The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux (bill gates best books .TXT) 📗

no joke in bad taste, which might have offended this visitor from the tomb. A few of those present who knew the story of the ghost and the description of him given by the chief scene-shifter⁠—they did not know of Joseph Buquet’s death⁠—thought, in their own minds, that the man at the end of the table might easily have passed for him; and yet, according to the story, the ghost had no nose and the person in question had. But M. Moncharmin declares, in his Memoirs, that the guest’s nose was transparent: “long, thin and transparent” are his exact words. I, for my part, will add that this might very well apply to a false nose. M. Moncharmin may have taken for transparency what was only shininess. Everybody knows that orthopaedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who have lost their noses naturally or as the result of an operation.

Did the ghost really take a seat at the managers’ supper-table that night, uninvited? And can we be sure that the figure was that of the Opera ghost himself? Who would venture to assert as much? I mention the incident, not because I wish for a second to make the reader believe⁠—or even to try to make him believe⁠—that the ghost was capable of such a sublime piece of impudence; but because, after all, the thing is impossible.

M. Armand Moncharmin, in chapter eleven of his Memoirs, says:

When I think of this first evening, I can not separate the secret confided to us by MM. Debienne and Poligny in their office from the presence at our supper of that ghostly person whom none of us knew.

What happened was this: MM. Debienne and Poligny, sitting at the center of the table, had not seen the man with the death’s head. Suddenly he began to speak.

“The ballet-girls are right,” he said. “The death of that poor Buquet is perhaps not so natural as people think.”

Debienne and Poligny gave a start.

“Is Buquet dead?” they cried.

“Yes,” replied the man, or the shadow of a man, quietly. “He was found, this evening, hanging in the third cellar, between a farmhouse and a scene from the Roi de Lahore.”

The two managers, or rather ex-managers, at once rose and stared strangely at the speaker. They were more excited than they need have been, that is to say, more excited than anyone need be by the announcement of the suicide of a chief scene-shifter. They looked at each other. They had both turned whiter than the tablecloth. At last, Debienne made a sign to MM. Richard and Moncharmin; Poligny muttered a few words of excuse to the guests; and all four went into the managers’ office. I leave M. Moncharmin to complete the story. In his Memoirs, he says:

MM. Debienne and Poligny seemed to grow more and more excited, and they appeared to have something very difficult to tell us. First, they asked us if we knew the man, sitting at the end of the table, who had told them of the death of Joseph Buquet; and, when we answered in the negative, they looked still more concerned. They took the master-keys from our hands, stared at them for a moment and advised us to have new locks made, with the greatest secrecy, for the rooms, closets and presses that we might wish to have hermetically closed. They said this so funnily that we began to laugh and to ask if there were thieves at the Opera. They replied that there was something worse, which was the ghost. We began to laugh again, feeling sure that they were indulging in some joke that was intended to crown our little entertainment. Then, at their request, we became “serious,” resolving to humor them and to enter into the spirit of the game. They told us that they never would have spoken to us of the ghost, if they had not received formal orders from the ghost himself to ask us to be pleasant to him and to grant any request that he might make. However, in their relief at leaving a domain where that tyrannical shade held sway, they had hesitated until the last moment to tell us this curious story, which our skeptical minds were certainly not prepared to entertain. But the announcement of the death of Joseph Buquet had served them as a brutal reminder that, whenever they had disregarded the ghost’s wishes, some fantastic or disastrous event had brought them to a sense of their dependence.

During these unexpected utterances made in a tone of the most secret and important confidence, I looked at Richard. Richard, in his student days, had acquired a great reputation for practical joking, and he seemed to relish the dish which was being served up to him in his turn. He did not miss a morsel of it, though the seasoning was a little gruesome because of the death of Buquet. He nodded his head sadly, while the others spoke, and his features assumed the air of a man who bitterly regretted having taken over the Opera, now that he knew that there was a ghost mixed up in the business. I could think of nothing better than to give him a servile imitation of this attitude of despair. However, in spite of all our efforts, we could not, at the finish, help bursting out laughing in the faces of MM. Debienne and Poligny, who, seeing us pass straight from the gloomiest state of mind to one of the most insolent merriment, acted as though they thought that we had gone mad.

The joke became a little tedious; and Richard asked half-seriously and half in jest:

“But, after all, what does this ghost of yours want?”

M. Poligny went to his desk and returned with a copy of the memorandum-book. The memorandum-book begins with the well-known words saying that “the management of the Opera shall give to the performance of the National Academy of Music the splendor that becomes the first lyric stage in France” and ends with Clause 98, which says that