I. EST-CE LE FANTÔME?

I

IS IT THE PHANTOM?

That evening, which was the one on which Messrs. Debienne and Poligny, the resigning directors of the Opera, were giving their last gala performance on the occasion of their departure, the box of the Sorelli—one of the leading dancers—was suddenly invaded by half a dozen of those young ladies of the corps de ballet who were coming up from the stage after having “danced” *Polyeucte*. They rushed in in great confusion, some uttering excessive and unnatural laughter, and others cries of terror.

The Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment to “rehearse” the little speech she was to deliver presently in the foyer before Messrs. Debienne and Poligny, had seen with ill humor all this giddy crowd come rushing in behind her. She turned toward her companions and inquired into the cause of so tumultuous an agitation. It was little Jammes—the nose dear to Grévin, forget-me-not eyes, rose cheeks, a lily bosom—who gave the reason in three words, in a trembling voice stifled by anguish:

“It is the phantom!”

And she locked the door. The Sorelli’s box was of an official and banal elegance. A cheval glass, a divan, a dressing table and wardrobes made up its necessary furniture. A few engravings on the walls, souvenirs of her mother, who had known the fine days of the old Opera on the rue Le Peletier. Portraits of Vestris, of Gardel, of Dupont, of Bigottini. This box seemed a palace to the girls of the corps de ballet, who were lodged in common rooms, where they spent their time singing, quarreling, beating the hairdressers and dressers, and treating themselves to little glasses of cassis or beer or even rum until the warning bell rang.

The Sorelli was very superstitious. On hearing little Jammes speak of the phantom, she shuddered and said:

“Silly child!”

And as she was the first to believe in phantoms in general and in that of the Opera in particular, she at once wished to be informed.

“Did you see him?” she asked.

“As I see you!” replied little Jammes, moaning, who, no longer able to stand on her legs, let herself fall into a chair.

And immediately little Giry—prune-like features, ink-black hair, a bistre complexion, her poor little skin on her poor little bones—added:

“If it is he, he is very ugly!”

“Oh! yes,” said the chorus of dancers.

And they all spoke at once. The phantom had appeared to them in the form of a gentleman in a black dress coat who had suddenly risen up before them, in the corridor, without one being able to know whence he came. His appearance had been so sudden that one might have thought he issued from the wall.

“Bah!” said one of them who had more or less kept her presence of mind, “you see the phantom everywhere.”

And it is true that, for some months past, nothing was spoken of at the Opera but this phantom in a black coat who walked like a shadow, from top to bottom of the building, who spoke to no one, to whom no one dared speak, and who vanished, moreover, as soon as he had been seen, without one being able to know by where or how. He made no noise in walking, as befits a true phantom. They had begun by laughing and mocking at this revenant dressed like a man of the world or like an undertaker, but the legend of the phantom had soon taken colossal proportions in the corps de ballet. All claimed to have met more or less this extra-natural being and to have been victims of his evil spells. And those who laughed the loudest were not the most reassured. When he did not show himself, he signaled his presence or his passage by droll or fatal events for which the almost general superstition held him responsible. Had there been an accident to deplore, had a comrade played a trick on one of those young ladies of the corps, had a rice-powder puff been lost? All was the fault of the phantom, the phantom of the Opera!

After all, who had seen him? One may meet so many black coats at the Opera which are not phantoms. But that one had a specialty which not all black coats possess. He clothed a skeleton.

At least, those young ladies said so.

And he had, naturally, a death’s head.

Was all that serious? The truth is that the idea of the skeleton was born of the description given of the phantom by Joseph Buquet, the chief machinist, who, he, had really seen him. He had run into—one cannot say “face to face,” for the phantom had none—the mysterious personage on the little staircase which, near the rail, leads directly down to the “lower regions.” He had had time to perceive him for a second—for the phantom had fled—and had kept an ineffaceable memory of that vision.

And here is what Joseph Buquet said of the phantom to whoever would hear him:

“He is of a prodigious thinness and his black coat floats upon a skeletal frame. His eyes are so deep that one cannot well distinguish the motionless pupils. One sees, in short, only two great black holes such as are in the skulls of the dead. His skin, which is stretched upon the bones like a drumhead, is not white, but vilely yellow; his nose is so little that it is invisible in profile, and *the absence* of this nose is a horrible thing *to behold.* Three or four long brown locks on the forehead and behind the ears do duty for hair.”

In vain had Joseph Buquet pursued this strange apparition. It had disappeared as if by magic and he had not been able to find its trace.

This chief machinist was a serious man, steady, of a slow imagination, and he was sober. His word was listened to with stupor and interest, and at once there were found people to relate that they too had met a black coat with a death’s head.

Sensible persons who got wind of this story affirmed at first that Joseph Buquet had been the victim of a joke played by one of his subordinates. And then there occurred, one upon another, incidents so curious and so inexplicable that the cleverest began to be troubled.

A lieutenant of firemen, that’s brave! He fears nothing, he fears especially not fire!

Well! the lieutenant of firemen in question[2], who had gone to make a tour of inspection in the lower regions and who had ventured, it seems, a little farther than usual, had suddenly reappeared upon the stage, pale, terrified, trembling, his eyes out of their sockets, and had all but fainted in the arms of the noble mother of little Jammes. And why? Because he had seen advancing toward him, *at the height of a head, but without a body, a head of fire!* And I repeat, a lieutenant of firemen, that fears not fire.

This lieutenant of firemen was named Papin.

The corps de ballet was consternated. First, this head of fire answered in no way to the description given of the phantom by Joseph Buquet. They questioned the fireman well, they interrogated anew the chief machinist, after which these young ladies were persuaded that the phantom had several heads of which he changed as he wished. Naturally, they at once imagined that they ran the greatest dangers. From the moment a lieutenant of firemen did not hesitate to faint, coryphées and little rats might invoke many excuses for the terror which made them flee with all their little paws when they passed before some dark hole of a poorly lighted corridor.

So that, to protect as far as possible the monument devoted to such horrible spells, the Sorelli herself, surrounded by all the dancers and even followed by all the brood of the little classes in tights, had—on the morrow of the story of the lieutenant of firemen—upon the table which stands in the concierge’s vestibule, on the side of the administration courtyard, deposited a horseshoe which whoever entered the Opera, under any other title than that of spectator, must touch before setting foot on the first step of the staircase. And this under pain of becoming the prey of the occult power which had seized upon the building, from the cellars to the attic!

This horseshoe as well as all this story, moreover—alas!—I have not invented, and one may still today see it upon the vestibule table, before the concierge’s lodge, when one enters the Opera by the administration courtyard.

This gives quite rapidly an idea of the state of mind of those young ladies, on the evening when we enter with them into the Sorelli’s box.

“It is the phantom!” little Jammes had therefore cried.

And the uneasiness of the dancers had but increased. Now, an anguishing silence reigned in the box. Nothing was heard but the sound of panting breaths. At last, Jammes, throwing herself with marks of sincere fright into the farthest corner of the wall, murmured this single word:

“Listen!”

It seemed, indeed, to everyone that a rustling was heard behind the door. No sound of steps. It was like a light silk gliding upon the panel. Then, nothing more. The Sorelli tried to show herself less pusillanimous than her companions. She advanced toward the door, and asked in a colorless voice:

“Who is there?”

But no one answered her.

Then, feeling upon her all the eyes which spied her slightest gestures, she forced herself to be brave and said very loud:

“Is there someone behind the door?”

“Oh! yes! Yes! certainly, there is someone behind the door!” repeated that dry little prune of a Meg Giry, who heroically held back the Sorelli by her gauze skirt… Above all, do not open! My God, do not open!”

But the Sorelli, armed with a little dagger which never left her, dared to turn the key in the lock, and open the door, while the dancers drew back even into the dressing closet and Meg Giry sighed:

“Mamma! mamma!”

The Sorelli looked into the corridor, courageously. It was deserted; a firefly, in its glass prison, cast a red and muddy gleam within the ambient shadows, without succeeding in dispelling them. And the dancer quickly closed the door again with a great sigh.

“No,” said she, “there is no one!”

“And yet, we saw him well!” affirmed Jammes again, resuming with timid little steps her place beside the Sorelli. “He must be somewhere, about there, lurking. I am not going back to dress. We should all go down to the foyer, together, at once, for the ‘speech,’ and we would come up together.”

Thereupon, the child piously touched the little coral finger which was destined to conjure away ill luck. And the Sorelli traced, stealthily, with the tip of the pink nail of her right thumb, a St. Andrew’s cross upon the wooden ring which circled the ring finger of her left hand.

“The Sorelli,” wrote a celebrated chronicler, “is a tall, beautiful dancer, with a grave and voluptuous face, with a waist as supple as a branch of willow; it is commonly said of her that she is ‘a fine creature.’ Her hair, blond and pure as gold, crowns a dull brow beneath which are set two emerald eyes. Her head sways softly like a plume upon a long, elegant and proud neck. When she dances, she has a certain movement of the hips indescribable, which gives to all her body a quivering of ineffable languor. When she raises her arms and bends to begin a pirouette, thus accentuating all the line of the bodice, and the inclination of the body makes prominent the hip of this delicious woman, it appears that it is a picture to drive one mad.”

As for brains, it appears established that she had scarce any. She was not blamed for it.

She said again to the little dancers:

“Children, you must ‘compose’ yourselves!… The phantom? Perhaps no one has ever seen him!…”

“Yes! yes! We saw him!… we saw him just now!” resumed the little ones. “He had the death’s head and his coat, like the evening he appeared to Joseph Buquet!”

“And Gabriel saw him too!” said Jammes… “no later than yesterday! yesterday afternoon… in broad daylight…”

“Gabriel, the singing master?”

“But yes… How! you do not know that?”

“And he had his coat, in broad daylight?”

“Who? Gabriel?”

“But no! The phantom?”

“Sure enough, he had his coat!” affirmed Jammes. “It is Gabriel himself who told me… It is even by that that he recognized him. And here is how it happened. Gabriel was in the stage manager’s office. Suddenly, the door opened. It was the Persian who was entering. You know if the Persian has the ‘evil eye’.”

“Oh! yes!” answered in chorus the little dancers who, as soon as they had evoked the image of the Persian, made horns at Fate with their index and little finger extended, while the middle and ring fingers were folded upon the palm and held by the thumb.

“… And if Gabriel is superstitious!” continued Jammes, “yet he is always polite and when he sees the Persian, he contents himself with quietly putting his hand in his pocket and touching his keys… Well! as soon as the door opened before the Persian, Gabriel made but one bound from the armchair where he sat to the lock of the wardrobe, to touch iron! In this movement, he tore a whole panel of his overcoat on a nail. In his haste to get out, he went and struck his forehead against a peg and made himself an enormous bump; then, in abruptly recoiling, he scraped his arm on the screen, near the piano; he wished to lean on the piano, but so unhappily that the lid fell back upon his hands and crushed his fingers; he leaped like a madman out of the office and finally took his time so ill in descending the staircase that he tumbled on his back all the steps of the first floor. I was passing just then with mamma. We rushed to pick him up. He was all bruised and had his face full of blood, which frightened us. But immediately he began to smile at us and to cry: ‘Thank God! to have got off with so little!’ Then, we questioned him and he told us all his fright. It had come to him from having perceived, behind the Persian, the phantom! *the phantom with the death’s head*, as Joseph Buquet described him.”

A terrified murmur greeted the end of this story at the end of which Jammes arrived quite out of breath, so fast had she narrated it, as if she were pursued by the phantom. And then, there was again a silence which was interrupted, in a low voice, by little Giry, while the Sorelli, much moved, polished her nails.

“Joseph Buquet had better hold his tongue,” pronounced the prune.

“Why should he hold his tongue?” they asked her.

“It is mamma’s opinion…” replied Meg, quite in a low voice this time, and looking around her as if she feared being heard by other ears than those which were there.

“And why is it your mother’s opinion?”

“Hush! Mamma says the phantom does not like to be annoyed!”

“And why does your mother say that?”

“Because… Because… nothing…”

This learned reticence had the gift of exasperating the curiosity of those young ladies, who pressed around little Giry and besought her to explain. They were there, elbow to elbow, bent in the same movement of prayer and fright. They communicated their fear to one another, taking in it an acute pleasure which chilled them.

“I swore to say nothing!” said Meg again, in a breath.

But they gave her no rest and they promised secrecy so well that Meg, who burned with desire to tell what she knew, began, her eyes fixed upon the door:

“Here… it is because of the box…”

“What box?”

“The phantom’s box!”

“The phantom has a box?”

At this idea that the phantom had his box, the dancers could not contain the fatal joy of their stupefaction. They uttered little sighs. They said:

“Oh! my God! tell… tell…”

“Lower!” commanded Meg. “It is the first box, number 5, you know well, the first box next to the left proscenium.”

“Impossible!”

“It is as I tell you… It is mamma who is the box opener… But you surely swear to say nothing?”

“But yes, go on!…”

“Well! it is the phantom’s box… No one has come there for more than a month, except the phantom, of course, and orders have been given to the management never to let it again…”

“And is it true that the phantom comes there?”

“But yes…”

“Then someone comes there?”

“But no!… *The phantom comes there and there is no one.*”

The little dancers looked at one another. If the phantom came into the box, one must see him, since he had a black coat and a death’s head. This they made Meg understand, but she replied:

“Exactly! One does not see the phantom! And he has neither coat nor head!… All that has been told of his death’s head and his head of fire, is nonsense! He has nothing at all… One only hears him when he is in the box. Mamma has never seen him, but she has heard him. Mamma knows well, since it is she who gives him the program!”

The Sorelli thought she ought to intervene:

“Little Giry, you are mocking us.”

Then little Giry began to cry.

“I had better have held my tongue… if mamma ever knew that!… but sure enough Joseph Buquet is wrong to busy himself with things that concern him not… it will bring him misfortune… mamma was saying so again last night…”

At that moment, heavy and hurried steps were heard in the corridor and a breathless voice which cried:

“Cécile! Cécile! are you there?”

“It is mamma’s voice!” said Jammes. “What is the matter?”

And she opened the door. An honorable lady, built like a Pomeranian grenadier, rushed into the box and let herself fall moaning into an armchair. Her eyes rolled, affrighted, lugubriously lighting her face of baked brick.

“What a misfortune!” said she… “What a misfortune!”

“What? What?”

“Joseph Buquet…”

“Well! Joseph Buquet…”

“Joseph Buquet is dead!”

The box filled with exclamations, astonished protests, affrighted demands for explanation…

“Yes… he has just been found hanged in the third lower region!… *But the most terrible,*” continued, panting, the poor honorable lady, *“the most terrible is that the machinists who found his body pretend that there was heard around the corpse a noise which resembled the chant of the dead!”*

“It is the phantom!” let escape, as despite herself, little Giry, but she immediately recovered herself, her fists to her mouth: “no!… no!… I said nothing!… I said nothing!…”

Around her, all her companions, terrified, repeated in a low voice:

“Sure enough! It is the phantom!…”

The Sorelli was pale…

“Never shall I be able to say my speech,” said she.

Jammes’s mamma gave her opinion in emptying a little glass of liqueur which stood upon a table: there must be some phantom in that…

The truth is that one has never well known how Joseph Buquet died. The summary inquiry gave no result, outside of *natural suicide*. In the *Memoirs of a Director*, M. Moncharmin, who was one of the two directors, succeeding MM. Debienne and Poligny, relates the incident of the hanged man thus:

“An annoying accident came to trouble the little fête which MM. Debienne and Poligny were giving to celebrate their departure. I was in the management office when I saw suddenly enter Mercier—the administrator.—He was distraught in telling me that they had just discovered, hanged in the third lower region of the stage, between a flat and a set of *The King of Lahore*, the body of a machinist. I cried: Go cut him down! The time I took to tumble down the staircase and descend the fly ladder, the hanged man no longer had his rope!”

Here then is an event which M. Moncharmin finds natural. A man is hanged at the end of a rope, one goes to cut him down, the rope has disappeared. Oh! M. Moncharmin has found a very simple explanation. Listen to him: *It was the hour of the dance, and coryphées and rats had quickly taken their precautions against the evil eye.* A point, that is all. You see here the corps de ballet descending the fly ladder and dividing the hanged man’s rope in less time than it takes to write it. That is not serious. When I think, on the contrary, of the exact spot where the body was found—in the third lower region of the stage—I imagine that there might be *somewhere* an interest in this rope disappearing after it had done its work, and we shall see later if I am wrong to have that imagination.

The sinister news had quickly spread from top to bottom of the Opera, where Joseph Buquet was much loved. The boxes emptied, and the little dancers, grouped around the Sorelli like fearful sheep around the shepherd, took the path to the foyer, through the corridors and poorly lighted staircases, trotting with all the haste of their little pink paws.

[Note 2: I hold this anecdote also to be very authentic, from M. Pedro Gailliard himself, former director of the Opera.]

“Stories of the world, in your language.”