VIII. OÙ MM. FIRMIN RICHARD, ET ARMAND MONCHARMIN ONT L'AUDACE DE FAIRE

VIII

WHERE MESSRS. FIRMIN RICHARD AND ARMAND MONCHARMIN HAVE THE AUDACITY TO HAVE “FAUST” PERFORMED IN A “CURSED” HOUSE, AND OF THE HORRIFYING EVENT THAT RESULTED

But on Saturday morning, upon arriving at their office, the managers found a double letter from the O.G. worded as follows:

“My dear managers,

“So it is war?

“If you still wish for peace, here is my ultimatum.

“It is subject to the following four conditions:

“1. Return my box to me—and I require that it be at my free disposal from this moment on;

“2. The role of ‘Marguerite’ shall be sung this evening by Christine Daaé. Do not concern yourselves with Carlotta, who will be ill;

“3. I absolutely require the good and loyal services of Mme Giry, my box-keeper, whom you shall immediately reinstate in her functions;

“4. Inform me by a letter given to Mme Giry, who will see that it reaches me, that you accept, as did your predecessors, the conditions of my specifications regarding my monthly stipend. I shall later make known to you the manner in which you are to pay it.

“_Otherwise, you shall give_ Faust _this evening in a cursed house._

“To the wise, a warning!

“F. OF THE O.”

—Well! he’s a nuisance, that one!... A nuisance! roared Richard, raising his vengeful fists and letting them fall with a crash upon his desk.

At that moment Mercier, the administrator, entered.

—Lachenal would like to see one of you gentlemen, he said. The matter appears urgent, and the old fellow seems quite distraught.

—Who is this Lachenal? asked Richard.

—He is your chief equerry.

—What! my chief equerry?

—Why yes, sir, explained Mercier... there are several equerries at the Opera, and M. Lachenal is their chief.

—And what does this equerry do?

—He has the high direction of the stable.

—What stable?

—Why, yours, sir, the Opera’s stable.

—There is a stable at the Opera? Upon my word, I knew nothing of it! And where is it?

—In the lower depths, toward the Rotonde. It is a very important service; we have twelve horses.

—Twelve horses! And what on earth for?

—Why, for the processions in _La Juive_, _Le Prophète_, etc.; we need trained horses that “know the boards.” The equerries are charged with teaching them. M. Lachenal is very skilled at it. He is the former director of Franconi’s stables.

—Very well... but what does he want with me?

—I know not... I have never seen him in such a state.

—Show him in!...

M. Lachenal enters. He has a riding crop in his hand and nervously lashes one of his boots with it.

—Good day, M. Lachenal, said Richard, impressed. To what do we owe the honor of your visit?

—Mr. Manager, I have come to ask you to throw the entire stable out of doors.

—What! you wish to throw our horses out of doors?

—It is not a question of the horses, but of the grooms!

—How many grooms do you have, M. Lachenal?

—Six!

—Six grooms! That is at least two too many!

—Those are “positions,” interrupted Mercier, which were created and imposed upon us by the under-secretariat of Fine Arts. They are occupied by protégés of the government, and if I may venture...

—The government, I couldn’t care less!... affirmed Richard with energy. We have no need of more than four grooms for twelve horses.

—Eleven! corrected the chief equerry.

—Twelve! repeated Richard.

—Eleven! repeated Lachenal.

—Ah! it was the administrator who told me you had twelve horses!

—I had twelve, but I have had only eleven since César was stolen from us!

And M. Lachenal gave his boot a great swipe with the crop.

—César has been stolen from us, cried the administrator; César, the white horse from _Le Prophète_.

—There is no second César! declared the chief equerry in a dry tone. I spent ten years with Franconi and I have seen horses! Well, there is no second César! And he has been stolen from us.

—How so?

—Eh! I know nothing of it! No one knows anything! That is why I have come to ask you to throw the entire stable out of doors.

—What do your grooms say?

—Foolishness... some accuse extras... others claim it is the concierge of the administration.

—The concierge of the administration? I would answer for him as for myself! protested Mercier.

—But finally, Mr. Chief Equerry, cried Richard, you must have an idea!...

—Well! yes, I have one! I have one! suddenly declared M. Lachenal, and I shall tell it to you. As for me, there is no doubt.—The chief equerry drew near the managers and whispered in their ear:—_It is the phantom who did the deed!_

Richard started.

—Ah! you too! You too!

—What? I too? It is the most natural thing...

—But how now! M. Lachenal! but how now, Mr. Chief Equerry...

—... that I should tell you what I think, after what I have seen...

—And what have you seen, M. Lachenal?

—I saw, as I see you now, a black shadow mounting a white horse that resembled César as two drops of water!

—And you did not run after that white horse and that black shadow?

—I ran and I called, Mr. Manager, but they fled with a disconcerting rapidity and disappeared into the night of the gallery...

M. Richard rose:

—That will do, M. Lachenal. You may withdraw... we shall file a complaint against the _phantom_...

—And you will throw my stable out of doors!

—It is understood! Good-bye, sir!

M. Lachenal bowed and left.

Richard was foaming.

—You will settle the account of that imbecile!

—He is a friend of the government commissioner! ventured Mercier...

—And he takes his aperitif at Tortoni’s with Lagréné, Scholl and Pertuiset, the lion-killer, added Moncharmin. We shall set the entire press against us! He will tell the story of the phantom and everyone will laugh at our expense! If we are ridiculous, we are done for!

—Very well, let us speak of it no more... conceded Richard, who was already thinking of something else.

At that moment the door opened and, doubtless, that door was not then guarded by its ordinary Cerberus, for Mame Giry was seen to enter abruptly, a letter in her hand, and say hastily:

—Pardon, excuse me, gentlemen, but I received a letter this morning from the phantom of the Opera. He tells me to stop by your office, that you supposedly have something to give me...

She did not finish her sentence. She saw the face of Firmin Richard, and it was terrible. The honorable director of the Opera was ready to explode. The fury that agitated him was as yet outwardly expressed only by the scarlet color of his furious face and the flash of his lightning eyes. He said nothing. He could not speak. But suddenly his gesture flew. First the left arm undertook the frail person of Mame Giry and made her describe so unexpected a half-turn, so rapid a pirouette, that she uttered a cry of despair; and then it was the right foot, the right foot of the same honorable director, that went to imprint its sole upon the black taffeta of a skirt which, certainly, had never before in such a place suffered such an outrage.

The event had been so precipitate that when Mame Giry found herself again in the gallery, she was still dazed and seemed not to understand. But suddenly she understood, and the Opera rang with her indignant cries, her fierce protests, her death threats. It took three boys to lead her down into the administration courtyard and two policemen to carry her into the street.

At about the same hour, Carlotta, who lived in a small hotel on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, rang for her lady’s maid and had her correspondence brought to her in bed. Among this correspondence she found an anonymous letter which said to her:

“If you sing this evening, fear that a great misfortune shall befall you at the very moment you sing... a misfortune worse than death.”

This threat was traced in red ink, in a hesitant, scratchy hand.

Having read this letter, Carlotta lost all appetite for breakfast. She pushed away the tray on which the maid presented her with steaming chocolate. She sat upon her bed and reflected deeply. This was not the first letter of its kind she had received, but never had she read one so threatening.

She believed herself at that moment the target of a thousand jealous enterprises and readily recounted that she had a secret enemy who had sworn her ruin. She claimed that some wicked plot was being hatched against her, some cabal that would erupt one of these days; but she was not a woman to be intimidated, she added.

The truth was that, if there was a cabal, it was led by Carlotta herself against poor Christine, who little suspected it. Carlotta had not forgiven Christine the triumph she had won in replacing her at a moment’s notice.

When she had been told of the extraordinary reception accorded her substitute, Carlotta had instantly felt cured of a beginning bronchitis and a fit of sulking against the management, and she had shown not the slightest inclination to leave her post. Since then she had worked with all her strength to “smother” her rival, setting powerful friends to work upon the managers so that they would give Christine no further occasion for a new triumph. Certain newspapers that had begun to sing Christine’s praises now occupied themselves only with Carlotta’s glory. Finally, at the theatre itself, the celebrated diva held the most insulting discourse about Christine and tried to cause her a thousand little annoyances.

Carlotta had neither heart nor soul. She was but an instrument! Certainly, a marvelous instrument. Her repertoire included all that can tempt the ambition of a great artist, as well among the German masters as among the Italians or the French. Never, until that day, had Carlotta been heard to sing false, nor to lack the volume of voice necessary for the rendering of any passage of her immense repertoire. In short, the instrument was broad, powerful and of admirable precision. But no one could have said to Carlotta what Rossini said to Krauss, after she had sung for him in German “Sombres forêts?...”: “You sing with your soul, my daughter, and your soul is beautiful!”

Where was your soul, O Carlotta, when you danced in the dives of Barcelona? Where was it, when later, in Paris, you sang upon sad boards your cynical couplets as a music-hall bacchante? Where your soul, when, before the masters assembled at the home of one of your lovers, you made resonate that docile instrument, whose marvel was that it sang with the same indifferent perfection the sublime love and the lowest orgy? O Carlotta, if ever you had had a soul and had then lost it, you would have found it again when you became Juliette, when you were Elvire, and Ophélie, and Marguerite! For others have risen from lower than you and whom art, aided by love, has purified!

Truly, when I think of all the pettiness, the vileness that Christine Daaé had to suffer at that time at the hands of this Carlotta, I cannot restrain my wrath, and it surprises me not that my indignation should express itself in somewhat vast insights upon art in general, and that of song in particular, wherein the admirers of Carlotta will certainly find nothing to their taste.

When Carlotta had finished reflecting upon the threat of the strange letter she had just received, she rose.

—We shall see about that, she said... And she uttered, in Spanish, a few oaths, with a very resolute air.

The first thing she saw upon putting her nose to the window was a hearse. The hearse and the letter persuaded her that she ran, that very evening, the most serious dangers. She gathered at her home the whole host and rear-guard of her friends, told them she was threatened, at the evening performance, by a cabal organized by Christine Daaé, and declared that they must counter this little one by filling the house with her own admirers, hers, Carlotta’s. She lacked none, did she not? She counted on them to be ready for any eventuality and to silence the troublemakers, if, as she feared, they unleashed scandal.

The private secretary of M. Richard having come to inquire after the health of the diva, returned with the assurance that she was marvelously well and that, “were she at death’s door,” she would sing that very evening the role of Marguerite. As the secretary had, on behalf of his chief, strongly recommended to the diva that she commit no imprudence, that she not leave her home, and that she guard against drafts, Carlotta could not help, after his departure, linking these exceptional and unexpected recommendations to the threats inscribed in the letter.

It was five o’clock when she received by post a new anonymous letter in the same hand as the first. It was brief. It said simply: “You have a cold; were you reasonable, you would understand that it is folly to wish to sing this evening.”

Carlotta sneered, shrugged her shoulders, which were magnificent, and launched two or three notes that reassured her.

Her friends were faithful to their promise. They were all, that evening, at the Opera, but in vain did they search around them for those ferocious conspirators they had been charged to combat. If one excepted some profane ones, some honest bourgeois whose placid faces reflected no other design than that of hearing again a music which, long since, had won their favor, there were there only habitués whose elegant, peaceful and correct manners excluded any idea of demonstration. The only thing that appeared abnormal was the presence of MM. Richard and Moncharmin in box no. 5. The friends of Carlotta thought that perhaps the gentlemen managers, for their part, had wind of the projected scandal and had wished to be in the house to stop it as soon as it broke out, but that was an unjustified hypothesis, as you know; MM. Richard and Moncharmin thought only of their phantom.

Nothing?... In vain I question in ardent vigil Nature and the Creator. Not a voice slips to my ear A consoling word!

The celebrated baritone Carolus Fonta had scarcely launched the first invocation of Doctor Faust to the powers of hell, when M. Firmin Richard, who had seated himself upon the very chair of the phantom—the chair on the right, in the front row—leaned, in the best of humors, toward his associate, and said to him:

—And you, has a voice yet slipped a word to your ear?

—Let us wait! let us not be too hasty, answered on the same joking tone M. Armand Moncharmin. The performance is only just beginning and you know well that the phantom does not usually arrive until about the middle of the first act.

The first act passed without incident, which surprised not the friends of Carlotta, since Marguerite, in that act, sings not at all. As for the two managers, at the lowering of the curtain, they looked at one another smiling:

—So far so good! said Moncharmin.

—Yes, the phantom is late, declared Firmin Richard.

Moncharmin, ever jesting, resumed:

—On the whole, the house is not too badly composed this evening _for a cursed house_.

M. Richard deigned to smile. He pointed out to his colleague a good stout lady rather vulgarly dressed in black who was seated in an armchair in the middle of the house and who was flanked by two men, of rustic bearing in their cloth frock-coats.

—What is that “sort of people”? asked Moncharmin.

—That sort of people, my dear, is my concierge, her brother and her husband.

—You gave them tickets?

—Why yes... My concierge had never been to the Opera... it is the first time... and as, now, she must come every evening, I wished her to be well placed before spending her time placing others.

Moncharmin asked for explanations and Richard told him that he had, for some time, decided his concierge, in whom he had the greatest confidence, should take the place of Mam’ Giry.

—Speaking of Mother Giry, said Moncharmin, you know she is going to file a complaint against you.

—With whom? With the phantom?

The phantom! Moncharmin had almost forgotten him.

Moreover, the mysterious personage did nothing to recall himself to the memory of the managers.

Suddenly, the door of their box opened abruptly before the dismayed stage manager.

—What is it? they both asked, astonished to see him in such a place, at such a moment.

—There is, said the stage manager, a cabal mounted by the friends of Christine Daaé against Carlotta. The latter is furious.

—What is this story now? said Richard, frowning.

But the curtain was rising on the Kermesse and the manager signaled the stage manager to withdraw.

When the stage manager had cleared out, Moncharmin leaned to Richard’s ear:

—So Daaé has friends? he asked.

—Yes, said Richard, she has some.

—Who?

Richard indicated with his gaze a first box in which there were but two men.

—The Count de Chagny?

—Yes, he recommended her to me... so warmly, that if I did not know him to be a friend of Sorelli...

—Well! well!... murmured Moncharmin.

And who is that young man so pale, seated beside him?

—It is his brother, the viscount.

—He would do better to go to bed. He looks ill.

The stage resounded with joyful songs. Drunkenness in music. Triumph of the goblet.

Wine or beer, Beer or wine, May my glass Be full!

Students, bourgeois, soldiers, young girls and matrons, light of heart, whirled before the cabaret beneath the sign of the god Bacchus. Siebel made his entrance.

Christine Daaé was charming in travesty. Her fresh youth, her melancholy grace seduced at first sight. At once, the partisans of Carlotta imagined she was about to be hailed with an ovation that would inform them of the intentions of her friends. This indiscreet ovation would, moreover, have been of signal clumsiness. It did not occur.

On the contrary, when Marguerite crossed the stage and had sung the only two verses of her role in this second act:

No gentlemen, I am neither maiden nor fair, And I have no need For any to give me his hand!

exploding bravos welcomed Carlotta. It was so unforeseen and so needless that those who were in the know of nothing looked at one another asking what was happening, and the act again ended without any incident. Everyone then said: “It will be for the next act, evidently.” Some, who were, it seems, better informed than the others, affirmed that the “uproar” must begin at the “Cup of the King of Thulé,” and they rushed toward the subscribers’ entrance to go warn Carlotta.

The managers left the box during this intermission to inquire into this cabal story of which the stage manager had spoken, but they soon returned to their places shrugging their shoulders and calling the whole affair nonsense. The first thing they saw upon entering was, upon the ledge of the box, a box of English candies. Who had brought it there? They questioned the box-keepers. But no one could inform them. Then, turning again toward the ledge, they perceived this time, beside the box of English candies, an opera glass. They looked at one another. They had no mind to laugh. All that Mme Giry had told them came back to memory... and then... it seemed to them that there was about them like a strange draft of air... They sat down in silence, genuinely impressed.

The scene represented the garden of Marguerite...

Bear her my avowals, Carry my vows...

As she sang these first two verses, a bouquet of roses and lilacs in her hand, Christine, raising her head, caught sight in her box of the Vicomte de Chagny and thenceforth it seemed to all that her voice was less sure, less pure, less crystalline than usual. Something unknown deafened, weighed down her song... There was, beneath it, trembling and fear.

—Queer girl, remarked almost aloud a friend of Carlotta placed in the orchestra... The other evening she was divine and today, there she quavers. No experience, no method!

It is in you that I have faith, Speak for me.

The viscount buried his face in his hands. He wept. The count, behind him, violently bit the tip of his mustache, shrugged his shoulders and frowned. That the count, ordinarily so correct and so cold, should translate his intimate sentiments by so many outward signs, he must have been furious. He was. He had seen his brother return from a rapid and mysterious journey in an alarming state of health. The explanations that followed had doubtless not had the virtue of reassuring the count who, desirous of knowing where he stood, had requested a meeting with Christine Daaé. She had had the audacity to answer him that she could receive neither him nor his brother. He believed in an abominable calculation. He did not forgive Christine for making Raoul suffer, but above all he did not forgive Raoul for suffering for Christine. Ah! he had been wrong to interest himself for an instant in this little one, whose triumph of one evening remained incomprehensible to all.

That the flower upon her lips Know at least to lay A sweet kiss.

—Little minx, go on, grumbled the count.

And he wondered what she wanted... what she could hope for... She was pure, so she said, without friend, without protector of any sort... this angel of the North must be sly!

Raoul, he, behind his hands, curtain hiding his child’s tears, thought only of the letter he had received upon his return to Paris where Christine had arrived before him, having fled Perros like a thief: “My dear old little friend, you must have the courage to see me no more, to speak to me no more... if you love me a little, do that for me, for me who shall never forget you... my dear Raoul. Above all, never enter my box again. My life depends on it. Yours depends on it. Your little Christine.”

A thunder of applause... It is Carlotta making her entrance.

The garden act unfolded with its accustomed peripeteia.

When Marguerite had finished singing the air of the King of Thulé, she was acclaimed; she was again when she had ended the jewels air:

Ah! I laugh to see myself So fair in this mirror...

Thenceforth, sure of herself, sure of her friends in the house, sure of her voice and her success, fearing nothing more, Carlotta gave herself wholly, with ardor, with enthusiasm, with intoxication. Her playing had no further restraint nor shame... It was no longer Marguerite, it was Carmen. She was but the more applauded, and her duet with Faust seemed to prepare her a new success, when there suddenly occurred... something horrifying.

Faust had knelt:

Let me, let me contemplate your face Beneath the pale light With which the star of night, as in a cloud, Caresses your beauty.

And Marguerite answered:

O silence! O happiness! ineffable mystery! Intoxicating languor! I listen!... And I understand this solitary voice That sings in my heart!

At that moment then... at that very moment... there occurred something... I said something horrifying...

... The house, with a single movement, had risen... In their box, the two managers cannot restrain an exclamation of horror... Spectators and spectatresses look at one another as if to ask one another the explanation of so unexpected a phenomenon... The face of Carlotta expresses the most atrocious pain, her eyes seem haunted by madness. The poor woman has straightened up, her mouth still half-open, having just finished letting pass “that solitary voice that sang in her heart...” But that mouth sang no more... _it dared no longer a word, no longer a sound_...

For that mouth created for harmony, that agile instrument which had never failed, magnificent organ, generator of the most beautiful sonorities, of the most difficult chords, of the softest modulations, of the most ardent rhythms, sublime human mechanism to which there lacked, to be divine, only the fire of heaven which alone gives true emotion and lifts souls... that mouth had let pass...

From that mouth had escaped...

... _A toad!_

Ah! the frightful, the hideous, the squamous, venomous, foamy, foaming, screeching toad!...

By where had it entered? How had it crouched upon the tongue? Hind legs folded, to leap higher and farther, stealthily, it had come out of the larynx, and... croak!

Croak! Croak!... Ah! the terrible croak!

For you well understand one must speak of the toad only figuratively. It was not seen but, by hell! it was heard. Croak!

The house was as if splashed by it. Never had batrachian, on the brink of resounding pools, torn the night with a more frightful croak.

And certainly, it was unexpected by all. Carlotta yet believed neither her throat nor her ears. Thunder, falling at her feet, would have astonished her less than this croaking toad that had just come out of her mouth...

And thunder would not have dishonored her. Whereas it is well understood that a toad nestled upon the tongue always dishonors a singer. There are those who have died of it.

My God! who would have believed it?... She was singing so tranquilly: “And I understand this solitary voice that sings in my heart!” She sang without effort, as always, with the same ease, as you would say: “Good day, madam, how do you do?”

It cannot be denied that there exist presumptuous singers, who have the great fault of not measuring their strength, and who, in their pride, wish to attain, with the weak voice heaven bestowed upon them, exceptional effects and launch notes that were forbidden them at birth. It is then that heaven, to punish them, sends them, without their knowing, into the mouth, a toad, a toad that goes croak! Everyone knows that. But no one could admit that a Carlotta, who had at least two octaves in her voice, should have a toad there too.

One could not have forgotten her strident _contralto_, her unheard-of _staccati_ in _The Magic Flute_. One remembered _Don Juan_, where she was Elvire and where she won the most resounding triumph, one evening, by giving herself the _B-flat_ that her comrade Donna Anna could not give. Then, truly, what meant that croak, at the end of this tranquil, peaceful, tiny “solitary voice that sang in her heart”?

It was not natural. There was sorcery beneath. That toad smelled of brimstone. Poor, miserable, despairing, annihilated Carlotta!...

In the house, the murmur grew. Had it been another than Carlotta to whom such an adventure befell, she would have been hissed! But with this one, whose perfect instrument was known, one showed not anger but consternation and dread. Thus must men have suffered that sort of terror if any there be who witnessed the catastrophe that broke the arms of the Venus of Milo!... and yet they could see the blow that struck... and understand...

But there? This toad was incomprehensible!...

So that after some seconds spent asking whether truly she had herself heard, issuing from her own mouth, that note—was it a note, that sound?—could one call that a sound? A sound is still music—this infernal noise, she wished to persuade herself that nothing of the sort had happened; that there had been, for an instant, an illusion of her ear, and not a criminal betrayal of the vocal organ...

She cast, distraught, her eyes about her as if to seek a refuge, a protection, or rather the spontaneous assurance of the innocence of her voice. Her clenched fingers had gone to her throat in a gesture of defense and protest. No! no! that croak was not hers! And it seemed indeed that Carolus Fonta himself was of that opinion, who looked at her with an inexpressible expression of gigantic childlike stupefaction. For, after all, he was near her, he. He had not left her. Perhaps he could tell her how such a thing had happened! No, he could not! His eyes were stupidly riveted to Carlotta’s mouth like the eyes of very small children considering the inexhaustible hat of the conjurer. How had so small a mouth been able to contain so great a croak?

All that, toad, croak, emotion, terror-murmur of the house, confusion of the stage, of the wings—some supernumeraries showed dismayed heads—all that which I describe to you in detail lasted some seconds.

Some frightful seconds which seemed above all interminable to the two managers up there, in box no. 5. Moncharmin and Richard were very pale. This unheard-of episode, which remained inexplicable, filled them with an anguish all the more mysterious in that they were for an instant under the direct influence of the phantom.

They had felt his breath. Some hairs of Moncharmin had stood up under that breath... And Richard had passed his handkerchief over his sweating brow... Yes, he was there... around them... behind them, beside them, they felt him without seeing him!... They heard his respiration... and so near them, so near them!... _One knows when someone is present_... Well, they knew now!... _they were sure of being three in the box_... They trembled at it... They had the idea of fleeing... They dared not... They dared not make a movement, exchange a word that might teach the phantom they knew he was there!... What was going to happen? What was going to occur?

Occurred the croak! Above all the noises of the house one heard their double exclamation of horror. _They felt themselves under the blows of the phantom._ Leaning over their box, they looked at Carlotta as if they no longer recognized her. This daughter of hell must have given with her croak the signal of some catastrophe. Ah! the catastrophe, they expected it! The phantom had promised it to them! The house was cursed! Their double managerial breast already panted beneath the weight of the catastrophe. One heard the strangled voice of Richard crying to Carlotta:

—Well! go on!

No! Carlotta did not go on... She bravely, heroically recommenced the fatal verse at the end of which the toad had appeared.

A frightful silence succeeds all the noises. Alone the voice of Carlotta again fills the sonorous vessel.

I listen!...

—The house listens too—

... And I understand this solitary voice (croak!) Croak!... that sings in my... croak!

The toad too has recommenced.

The house bursts into a prodigious tumult. Fallen back upon their seats, the two managers dare not even turn around; they have not the strength. The phantom laughs in their necks! And at last they distinctly hear in the right ear his voice, the impossible voice, the voice without mouth, the voice which says:

—_She sings tonight to bring down the chandelier!_

With a common movement, they raised their heads to the ceiling and uttered a terrible cry. The chandelier, the immense mass of the chandelier slipped, came toward them, at the call of that satanic voice. Unhooked, the chandelier plunged from the heights of the house and was engulfed in the midst of the orchestra, amid a thousand clamors. It was a terror, a general sauve-qui-peut. It is not my design to make live again here an historic hour. The curious need but open the newspapers of the epoch. There were many wounded and one dead.

The chandelier had crashed upon the head of the unhappy woman who had come that evening to the Opera, for the first time in her life, upon her whom M. Richard had designated as destined to replace in her functions as box-keeper Mame Giry, the box-keeper of the phantom! She was killed outright and the next day a newspaper appeared with this headline: _Two hundred thousand kilos upon the head of a concierge!_ That was all her funeral oration.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”