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

by Gaston Leroux

  Charon himself: Charon was the ferryman who carried the newly dead across the river Styx to Hades. In addition to this mythological visualization of the reality of death, the spiral descent to the lake and the various subterranean levels are also reminiscent of Dante’s description of hell.

  my surroundings: in 1875, when it first opened, the Opera House was lit by gas. Electricity—which explains Christine’s sudden bedazzlement—had only restricted use. ‘In the lower room are contained gasometers of hydrogen and oxygen for the oxyhydric light, and a gigantic galvanic battery of 360 Runsen cells. [From it,] wires aggregating nearly a mile in length are led to the stage, where the intensity of the current may be varied to produce a different optical effect with the electric light; for instance, by throwing this light into watery vapour, a genuine rainbow is projected on the scene’ (Manufacturer and Builder (July 1875), 154). By 1878, the Boulevards were lit by electric lights and in 1881 the central chandelier was converted to electricity.

  Desdemona’s Willow Song: given the internal chronology of the novel, the reference is probably not to Verdi’s Otello (1887) but to the opera by Rossini, first sung in 1816. The aria ‘Assis’ a piè d’un salice’ (seated at the foot of a willow tree) occurs in Act III.

  flock of Orpheus: in Greek mythology, Orpheus charmed all nature with the strains of his lyre which he was given by Apollo. He is sometimes portrayed as a shepherd of souls who descended into Hades in search of his wife, Eurydice.

  Jouy toile: or simply toile, a decorative cloth which originated in Jouyen-Josas in Burgundy in the eighteenth century. It was usually white and patterned with floral or pastoral scenes.

  Falstaff used to drink: not a reference of Verdi’s Falstaff (1893) but to The Merry Wives of Windsor (1849) by Otto Nicolai (1810–49), a native of Königsberg. Leroux had visited the town in 1904 to cover the centenary of the death of Immanuel Kant, who was also born there.

  the name Eric at random: the name of Viking heroes and fourteen Danish and Swedish kings. There is nothing in what we are told of Erik’s history nor in Leroux’s background nor in the previous history of monsters in literature, to explain this choice of name. His real name is nowhere revealed.

  Dies Irae: ‘the wrath of God’. Title and first words of a text in the Catholic missal which are sung at the service for the dead.

  punished by God: in the libretto for Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787), by Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), the ghost of the commendatore dispatches a defiant Don Juan to hell. Molière’s play (1665), Da Ponte’s major source, provided the same fate for the atheist and arch-seducer. Erik’s version is a bold assertion of human will.

  of Lake Avernus: a lake, the Lago d’Averno, in the Italian province of Campania whose waters, in Roman mythology, were inhospitable: no fish swam in it and no birds lived on its banks. It was thought to be the entrance to the infernal regions. The name was subsequently applied to all such unwholesome lakes.

  L’Époque: a private joke, for there was no such newspaper. But Leroux’s journalist-investigator, Joseph Joséphin, known as Rouletabille, hero of nine ‘extraordinary adventures’, was this fictitious paper’s star reporter.

  the ‘Bank of Saint Farce’!: that is, stage money. Such notes were used in stage performances, by cartoonists who satirized the wealth of the Church but also by criminals who passed counterfeit notes drawn on ‘La Banque de Sainte-Farce’ to escape detection. In Victorian Britain, the making and passing of outright forgeries was a serious offence, but making or passing something that merely looked like legal tender was treated more leniently. Hence the ‘flash’ notes supposedly issued by the Bank of Engraving or Elegance, Elfland, Eryland, Fanland, Lagland, and others besides.

  Robert Houdin!: Robert-Houdin was the stage name of Jean-Eugène Robert (1805–71), sometimes called ‘the father of modern magic’. Early French film pioneers like Georges Méliès were deeply influenced by memories of his elaborate illusions and technical skills.

  Sibyl of old on her stool: Pythia, priestess of Apollo, delivered replies to those who consulted the oracle at Delphi. She was inspired by sulphurous fumes rising from a hole inside the temple over which she sat bare on a three-legged stool, or tripod.

  Meg Giry, empress!: Among the list of stars of the musical stage who achieved what Mme Giry hopes for her daughter are famous names. They include Mlle Ménétrier who married Louis, Marquis de Cussy (1766–1837), chief steward of the households of Napoleon and Louis XVIII, and Maria Taglioni (1804–84), the Italian/Swedish ballet star of the Romantic era. The most celebrated was the Irish-born Lola Montez (pseudonym of Eliza Rosanna Gilbert (1818 or 1821–61) who found notoriety as a ‘Spanish’ dancer and became the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria who made her countess of Landsfeld on 25 August 1847. The fact that Meg’s predicted apotheosis is still some way off, in 1885, is the clearest internal evidence for situating the action a few years before that date.

  look guilty: here speaks Leroux, the veteran courtroom reporter.

  Thebes … Ecbatana … Delphi: ‘hundred-gated Thebes’, in ancient Egypt, is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad (Book 9); Ecbatana was the fabled city of the Medes; on Delphi, see note to p. 171.

  18 March: see note to p. 8. Supporters of the Paris Commune were known as Communards or fédérés.

  Mme Pierre Wolff: a friendly reference to the wife of Pierre Wolff (1865–1944), an experienced dramatist, with whom Leroux collaborated for his first play, La Maison des juges (1906). Her name did not figure in the first, serialized version of the novel in Le Gaulois of 16 December 1909.

  several metres thick: ‘The excavations started in 1861 … Very soon water was encountered … In order to make a foundation under such circumstances, the whole site was surrounded with a double row of piles 20 feet long, driven down so that only 1½ feet was left projecting above the surface of the water, while between the piles hydraulic concrete was poured, so as to make a water-tight wall inside of which the water was pumped out and the foundations laid. This work absorbed half a million dollars and was only accomplished under great difficulties, eight large pumps working day and night being required to enable the workmen to place the concrete in a sufficiently dry soil, while at the same time measures had constantly to be taken to remedy the continual caving of the surrounding soil. The main thickness of the concrete foundations is 7 feet; this layer is covered with a bed of hydraulic cement 2 inches thick, on which another layer of concrete has been placed, and on this surface thus rendered perfectly solid, the inverted arches are placed which form the foundations of the cellar … This method of making the foundations has been a complete success. The cellar contains a tank in which all the water collects, while the scenes and flats are perfectly preserved against all moisture as well as the rest of the machinery and other property’ (Manufacturer and Builder (July 1875), 154). See also Appendix.

  ‘The Punjabi bowstring!’: a deadly noose made of catgut or sometimes silk. It was an efficient method of garrotting enemies and was in widespread use, by bandits and state executioners, from Turkey, across Persia, Afghanistan, and, as its name indicates, the north-west frontier of India. At times, however, Leroux suggests that it was used not only at close quarters but also ‘thrown’, in the manner of a lasso.

  to breathe through: though in some editions, the date 1900 is given, the serialized text (Le Gaulois, 20 December 1909) gives the correct date. In Le Matin of 28 July 1909, Jean Ajalbert reviewed the opposition to French rule in Tonkin, the northern province of Indochina (modern Vietnam). Dé Tham (c.1860–1913) was the rebels’ leader or, in French eyes, a bandit. On one occasion, Ajalbert relates, when he and his men were being hunted by French soldiers, ‘they jumped into a river fringed by bamboos where, completely submerged, they survived by putting a hollow reed tube in their mouths and breathing through it’.

  the Madeleine: work on the church of Saint Mary Magdalen was begun in 1764 and completed in 1842. On its eastern side, the Boulevard de la Madeleine leads directly to the Place de l
’Opéra.

  the Rosy Hours of Mazanderan… cruel entertainments: Leroux never explains the ‘Rosy Hours’ nor the role played by the Sultana in it. Was it a religious sect, a secret society, a philosophical cult, or a building? It was perhaps all of these. Its activities were secret, it was committed to a policy of terror and it was located in space: Erik’s first torture chamber was built at the behest of the sadistic Sultana, presumably in her palace. The internal chronology of the novel suggests that Erik had left Mazanderan three or four years before 1862 when he was back in Paris. In that year work began on Garnier’s new Opera House. Since Erik was engaged to help lay the foundations, he must have been in at the start. There is no trace of ‘Rosy Hours’ in histories of nineteenth-century Persia, but, curiously, a ‘Company of the Rosy Hours’ surfaces in chapter 12 of John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), set in Turkey in the Great War. Sandy Arbuthnot, Richard Hannay’s friend, becomes its leader and explains that, in 1910, it had been ‘all for the Young Turks and reform; now [that is, since 1914] it hankered after the old regime and was the last hope of the orthodox … It stood for Islam and the old ways and might be described as a Conservative-Nationalist caucus.’ There is no evidence that Buchan had read The Phantom of the Opera. Perhaps both he and Leroux had come across a reference to these mysterious ‘Rosy Hours’ independently, found the name suitably mysterious and each had made his own use of it. Mazanderan, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, was then part of Persia; it is now a province of modern Iran.

  by Philippe Garnier: a slip of the pen (for Charles Garnier) which also appeared in Le Gaulois of 24 December 1909. The oversight is an indication of the cavalier manner in which authors of popular fiction prepared their serials for publication in volume form.

  by both mayor and priest: since the Revolution of 1789, during which the Catholic religion was outlawed, marriage in France has been a civil matter. A second, religious ceremony remains a personal option for believers.

  at my age!: though this is ironic and Erik is seemingly indestructible, the internal chronology nevertheless makes him about 50.

  are now unnecessary: the nineteenth century was fascinated by the possibility of reproducing reality in images of various sorts. From early vitascopes to the giant panoramas of the 1870s (revolving drums inside which spectators watched passing displays of painted ‘marvels’), showmen exploited the public’s enthusiasm for new experiences. By the 1890s, scientists had perfected the means of making still and moving images. With the growing popularity of the photograph and the advent of cinema, optical effects such as mirror mazes lost much of their novelty.

  age of Louis-Philippe: another general indication of Erik’s age, for it suggests that he was born during the reign (1830–48) of Louis-Philippe, the ‘bourgeois king’.

  Imitation of Christ: a devotional work, attributed to Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471), tracing the growth of the soul to spiritual perfection. Translated into many languages, it was many times reprinted in the nineteenth century, in different qualities of binding, during the boom in religious publications spearheaded by the enterprising abbé Migne.

  angel wept!!…: in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923), Frederick Treves, recalled inviting a woman friend to visit his patient. ‘The effect upon poor Merrick was not quite what I expected… As he let go her hand he bent his head on his knees and sobbed until I thought he would never cease… He told me afterwards that this was the first woman who had ever smiled at him, and the first woman, in the whole of his life, who had shaken hands with him. From this day, the transformation of Merrick commenced and he began to change, little by little, from a hunted thing into a man.’ It says much for Leroux’s understanding of human nature that he could capture Erik’s comparable reaction so accurately. Erik’s own cathartic ‘transformation’ from loathsome beast to a man capable of generous impulses is, when viewed in this perspective, far more convincing than the sentimental cliché which showed the wicked man reformed by the power of love.

  by little Meg: Meg never became an empress but she did marry into the aristocracy. In the Prologue, she is named as the (fictitious) baronne de Castelot-Barbezac.

  M. Dujardin-Beaumetz: Eugène Dujardin-Beaumetz (1852–1913) was a painter who also served as sous-secrétaire d’État aux Beaux Arts between 1905 and 1912.

  with Mme Giry: aficionados of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical play report that the modern management of the Paris Opera House has discouraged such visits.

  group of gypsies: Leroux also draws on his current preoccupation with the Romany who figure prominently in the novel he was researching even as he was finishing The Phantom of the Opera, La Reine du Sabbat, which was serialized in 161 episodes in Le Matin between 18 August 1910 and 31 January 1911.

  Nizhnii Novgorod: situated on the Volga, east of Moscow, it was famous for its Great Fair which was held annually in July and August. Again, Leroux exploits his own familiarity with Russia which he had visited as a journalist. The ‘blank phase of his life’ presumably included Erik’s travels to Tonkin and the Punjab which may be inferred from the text.

  at war with Persia: the taking of Herat by the British in July 1857 ended the series of wars between the two countries and situates Erik’s sojourn in Mazanderan in the mid-1850s, when he was still a young man.

  sleeping in another: the Young Turks’ revolution for the modernization of Turkey in July 1908 was resisted by a counter-coup in early 1909. When negotiations failed, the Sultan, Abdul Hamid, retreated into the Yilditz-Kiosk on the Bosphorus in mid-April. He was deposed after troops were despatched from Salonika in early May. On 9 May, the special correspondent of Le Matin reported that the liberators of the Yilditz Palace found ‘a securely bolted chamber containing a number of models of Abdul Hamid in various poses. One in particular showed him in his traditional dress, a robe of blue and green.’

  APPENDIX

  M. Lequesne … M. Millet: Eugène-Louis Lequesne (1815–87) and Aimé Millet (1819–91).

  the Emperor Napoleon: that is, Napoleon III who ceased to be emperor when France fell to superior Prussian forces in September 1870.

  cent-gardes: the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, constituted by an elite troop of cavalry.

  Castaigne: André Castaigne (1861–1929), painter and illustrator of the first edition of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra in 1910. For it, he produced a frontispice and four watercolour illustrations of high quality. His cover shows the Phantom in top hat and white tie, with only his eyes covered by a black mask thus revealing the mouth as a set of grinning teeth. The illustrations were retained in the first US and Canadian editions but not by Leroux’s British publisher.

  metropolitan railway: that is, the ‘Métropolitain’, the Paris underground, usually known as the ‘Métro’. It was opened in 1900 and had six lines by 1910, four of them servicing the financial and business district around the Opera.

  1 Quoted by Jean-Claude Lamy, ‘Le Fauteuil hanté’, Europe, 626–7 (June – July 1981), 111.

  1 I would be ungrateful indeed if, as I embark on this terrifying but true story, I did not also thank the current management of the Opera, who so generously facilitated all my enquiries and in particular M. Messager; also the most helpful Administrator, M. Gabion, and that very friendly architect assigned to the preservation of the fabric who never hesitated to lend me the works of Charles Garnier, even though it was almost certain that I would never return them. Finally, all it remains for me is to acknowledge publicly the generosity of my friend and former colleague, M. J.-L. Croze, who allowed me to delve deeply into his wonderful library of theatre books and to borrow unique editions which he valued highly.—G.L.*

  1 I was told this anecdote, which is also absolutely true, from no less a person than M. Pedro Gailhard,* a former Director of the Opéra de Paris.

  1 M. Pedro Gailhard told me personally that he himself had continued the practice and created such employment for elderly stagehands whom he was reluctant to dismiss.

  1 In those days, it w
as the job of firemen, when there were no performances, to oversee the general safety of the Opera House. This practice has subsequently been discontinued. I asked M. Pedro Gaillard why and he said that ‘it was because, given their total lack of familiarity with the areas under the stage, they themselves were considered a fire hazard’.

  1 The author is no more prepared than the Persian to provide a more detailed explanation of this sudden shadowy materialization. Explanations for everything else in this absolutely true story, however outlandish on the surface, will normally be provided. But I cannot say in so many words exactly what the Persian meant by replying: ‘He is something far worse than that!’ (worse, that is, than being a member of the theatre police). Readers will have to work it out for themselves, for I have given a solemn undertaking to the ex-Director of the Paris Opera, M. Pedro Gailhard, never to make public the secret of the fascinating and very useful individual who wanders like a shadow in a cloak. By condemning himself to a life spent confined to the cavernous regions beneath the Opera House, he has rendered signal services to opera-goers who, on gala concert nights for example, are bold enough to venture into the lower depths. I speak here of security matters and I am not at liberty, I swear, to be more specific.