Gaston
Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera"
Edited Version by George Perry
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Gaston
Leroux begins his novel "The Phantom of the
Opera" by claiming that the ghost really
existed, and revealing how he had found the
evidence for the thirty year old story he was
about to tell when going through the National
Archives of Music.
He
read documents, memoirs and talked to those who
remembered the incidents that accompany the
kidnapping of Christine Daae, the disappearance
of the Vicomte de Chagny and the death of Count
Philippe. He tells how by chance he met the
examining magistrate in the case, and learned of
a mysterious witness known as the Persian who
claimed to have conversed with the ghost. Leroux
then tells how he tracked the Persian to a small
apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, and interviewed
him only five months before his death. The
Persian produced proof of the ghost's existence,
in particular the letters of Christine Daae,
which Leroux compared with other examples of her
handwriting to make sure that they were not
forgeries. He then describes how workmen, digging
in the cellers, found a skeleton, at first
believed to be a victim of the Commune, but
alleged by Leroux to be that of the Phantom.
Leroux
then begins his narrative, taking the reader back
to the 1880's , telling how the ballet girls
chanced on a silent figure in dress clothes who
had materialized backstage. It had been sighted
many times before, and had become somewhat a
legend. Where his face should have been was a
death's head, a yellow, noseless visage with
black holes instead of eyes. The descriptions
vary since no one had been close enough to take a
proper look. The first chapter deals largely with
backstage gossip by the girls, led by Meg Giry,
the daughter of the woman who looks after the
boxes around the auditorium, she informs them
that the ghost is allocated Box 5, and that he
watches each performance from the shadows. She is
interrupted by her mother who announces that
Buquet, the chief scene-shifter, had been found
hanged beneath the stage.
That
very evening a young singer, Christine Daae, has
just triumphantly sung in a gala performance
which included the trio from Faust, taking the
place of the diva, La Carlotta, who was ill.
Watching her performance is Philippe, the Comte
de Chagny, and his brother Raoul, the Vicomte,
who is twenty years younger and quite taken with
her. They go backstage, where Christine has just
had a fainting fit, and when she comes around
Raoul reminds here of a childhood incident which
took place when he first met her: "I'm the
little boy who went into the sea to rescue your
scarf." She in turn claims to be too unwell
to continue the conversation. Later, when the
crowds have thinned, Raoul is still lingering
near her dressing room door,when he hears a man's
voice within telling her that she must love him.
When eventually Christine leaves her room, she
sweeps past him, alone. Raoul inspects the
unlocked room and it is empty.
Leroux
then describes in an extract from the memoirs of
M. Moncharmin how the departing M. Poligny handed
over a document in which the ghost demanded an
allowance of 20,000 francs a month and a
permanent box at his disposal for every
performance. According to the two managers,
Richard and Moncharmin, the ghost was too
unreasonable. The new managers decide to defy
these requests. It is they feel, an elaborate
joke, started by their predecessors, and when a
few days later they receive a letter from the
ghost, complaining that his box had been sold,
they agree to let the old managers have it for
the next performance. There follows a letter of
thanks and a demand for the balance of his
allowance from 'O.G.', as the Opera ghost calls
himself. Followed by a letter from the
ex-managers saying that they would not dare use
the box seat at all. Annoyed, the new managers
decide to allow the box to be sold for all
performances. It leads to an evening being
disrupted by maniacal laughter. Mme. Giry is sent
for, and asked if she can shed any light on
matter. She tells the managers unequivocally that
they have angered the ghost, and she refers to
other incidents where the ghost's presence has
caused a disturbance. The managers take her for a
madwomen and dismiss her.
Christine
Daae seems strangely reluctant to sing, but she
sends Raoul a note confessing her remembrance of
the childhood incident with the scarf, and adds
that she is paying a visit to Perros-Guirrec in
Brittany, to her father's grave. Raoul dashes
after her, recalling on the way how her father, a
Swedish peasant with untapped musical gifts and
his talented daughter, had been brought to Paris
by Valerius, a music professor, they stayed in
Brittany for the summer; how the daughter's scarf
blew out to sea, and he, the boy Raoul, had
rescued it. Thereafter they had played every day
until the autumn when they parted. Then her
father died, and Christine drove herself to
forget the young aristocrat, devoting her life
istead to her art. But Raoul, in spite of her
indifference, has attended her every performance
at the Opera.
Suprisingly,
she is waiting for him at Perros, and he asks her
why she has ignored him for so long. When he
tells her how he heard a man's voice speaking to
her in her dressing room, she becomes pale and
afraid. In the graveyard where her father is
buried, she tells him of the Angel of Music
legend, how she has been visited by him and been
given lessons in singing from him. She believes
him to be the ghost of her father. Later in the
middle of the night Raoul follows her as she goes
to the graveyard as if in a trance, and he hears
perfect music which seems to draw him towards the
grave. Then he is suddenly attacked by a spectre
with a death's head, and brought back to the inn
in the morning still unconscious.
Leroux
then quotes from Moncharmin's memoirs an uneasy
experience in which the two managers go to have a
closer look at Box 5, and are both convinced they
have seen something there. Bravely, they vow to
watch that Saturday's performance of Faust from
the box themselves. Then they receive a stern
letter from 'O.G.' demanding the restitution of
his box, the replacement of Carlotta with
Christine Daae, the revoking of Mme. Giry's
dismissal, a further plea for his money, and the
threat that if his terms are not met the house
will have a curse on it.
While
they are ranting and raving at this latest
impertinence, the Opera stablekeeper arrives to
ask them to dismiss his workforce of stablemen
because Cesar, the prize among the dozen of
horses, has been stolen, supposedly by the
Phantom. Then Mme. Giry appears saying that she
has had a letter from him, but before she can get
any further she is literally booted out of the
office by the very angry Richard. Meanwhile,
Carlotta is studying a threatening letter which
says that if she insists on going on she will
face a misfortune worse than death. A further
letter urges her to have a bad cold. Beliving it
to be a plot involving her rival, Christine, her
resolve to perform hardens. She defies the
instructions. But during the performance she
suddenly loses her voice, emitting strange
toad-like sounds. At which point the two managers
watching the performance collapse in their
chairs, daring not to turn around for they hear
the ghost chuckling from behind their backs! Then
the voice saying: "She is singing tonight to
bring the chandelier down!" All at once the
massive chandelier comes crashing down. A wild
rush for the doors by the public follows.
After
the tragedy Christine disappears, and for some
days later a worried Raoul askes of Mme.
Valerius, the widow of the music professor who
had brought her late father to France, if she
knows where she is. The elderly woman, now
bedridden, tells him that Christine is with the
Angel of Music, who lives in heaven and has her
in his power. It is from him that she has been
receiving singing lessons. Raoul is in despair,
but later a note arrives from Christine asking
him to meet her secretly at the Opera masked
ball.
At
the masked ball, narrowly avoiding a sinister
scarlet-garbed figure with a death's head, and
recognized by Raoul as his assailant at Perros,
they go to a place where they can talk. Christine
tells him that she must give him up.
Disconsolate, Raoul hides in her dressing room,
and watches as she is addressed by a voice in the
mirror, into which she vanishes.
The
next day he visits Mme. Valerius and finds
Christine with her. he tells her that he saw her
speak to a man called Erik in her dressing room,
and she reveals that he is her Angel of Music.
She makes him promise not to come to the dressing
room again, unless she sends for him. For the
next few days their relationship is an uneasy
one. Then they go to the roof of the Opera house,
and Christine tells of how she was lured by the
masked Erik to his lair in the depths of the
building on the back of the missing white horse,
Cesar, and how his bed was a coffin. She
describes how he played his composition to her,
an opera called Don Juan Triumphant, and how she
snatched his mask off to reveal a face of
indescribable ugliness, how he confessed his love
and resolved to make her a great singer, and how
she was moved by pity. Unknown to Raoul and
Christine, the Phantom is above their heads,
perched on the statue of Apollo, and has been
listening to every word of her betrayal.
As
they leave the roof the Persian is standing at
the foot of the stairs and suggests that they
take a different route. Later, Raoul wakes in the
middle of the night and thinks that Erik is
watching him.
Philippe
tells Raoul that he should not marry Christine,
regarding her ghost stories as a form of madness,
and he is concerned for the good name of the
family. During a performance of Faust, Christine
suddenly vanishes on stage before the audience
and there is speculation as to whether her
disappearance is the work of Raoul or the ghost.
Then Raoul arrives backstage and his distressed
condition makes it clear that he is innocent. He
accuses the unseen Erik, but is helpless to find
the missing girl.
Leroux
pauses in his story to describe how the managers,
facing the demands of the Phantom for his
allowance, place 20,000 frances in an envelope,
only to have them substituted for false
banknotes. They suspect that Mme. Giry is
responsible for the deception and accuse her. She
is able to show that they are mistaken. The
police are summoned to deal with both the missing
money and the vanished opera singer. The theory
is put forward that she has been taken away by
Philippe to get her away from Raoul. Then the
Persian reveals himself to Raoul as having a
special interest in the Phantom, and tells him
that Christine is with Erik somwhere in the opera
house. He suggests they arm themselves with
pistols and then they go to her dressing room,
where the Persian shows how the mirror can become
a door leading to secret inner passages. They go
down into the cellars, holding their arms up as
if ready to fire their pistols, a precaution
urged by the Persian to counter the deadly effect
of the Punjab lasso, the device already used to
strangle Buquet. In the darkness of the lower
basement they have a frightening encounter with
the opera house ratcatcher. Later, thinking they
have reached the Phantom's lair, Raoul and the
Persian lower themselves inadvertently into a
torture chamber from which they cannot escape.
The
Persian then takes over the narration of the
story, describing how previously he had found
Erik's house beneath the Opera on the other side
of the subterranean lake, and how on crossing it
in a boat he was pulled under and nearly killed.
Erik used a reed to swim underwater and attacked
him for intruding onto his domain. The Persian
reveals that he had known Erik in his own
country, as a deformed person of superior
intellect, and that now he challenged him over
his obsession with Christine. Eventually the
Persian returns with Raoul in their attempt to
rescuse the young women, but they are trapped in
the torture chamber.
Christine
is held prisioner in the Phantom's quarters next
door, and they are able to converse with her
through the walls, but she cannot help them. Erik
has an ornamental grasshopper and a scorpion in
two boxs, and tells her that if she rotates one
of them it will save the men. But if she chooses
the wrong one the opera house will be destroyed.
Meanwhile Erik turns up the heat in the torture
chamber, making it so hot that both men feel like
they are being roasted alive. They begin to
hallucinate that they are in some jungle or
desert. Eventually, on the brink of death, the
Persian finds a secret way out of the room, and
they find themselves in another chamber full of
barrels of gunpowder. Christine meanwhile, at the
Phantom's urging, takes a chance and turns the
scorpion. The room in which the Persian and Raoul
are now trapped is flooded by a sudden torrent of
water and they are threatened with drowning. The
Persian's written narrative ends at that point.
The
tale is resumed by Leroux, who says that he heard
it from the lips of the man in his old age,
shortly before he died. The men had fallen
unconscious after the flood, but the Persian
wakes up in Erik's quarters, where Christine is
ministering to him. Erik describes her as his
wife. Later both the Persian and Raoul are
returned to their homes. Philippe has been found
drowned in the Opera lake. Erik calls on the
Persian and tells him that he is dying, and that
Christine is the first woman to have allowed him
to kiss her. He explains that the death of Count
Philippe had been beyond his control, he had been
trying to rescue his brother. Christine had
persuaded him to release Raoul, and he would as a
mark of gratitude to the Persian for his kindness
hand over all the papers and artefacts relevant
to her disappearance. Erik then left in a cab for
the Opera. Three weeks later an advertisement was
published in Epoque: 'Erik is Dead'.
In
the epilogue Leroux explains how the Persian was
the only one to have known the whole truth. A
visit to the aged M. Poligny proved to be
useless, and the Persian reminds Leroux that the
manager had never realized the extent to which he
had been duped by Erik. Erik had blocked up all
the secret entrances to his house before his
death, and it was never found, nor was the
manuscript of Don Juan Triumphant. But Leroux did
discover a secret trapdoor in the manager's
office, which was how Erik had managed to
abstract the money from under their noses. The
Persian explained how Erik had been born a
monster, the son of a master mason who lived near
Rouen. his earliest memory had been of a mask
being placed over his head in the cradle to hide
his horrific features. He was exhibited as a
freak at fairs, and travelled widely across
Europe and Asia, already a gifted musician,
practising ventriloquism and magic. In Persia he
became a master architect, brilliant at designing
secret passages and trapdoors. In Paris he
tendered for part of the opera house
construction, and used some of his time on the
site to build concealed passageways and a home
where he could hide from mankind.
The
reader knows and guesses the rest. It is all in
keeping with the incredible yet veracious story.
Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we
curse him? He only asked to be 'someone' like
everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had
to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with,
when, with an ordinary face, he would have been
one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had
a heart that could have held the empire of the
world; and in the end he had to content himself
with a cellar. Surely we may pity the Opera
ghost!
I
have prayed over his mortal remains, that God
might show him mercy, notwithstanding his crimes.
Yes, I am certain, quite certian that I prayed
beside his body, the other day, when they took it
from the spot where they were burying the
phonographic records, It was Erik's skeleton. I
did not recognize it by the ugliness of the head,
for all men are ugly when they have been dead as
long as that, but by the plain gold ring which he
wore and which Christine Daae must have slipped
on his finger, when she came to bury him in
accordance with her promise.
The
skeleton was lying near the little well, in the
place where the Angel of Music first held
Christine Daae fainting in his trembling arms, on
the night when he carried her down to the cellars
of the opera house.
And
now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton?
Surely they will not bury it in the common
grave!...I say that the skeleton of the Opera
ghost is no ordinary skeleton and that its proper
place is in the archives of the National Academy
of Music.
Gaston
Leroux
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