Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera"

Edited Version by George Perry

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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