_ I have now told the singular, but veracious story of the Opera ghost.
As I declared on the first page of this work, it is no longer possible
to deny that Erik really lived. There are to-day so many proofs
of his existence within the reach of everybody that we can follow
Erik's actions logically through the whole tragedy of the Chagnys.
There is no need to repeat here how greatly the case excited the capital.
The kidnapping of the artist, the death of the Comte de Chagny
under such exceptional conditions, the disappearance of his brother,
the drugging of the gas-man at the Opera and of his two assistants:
what tragedies, what passions, what crimes had surrounded the idyll
of Raoul and the sweet and charming Christine!...What had become
of that wonderful, mysterious artist of whom the world was never,
never to hear again?...She was represented as the victim of a
rivalry between the two brothers; and nobody suspected what had
really happened, nobody understood that, as Raoul and Christine
had both disappeared, both had withdrawn far from the world to
enjoy a happiness which they would not have cared to make public
after the inexplicable death of Count Philippe....They took
the train one day from "the northern railway station of the world."
...Possibly, I too shall take the train at that station, one day,
and go and seek around thy lakes, O Norway, O silent Scandinavia,
for the perhaps still living traces of Raoul and Christine and also
of Mamma Valerius, who disappeared at the same time!...Possibly,
some day, I shall hear the lonely echoes of the North repeat
the singing of her who knew the Angel of Music!...
Long after the case was pigeonholed by the unintelligent care
of M. le Juge d'Instruction Faure, the newspapers made efforts,
at intervals, to fathom the mystery. One evening paper alone,
which knew all the gossip of the theaters, said:
"We recognize the touch of the Opera ghost."
And even that was written by way of irony.
The Persian alone knew the whole truth and held the main proofs,
which came to him with the pious relics promised by the ghost. It fell
to my lot to complete those proofs with the aid of the daroga himself.
Day by day, I kept him informed of the progress of my inquiries;
and he directed them. He had not been to the Opera for years and years,
but he had preserved the most accurate recollection of the building,
and there was no better guide than he possible to help me discover
its most secret recesses. He also told me where to gather further
information, whom to ask; and he sent me to call on M. Poligny,
at a moment when the poor man was nearly drawing his last breath.
I had no idea that he was so very ill, and I shall never forget
the effect which my questions about the ghost produced upon him.
He looked at me as if I were the devil and answered only in a few
incoherent sentences, which showed, however--and that was the main thing--
the extent of the perturbation which O. G., in his time, had brought
into that already very restless life (for M. Poligny was what people
call a man of pleasure).
When I came and told the Persian of the poor result of my visit
to M. Poligny, the daroga gave a faint smile and said:
"Poligny never knew how far that extraordinary blackguard of an Erik
humbugged him."--The Persian, by the way, spoke of Erik sometimes
as a demigod and sometimes as the lowest of the low--"Poligny
was superstitious and Erik knew it. Erik knew most things about
the public and private affairs of the Opera. When M. Poligny heard
a mysterious voice tell him, in Box Five, of the manner in which he
used to spend his time and abuse his partner's confidence, he did
not wait to hear any more. Thinking at first that it was a voice
from Heaven, he believed himself damned; and then, when the voice
began to ask for money, he saw that he was being victimized by a
shrewd blackmailer to whom Debienne himself had fallen a prey.
Both of them, already tired of management for various reasons,
went away without trying to investigate further into the personality
of that curious O. G., who had forced such a singular memorandum-book
upon them. They bequeathed the whole mystery to their successors
and heaved a sigh of relief when they were rid of a business
that had puzzled them without amusing them in the least."
I then spoke of the two successors and expressed my surprise that,
in his Memoirs of a Manager, M. Moncharmin should describe the Opera
ghost's behavior at such length in the first part of the book and hardly
mention it at all in the second. In reply to this, the Persian,
who knew the MEMOIRS as thoroughly as if he had written them himself,
observed that I should find the explanation of the whole business
if I would just recollect the few lines which Moncharmin devotes
to the ghost in the second part aforesaid. I quote these lines,
which are particularly interesting because they describe the very
simple manner in which the famous incident of the twenty-thousand
francs was closed:
"As for O. G., some of whose curious tricks I have related in the
first part of my Memoirs, I will only say that he redeemed by one
spontaneous fine action all the worry which he had caused my dear
friend and partner and, I am bound to say, myself. He felt, no doubt,
that there are limits to a joke, especially when it is so expensive
and when the commissary of police has been informed, for, at the moment
when we had made an appointment in our office with M. Mifroid to tell him
the whole story, a few days after the disappearance of Christine Daae,
we found, on Richard's table, a large envelope, inscribed, in red ink,
"WITH O. G.'S COMPLIMENTS." It contained the large sum of money
which he had succeeded in playfully extracting, for the time being,
from the treasury. Richard was at once of the opinion that we must
be content with that and drop the business. I agreed with Richard.
All's well that ends well. What do you say, O. G.?"
Of course, Moncharmin, especially after the money had been restored,
continued to believe that he had, for a short while, been the butt
of Richard's sense of humor, whereas Richard, on his side,
was convinced that Moncharmin had amused himself by inventing
the whole of the affair of the Opera ghost, in order to revenge
himself for a few jokes.
I asked the Persian to tell me by what trick the ghost had taken
twenty-thousand francs from Richard's pocket in spite of the
safety-pin. He replied that he had not gone into this little detail,
but that, if I myself cared to make an investigation on the spot,
I should certainly find the solution to the riddle in the managers'
office by remembering that Erik had not been nicknamed the trap-door
lover for nothing. I promised the Persian to do so as soon as I
had time, and I may as well tell the reader at once that the results
of my investigation were perfectly satisfactory; and I hardly
believed that I should ever discover so many undeniable proofs
of the authenticity of the feats ascribed to the ghost.
The Persian's manuscript, Christine Daae's papers, the statements made
to me by the people who used to work under MM. Richard and Moncharmin,
by little Meg herself (the worthy Madame Giry, I am sorry to say, is no more)
and by Sorelli, who is now living in retirement at Louveciennes:
all the documents relating to the existence of the ghost, which I
propose to deposit in the archives of the Opera, have been checked
and confirmed by a number of important discoveries of which I am
justly proud. I have not been able to find the house on the lake,
Erik having blocked up all the secret entrances.[12] On the other hand,
I have discovered the secret passage of the Communists, the planking
of which is falling to pieces in parts, and also the trap-door
through which Raoul and the Persian penetrated into the cellars
of the opera-house. In the Communists' dungeon, I noticed numbers of
initials traced on the walls by the unfortunate people confined in it;
and among these were an "R" and a "C." R. C.: Raoul de Chagny.
The letters are there to this day.
----
[12] Even so, I am convinced that it would be easy to reach it
by draining the lake, as I have repeatedly requested the Ministry
of Fine Arts to do. I was speaking about it to M. Dujardin-Beaumetz,
the under-secretary for fine arts, only forty-eight hours before
the publication of this book. Who knows but that the score of DON
JUAN TRIUMPHANT might yet be discovered in the house on the lake?
If the reader will visit the Opera one morning and ask leave to stroll
where he pleases, without being accompanied by a stupid guide,
let him go to Box Five and knock with his fist or stick on
the enormous column that separates this from the stage-box. He
will find that the column sounds hollow. After that, do not be
astonished by the suggestion that it was occupied by the voice
of the ghost: there is room inside the column for two men.
If you are surprised that, when the various incidents occurred,
no one turned round to look at the column, you must remember
that it presented the appearance of solid marble, and that
the voice contained in it seemed rather to come from the opposite
side, for, as we have seen, the ghost was an expert ventriloquist.
The column was elaborately carved and decorated with the sculptor's
chisel; and I do not despair of one day discovering the ornament that
could be raised or lowered at will, so as to admit of the ghost's
mysterious correspondence with Mme. Giry and of his generosity.
However, all these discoveries are nothing, to my mind, compared with
that which I was able to make, in the presence of the acting-manager,
in the managers' office, within a couple of inches from the desk-chair,
and which consisted of a trap-door, the width of a board in the flooring
and the length of a man's fore-arm and no longer; a trap-door that
falls back like the lid of a box; a trap-door through which I can
see a hand come and dexterously fumble at the pocket of a swallow-tail coat.
That is the way the forty-thousand francs went!.... And that also
is the way by which, through some trick or other, they were returned.
Speaking about this to the Persian, I said:
"So we may take it, as the forty-thousand francs were returned,
that Erik was simply amusing himself with that memorandum-book
of his?"
"Don't you believe it!" he replied. "Erik wanted money. Thinking himself
without the pale of humanity, he was restrained by no scruples and
he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination,
which he had received by way of compensation for his extraordinary
uglinesss, to prey upon his fellow-men. His reason for restoring
the forty-thousand francs, of his own accord, was that he no longer
wanted it. He had relinquished his marriage with Christine Daae.
He had relinquished everything above the surface of the earth."
According to the Persian's account, Erik was born in a small town
not far from Rouen. He was the son of a master-mason. He ran away at
an early age from his father's house, where his ugliness was a subject
of horror and terror to his parents. For a time, he frequented
the fairs, where a showman exhibited him as the "living corpse."
He seems to have crossed the whole of Europe, from fair to fair,
and to have completed his strange education as an artist and magician
at the very fountain-head of art and magic, among the Gipsies.
A period of Erik's life remained quite obscure. He was seen at the fair
of Nijni-Novgorod, where he displayed himself in all his hideous glory.
He already sang as nobody on this earth had ever sung before; he practised
ventriloquism and gave displays of legerdemain so extraordinary
that the caravans returning to Asia talked about it during the whole
length of their journey. In this way, his reputation penetrated
the walls of the palace at Mazenderan, where the little sultana,
the favorite of the Shah-in-Shah, was boring herself to death.
A dealer in furs, returning to Samarkand from Nijni-Novgorod,
told of the marvels which he had seen performed in Erik's tent.
The trader was summoned to the palace and the daroga of Mazenderan
was told to question him. Next the daroga was instructed to go
and find Erik. He brought him to Persia, where for some months
Erik's will was law. He was guilty of not a few horrors, for he
seemed not to know the difference between good and evil. He took
part calmly in a number of political assassinations; and he turned
his diabolical inventive powers against the Emir of Afghanistan,
who was at war with the Persian empire. The Shah took a liking
to him.
This was the time of the rosy hours of Mazenderan, of which the daroga's
narrative has given us a glimpse. Erik had very original ideas on
the subject of architecture and thought out a palace much as a conjuror
contrives a trick-casket. The Shah ordered him to construct an edifice
of this kind. Erik did so; and the building appears to have been
so ingenious that His Majesty was able to move about in it unseen and
to disappear without a possibility of the trick's being discovered.
When the Shah-in-Shah found himself the possessor of this gem,
he ordered Erik's yellow eyes to be put out. But he reflected that,
even when blind, Erik would still be able to build so remarkable
a house for another sovereign; and also that, as long as Erik
was alive, some one would know the secret of the wonderful palace.
Erik's death was decided upon, together with that of all the laborers
who had worked under his orders. The execution of this abominable
decree devolved upon the daroga of Mazenderan. Erik had shown
him some slight services and procured him many a hearty laugh.
He saved Erik by providing him with the means of escape, but nearly
paid with his head for his generous indulgence.
Fortunately for the daroga, a corpse, half-eaten by the birds
of prey, was found on the shore of the Caspian Sea, and was taken
for Erik's body, because the daroga's friends had dressed the remains
in clothing that belonged to Erik. The daroga was let off with
the loss of the imperial favor, the confiscation of his property
and an order of perpetual banishment. As a member of the Royal House,
however, he continued to receive a monthly pension of a few hundred
francs from the Persian treasury; and on this he came to live in Paris.
As for Erik, he went to Asia Minor and thence to Constantinople,
where he entered the Sultan's employment. In explanation of the services
which he was able to render a monarch haunted by perpetual terrors,
I need only say that it was Erik who constructed all the famous trap-doors
and secret chambers and mysterious strong-boxes which were found
at Yildiz-Kiosk after the last Turkish revolution. He also invented
those automata, dressed like the Sultan and resembling the Sultan in
all respects,[13] which made people believe that the Commander of the
Faithful was awake at one place, when, in reality, he was asleep elsewhere.
----
[13] See the interview of the special correspondent of the MATIN,
with Mohammed-Ali Bey, on the day after the entry of the Salonika
troops into Constantinople.
Of course, he had to leave the Sultan's service for the same reasons
that made him fly from Persia: he knew too much. Then, tired of
his adventurous, formidable and monstrous life, he longed to be some
one "like everybody else." And he became a contractor, like any
ordinary contractor, building ordinary houses with ordinary bricks.
He tendered for part of the foundations in the Opera.
His estimate was accepted. When he found himself in the cellars
of the enormous playhouse, his artistic, fantastic, wizard nature
resumed the upper hand. Besides, was he not as ugly as ever?
He dreamed of creating for his own use a dwelling unknown
to the rest of the earth, where he could hide from men's eyes for all time.
The reader knows and guesses the rest. It is all in keeping with
this incredible and yet veracious story. Poor, unhappy Erik!
Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be "some one,"
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. Ah, yes, we must needs
pity the Opera ghost.
I have prayed over his mortal remains, that God might show him
mercy notwithstanding his crimes. Yes, I am sure, quite sure
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 his 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
had certainly 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 place
of the skeleton of the Opera ghost is in the archives of the National
Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.
THE END. (A bonus next chapter - The Paris Opera House - is included) _