VII. UNE VISITE À LA LOGE N° 5

VII

A VISIT TO BOX NO. 5

We left Messrs. Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin at the moment when they made up their minds to go and pay a little visit to the first box no. 5.

They left behind them the broad staircase leading from the administration vestibule to the stage and its dependencies; they crossed the stage (the set), they entered the theatre by the subscribers' entrance, then the auditorium by the first corridor on the left. They then slipped between the front rows of the orchestra seats and looked at the first box no. 5. They saw it poorly because it was plunged in a half-darkness and immense covers had been thrown over the red velvet of the armrests.

At that moment, they were almost alone in the immense shadowy vessel and a great silence surrounded them. It was the quiet hour when the stagehands go to drink.

The crew had momentarily emptied the set, leaving a half-erected scene; a few rays of light (a pallid, sinister light, which seemed stolen from a dying star) had insinuated themselves through who knows what opening, as far as an old tower which raised its cardboard battlements upon the stage; things, in that artificial night, or rather in that lying daylight, took on strange shapes. Upon the orchestra seats, the cloth which covered them had the appearance of a raging sea, whose greenish waves had been instantly immobilized at the secret order of the giant of tempests, who, as everyone knows, is called Adamastor. Messrs. Moncharmin and Richard were the shipwrecked of that motionless upheaval of a sea of painted cloth. They advanced toward the boxes on the left, with great strokes of the arm, like sailors who have abandoned their boat and seek to reach the shore. The eight great columns in polished escallop rose in the shadow like so many prodigious piles destined to support the threatening, crumbling, and bulging cliff, whose courses were figured by the circular, parallel, and sagging lines of the balconies of the first, second, and third boxes. From high up, from the very top of the cliff, lost in the copper sky of M. Lenepveu, faces grimaced, sneered, mocked, and jeered at the uneasiness of Messrs. Moncharmin and Richard. They were, however, very serious faces ordinarily. They were called: Isis, Amphitrite, Hebe, Flora, Pandora, Psyche, Thetis, Pomona, Daphne, Clythie, Galatea, Arethusa. Yes, Arethusa herself and Pandora, whom everyone knows because of her box, looked at the two new directors of the Opera who had ended by clinging to some wreckage, and who, from there, silently contemplated the first box no. 5. I said they were uneasy. At least, I presume so. M. Moncharmin, in any case, admits that he was impressed. He says textually: "That 'swing' (what a style!) of the phantom of the Opera, upon which we had been so kindly made to mount, since we took over from Messrs. Poligny and Debienne, had no doubt ended by troubling the equilibrium of my imaginative faculties, and, all things considered, visual ones, for (was it the exceptional set in which we moved, at the center of an incredible silence which impressed us to that point?... were we the plaything of a sort of hallucination made possible by the near-darkness of the house and the dim light which bathed box no. 5?) for I saw, and Richard also saw, at the same moment, a shape in box no. 5. Richard said nothing; nor did I, for that matter. But we took each other's hand with the same gesture. Then, we waited thus for a few minutes, without moving, our eyes still fixed on the same point: but the shape had disappeared. Then, we went out and, in the corridor, we shared our impressions and we spoke of the shape. The misfortune is that my shape, mine, was not at all Richard's shape. I had seen like a death's head which was placed on the edge of the box, while Richard had caught sight of the shape of an old woman who resembled Mme. Giry. So much so that we saw that we had really been the plaything of an illusion and that we ran without further delay and laughing like madmen to the first box no. 5, into which we entered and in which we found no shape whatsoever."

And now here we are in box no. 5.

It is a box like all the other first boxes. Truly, nothing distinguishes this box from its neighbors.

Messrs. Moncharmin and Richard, ostentatiously amusing themselves and laughing at one another, moved the furniture of the box, lifted the covers and the seats and examined in particular the one upon which the voice used to sit. But they ascertained that it was an honest armchair, which had nothing magical about it. In short, the box was the most ordinary of boxes, with its red upholstery, its armchairs, its carpet, and its red velvet armrest. After having felt most seriously in the world the carpet and having, on that side as on the others, discovered nothing special, they went down into the pit below, which corresponded to box no. 5. In the pit no. 5, which is just at the corner of the first left exit of the orchestra seats, they found nothing either that merited being noted.

"All those people are making fun of us," Firmin Richard finally cried; "on Saturday, Faust is playing, we will attend the performance, both of us, in the first box no. 5!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”