they used to meet in Christine’s dressing room. It wouldn’t be possible here, the apartment’s too small. The whole house would hear them. But there’s nobody about in the Opera at eight in the morning. No one to complain of the noise!… Do you follow me?…’
‘I do! I do indeed!’ cried the Viscount and he hurriedly departed, leaving the old lady wondering whether he was entirely right in the head.
As he walked through the drawing room, he came face to face with the maid. For a moment, he thought he might question her. But he thought he detected a faint smile on her lips. He had the feeling that she was laughing at him and left quickly. Didn’t he know enough already?… He’d got the answers he’d come looking for, what else did he want?… He walked back to his brother’s house in a pitiful state.
He wanted to punish himself, to bang his head against the walls of buildings as he passed. After believing in all that innocence, all that purity! After trying to explain everything by her simplicity, straightforward heart and unalloyed honesty! Now he knew who the ‘spirit of music’ was, he could picture him! It had to be some miserable tenor, good-looking, who sang with honeyed lips! How contemptible and ridiculous he appeared to himself! What a wretched, petty, insignificant, foolish young man the Viscount de Chagny was, Raoul thought with rage in his heart. And as for her, what a brazen and diabolically abandoned creature she was!
Still, racing through the streets like that had done him good by cooling his overheated brain. When he got to his room, his sole thought was to fling himself on his bed and bury his sobs in his pillow. But his brother was there and into his arms Raoul fell like a baby. The Count consoled him like a father, without asking for explanations. In any case, Raoul would have baulked at telling him about the ‘spirit of music’. If there are some things we have no wish to boast about, there are others for which sympathy is too humiliating a price to pay.
The Count suggested taking his brother to dinner. If the hurt had not been so recent, Raoul would probably have declined all invitations that night. But, to talk him round the Count had told him that the woman of his thoughts had been seen in the Bois de Boulogne the night before, with a man. At first, the Viscount would not believe it. But when he was given time and place, he stopped objecting and allowed himself to be convinced. Surely it was a perfectly ordinary thing? She had been seen in a carriage with the window down. She seemed to be quietly taking in the icy night air. There was a bright moon, so there was no mistake: it was unquestionably her. As to her companion, he was no more than a vague silhouette in the dark interior of the carriage which had been travelling at walking pace along a deserted avenue behind the stands of Longchamp racecourse.
Raoul changed in frantic haste, determined to forget his troubles by throwing himself into what is called the ‘vortex of pleasure’. But he made a poor fist of enjoying himself and left the Count when it was still early. It was about ten o’clock when he found himself in a cab behind the Longchamp racecourse.
It was bitterly cold. The road was empty and bathed in bright moonlight. He told the driver to wait for him in a narrow lane nearby. Then keeping as much out of sight as possible, he started stamping his feet.
He’d been keeping warm by this healthy method for half an hour when a carriage, coming from Paris, turned the corner of the avenue and began moving quietly, at walking pace, towards him.
His first thought was: ‘It’s her!’ and his heart started thumping as loudly as it had on the night he heard the man’s voice through the door of Christine’s dressing room… Dear God! How he loved her!
The carriage kept coming towards him. He had not moved from his spot. He waited… If it really was Christine, he decided he would grab the horses by the reins!… He was going to have it out with this Angel of Music, whatever the cost!
Another few steps and the carriage would be level with him. There was no doubt in his mind: it was her!… And then, a woman’s head appeared leaning out of the window. Suddenly it was caught in an aura of moonlight!
‘Christine!’
The sacred name of the woman he loved rose unbidden from his lips and from his heart. He could not help himself!… He leaped forward as if he would snatch her name back again, for the moment when it was thrown into the face of the night seemed to act as a prearranged signal: the carriage and horses sprang forward in a great spurt and were past him before he had time to carry out his plan. The window had been shut. The face of the young woman had vanished. And as he ran after it, the carriage soon became a black dot on the white road.
He called her again: ‘Christine!…’ Answer came there none. He stopped, swathed in silence!
He looked up despairingly at the sky and the stars above. He beat his burning chest with his fists. He loved her! But she did not love him!
He stared bleakly at the cold, empty road, but there was nothing colder, nothing more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman!
Raoul, your maid from the north has played you for a fool! Say honestly and truthfully: does a woman really have to have cheeks as fresh and a face as coy and ready to hide under the rosy veil of modesty to be able to drive through the friendless dark in an expensive carriage with a mysterious lover? Oughtn’t there to be sacrosanct limits to hypocrisy and lying?… And shouldn’t there be a law preventing a woman who has the soul of a courtesan having the ingenuous eyes of a child?
She had driven on without answering his call…
But what had he been thinking of by trying to waylay her?
What right did he have to think he could spring out at her and cast his presence in her face like a reproach, when all she asked was for him to forget her?
‘Go away!… Get out of my sight!… You count for nothing!…’
He thought of dying—and he was just twenty years old!
The next morning, his man found him sitting on his bed. He had not undressed and when he saw him the valet feared the worst, for his face was the picture of despair. Raoul snatched the letters he had brought. He had recognized one by its paper and the writing. In it, Christine said:
‘Raoul: the day after tomorrow, midnight, at the Masked Ball at the Opera, in the small reception room behind the great fireplace in the main lobby. Stand by the door that leads to the Rotonde. Don’t mention this meeting to anyone. Dress as a white domino. Make sure the mask hides your face. My life depends on your not being recognized. Christine.’
CHAPTER 10
The Masked Ball
THE letter was spattered with mud and had no stamp. On it was written: ‘Please forward to the Viscount de Chagny’ and his address in pencil. It had obviously been thrown or dropped in the hope that a passer-by would pick it up and deliver it to his house. Which was clearly what had happened. The note had been found on a pavement in the Place de l’Opéra. Raoul reread it feverishly.
It needed no more to rekindle his hopes. The grim picture he had momentarily formed of a Christine who had abandoned all self-respect gave way to his original image of her as innocent and unfortunate, the victim both of a foolish impulse and her own excessive sensibilities. But to what extent was she, at this point, really a victim? Whose prisoner was she? Into what maelstrom had she been sucked? The questions kept going round and round in his head painfully. But the pain was preferable to the torment of thinking that Christine was a hypocrite and a liar! What had happened exactly? To whose influence had she been subjected? What monster had bewitched her and with what weapons?
And what weapon if not music? Yes, of course! The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that the truth lay there. Had he forgotten how her voice had sounded at Perros when she told him about the visit from a celestial messenger? And surely what had happened to her recently should help him answer the shadowy questions he was grappling with? Had he underestimated her grief for her dead father and forgotten her weary rejection of everything that is life, even her art? At the Conservatoire, she had been no more than a mechanical, soulless voice. Then, all of a sudden, she had woken up, as if she had been breathed on by the divine afflatus. The Angel of Music had come to her! She had sung Marguerite in Faust and scored a triumph!… So who exactly had managed to convince her he was a magical maestro? Who knew about M. Daaé’s favourite legend and was exploiting it to the point where she had become a helpless instrument in his hands which he plucked at will?
Still, thought Raoul, there was nothing all that strange about such a case. He recalled what had happened to Princess Belmonte who lost her husband: her grief had made her almost catatonic. For a month, she had not been able to speak or shed a tear. With her physical and spiritual inertia deepening day by day, her reason similarly declined and she was gradually heading towards the extinction of life. Each evening, she was carried out into her gardens, but she did not seem to know where she was. Raff, the greatest singer in all Germany, was passing through Naples and enquired if he could visit her gardens which were justly celebrated. One of the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting asked the great artist if he would sing from inside the grove just by where she was lying. He agreed and chose a simple song which the Princess’s husband had sung to her during the first days of their marriage. It was an expressive, touching little air. Melody, words, the artist’s fine voice, all combined to stir the depths of the Princess’s very soul. Tears sprang to her eyes… she wept, was saved and remained thereafter convinced that her husband had come down from heaven that evening to sing that old song for her!
‘Yes… that evening… on that particular evening,’ thought Raoul, ‘perhaps on one single occasion… But even the most powerful imagination would not have gone on being fooled if the experiment had been repeated over time…’
Sooner or later, if the dreamy, grieving Princess had returned to the same place every evening for three months she would have spotted Raff hiding among the trees…
And the Angel of Music had been giving Christine lessons for three months!… Oh, he was a conscientious teacher!… And now he had started driving out with her in the Bois de Boulogne!
Fingers clenched, his hand straying to his chest, Raoul dug his nails into his flesh where his jealous heart pulsated. Lacking experience of women, he was terrified at the idea of what Christine was planning for him in the coming masquerade! What sort of fool would an opera singer make of a trusting young man who knows little about love? He felt ill with misery.
Raoul’s thoughts kept racing between these extremes. He no longer knew whether he should feel sorry for Christine or damn her, and from one moment to the next he pitied and cursed her. Even so, just in case, he acquired a white domino costume.
At last the appointed time came. With his face hidden by a black velvet mask trimmed with long, heavy lace, the Viscount de Chagny, got up like a white pierrot, felt ridiculous wearing fancy dress reminiscent of Romantic-era mummeries. No man of the world went to the Opera Ball in fancy dress! People would laugh! But one thought consoled the Viscount: there was no way he would be recognized! Besides, his costume and the mask had another advantage: he would be able to move around as freely as if he were at home, alone with his tortured soul and the ice in his heart. He would not need to pretend, nor compose his feature into a mask to cover his feelings: he had one already!
The Ball was an extra event given some time before Mardi Gras to mark the anniversary of the birth of a famous artist who had left a graphic record of the revelries of former times. A disciple of Gavarni, he had immortalized the roisterers of the carnival at La Courtille.* Accordingly it was an altogether livelier, noisier and more bohemian affair than the usual run of masked balls. Various artists had arranged to meet there and they were joined by a cohort of their models and students who around midnight had begun to make a good deal of noise.
At five minutes to twelve, Raoul walked up the great staircase. He did not pause to survey the many multicoloured costumes that filled the length of the marble steps of one of the most sumptuous settings anywhere in the world. He did not allow himself to be detained by frivolous masks, did not respond to their antics and shrugged off the unashamed familiarities of several couples who were already shameless enough. After crossing the main lobby and avoiding a farandole which for one moment had trapped him, he finally reached the room specified in Christine’s note. It was small but was crammed with people, for it was where those on their way to have supper at the Rotonde met those who were on their way back after drinking a glass of champagne. The crowd was noisy and happy. Raoul thought that Christine had deliberately chosen this milling throng for their mysterious rendezvous rather than some quiet corner, for here, with a mask, they would be anonymous in the crowd.
He leaned against a door-jamb and waited. He did not have to wait long. A black domino came up to him and gently brushed his hand. He knew it was her.
He followed.
‘Is that you, Christine?’ he asked, barely opening his mouth.
The domino swung round sharply and raised one finger level with her lips in a gesture clearly intended to mean that he was not to say her name again.
Raoul continued to follow in silence.
He was afraid of losing her now that he had found her in such strange circumstances. He no longer hated her. He did not even think that she had ‘anything to reproach herself with’, however bizarre and perplexing her behaviour might be. He was ready to forgive, to forget, to grovel. He was in love. Besides, he had no doubt she would shortly give him a perfectly reasonable explanation for her strange absence.
From time to time, the black domino turned round to check if the white domino was still following.
As Raoul, never losing sight of his guide, made his way back through the main public lobby, he could hardly miss, among the crowds, one particular crowd, and in it, among all the grou
ps got up in the most extravagant outfits, one particular group which had gathered around a reveller whose costume, striking manner and macabre appearance were causing a sensation…
It was a man dressed entirely in scarlet, with a huge plumed hat perched over a death’s head mask. And a very fine simulation of a human skull it was too! The art students who had gathered round turned him into a great success. They congratulated him, asked which designer, which master-craftsman, who clearly had Pluto, King of the Underworld, as a customer, had conceived, made and painted such a magnificent death’s head! The Grim Reaper himself must have posed for it.
The figure with the death’s head, the feathered hat and the scarlet costume wore an immense cloak of red velvet which trailed behind him and spread like a fiery royal train over the floor. And on this cloak were embroidered in letters of gold these words which everyone repeated aloud: ‘Make way, for I am the Red Death!…’
One person did not make way… and a skeletal hand snaked out from a crimson sleeve and savagely grabbed the wrist of the offender who, feeling the force of that bony embrace, the demented grip of Death which seemed to have no intention of ever letting him go, screamed with pain and fear. When the Red Death eventually released him, he made off like a madman through a hail of jibes and jeers. It was at that exact moment that Raoul came face to face with the ghoulish figure who happened to turn in his direction. And he was about to exclaim: ‘The Death’s Head I saw at Perros-Guirec!’ for he had recognized it. Forgetting Christine, he was about to spring when the black domino, who also seemed to be gripped by strange emotions, caught his arm and led him away… led him far from the public lobby, away from the frantic crowd among whom the Red Death was passing…
The black domino kept turning round and twice appeared to see something very frightening, for she began to walk even faster, obliging Raoul to follow suit, as if someone was after them.
In this fashion they climbed up two floors. There the stairs and corridors were more or less deserted. The black domino pushed open the door of a box and gestured to the white domino to follow. Christine (for it was she: he recognized her voice) hurriedly closed the door behind him, told him in a whisper to stay at the back of the box and keep out of sight. Raoul took off his mask; Christine kept hers on. He was about to ask her to remove it, when he was taken aback on seeing her put one ear to the wall and listen carefully to what was happening on the other side. Then she opened the door an inch, looked up and down the corridor and whispered:
The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics) Page 14