IN WHICH THE AUTHOR OF THIS
SINGULAR WORK INFORMS
THE READER HOW HE
ACQUIRED THE CERTAINTY
THAT THE OPERA GHOST
REALLY EXISTED
The Opera ghost really existed.
He was not,
as was long believed,
a creature
of the imagination
of the artists,
the superstition of the managers,
or a product
of the absurd
and impressionable brains
of the young ladies
of the ballet,
their mothers,
the box-keepers,
the cloak-room attendants
or the concierge.
Yes,
he existed
in flesh and blood,
although he assumed
the complete appearance
of a real phantom;
that is to say,
of a spectral shade.
When I
began to ransack the archives
of the National Academy
of Music
I was at once
struck by the surprising coincidences
between the phenomena
ascribed to the
"ghost"
and the most extraordinary
and fantastic tragedy
that ever
excited the Paris upper classes;
and I soon
conceived the idea
that this tragedy
might reasonably
be explained
by the phenomena in question.
The events
do not
date more
than thirty years back;
and it
would not
be difficult
to find
at the present day,
in the foyer
of the ballet,
old men
of the highest respectability,
men upon
whose word one
could absolutely rely,
who would remember as
though they
happened yesterday the mysterious
and dramatic conditions
that attended the kidnapping
of Christine Daae,
the disappearance
of the Vicomte de Chagny
and the death
of his elder brother,
Count Philippe,
whose body
was found
on the bank
of the lake
that exists
in the lower cellars
of the Opera
on the Rue-Scribe side.
But none of
those witnesses had
until
that day thought
that there was any
reason for
connecting the more
or less legendary figure
of the Opera ghost with
that terrible story.
The truth
was slow
to enter my mind,
puzzled by an inquiry
that at every moment
was complicated by events which,
at first sight,
might be
looked upon as superhuman;
and more than once
I was
within an ace
of abandoning a task
in which
I was
exhausting myself
in the hopeless pursuit
of a vain image.
At last,
I received the proof
that my presentiments
had not deceived me,
and I
was rewarded
for all my efforts
on the day
when I acquired the certainty
that the Opera ghost
was more
than a mere shade.
On that day,
I had
spent long hours
over THE MEMOIRS
OF A MANAGER,
the light
and frivolous work
of the too-skeptical Moncharmin,
who,
during his term
at the Opera,
understood nothing
of the mysterious behavior
of the ghost and
who was
making all the fun
of it
that he
could at the very moment
when he
became the first victim
of the curious financial operation
that went on inside the
"magic envelope."
I had just
left the library in despair,
when I met
the delightful acting-manager
of our National Academy,
who stood
chatting on a landing
with a lively
and well-groomed little old man,
to whom
he introduced me gaily.
The acting-manager
knew all
about my investigations and
how eagerly and unsuccessfully
I had been trying
to discover the whereabouts
of the examining magistrate
in the famous Chagny case,
M. Faure. Nobody knew
what had become of him,
alive or dead;
and here
he was back from Canada,
where he
had spent fifteen years,
and the first thing
he had done,
on his return to Paris,
was to come
to the secretarial offices
at the Opera
and ask
for a free seat.