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For several months, there had been nothing discussed at the Opera but this ghost in dress-clothes who stalked about the building, from top to bottom, like a shadow, who spoke to nobody, to whom nobody dared speak and who vanished as soon as he was seen, no one knowing how or where. As became a real ghost, he made no noise in walking.
“He is extraordinarily thin and his dress-coat hangs on a skeleton frame. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man’s skull. His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but a nasty yellow. His nose is so little worth talking about that you can’t see it side-face; and the absence of that nose is a horrible thing to look at. All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks on his forehead and behind his ears.”
“Christine, you must love me!” And Christine’s voice, infinitely sad and trembling, as though accompanied by tears, replied: “How can you talk like that? When I sing only for you!”
“Are you very tired?” “Oh, to-night I gave you my soul and I am dead!” Christine replied. “Your soul is a beautiful thing, child,” replied the grave man’s voice, “and I thank you. No emperor ever received so fair a gift. The angels wept tonight.”
None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy.
a face so pallid, so lugubrious and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under the straddling eyebrows, that the death’s head in question immediately scored a huge success.
screaming like a peacock.
you know all about my Memorandum-Book and, consequently, that you are treating me with outrageous contempt. If you wish to live in peace, you must not begin by taking away my private box.
Believe me to be, dear Mr. Manager, without prejudice to these little observations, Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,
“Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing.
And then came the lightning-flash of the gala performance: the heavens torn asunder and an angel’s voice heard upon earth for the delight of mankind and the utter capture of his heart.
After her father’s death, she acquired a distaste of everything in life, including her art. She went through the Conservatoire like a poor soulless singing-machine. And, suddenly, she awoke as though through the intervention of a god. The Angel of Music appeared upon the scene!
It was a man dressed all in scarlet, with a huge hat and feathers on the top of a wonderful death’s head. From his shoulders hung an immense red-velvet cloak, which trailed along the floor like a king’s train; and on this cloak was embroidered, in gold letters, which every one read and repeated aloud, “Don’t touch me! I am Red Death stalking abroad!”
“May one ask at least to what darkness you are returning? . . . For what hell are you leaving, mysterious lady . . . or for what paradise?”
The voice without a body went on singing; and certainly Raoul had never in his life heard anything more absolutely and heroically sweet, more gloriously insidious, more delicate, more powerful, in short, more irresistibly triumphant. He listened to it in a fever
And nothing could describe the passion with which the voice sang: “Fate links thee to me for ever and a day!”
“That is an undertaking which I have not asked of you and a promise which I refuse to make you!” said the young girl haughtily. “I am mistress of my own actions, M. de Chagny: you have no right to control them, and I will beg you to desist henceforth. As to what I have done during the last fortnight, there is only one man in the world who has the right to demand an account of me: my husband! Well, I have no husband and I never mean to marry!”
“This,” she said, “is a happiness that will harm no one.”
“Mademoiselle, I have the honor to ask for your hand.” “Why, you have both of them already, my dear betrothed!
A distant voice whispered in the young man’s ear: “She is wearing the ring again to-night; and you did not give it to her. She gave her soul again tonight and did not give it to you. .
Besides, it’s not mine. . . . Everything that is underground belongs to him!”
When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time . . . he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap-doors.”
“Even when he is not there, my ears are full of his sighs.
And I waited and lived on in a sort of ecstatic dream.
‘It is true, Christine! . . . I am not an Angel, nor a genius, nor a ghost. . . . I am Erik!’”
“I tell you that, if he does not hear me sing to-morrow, it will cause him infinite pain.” “It is difficult not to cause him pain and yet to escape from him for good.” “You are right in that, Raoul, for certainly he will die of my flight.”
“No, no! There is nothing to be done with Erik except to run away!”
“And you, Christine, tell me, do you hate him too?” “No,” said Christine simply. “No, of course not . . . Why, you love him! Your fear, your terror, all of that is just love and love of the most exquisite kind, the kind which people do not admit even to themselves,” said Raoul bitterly. “The kind that gives you a thrill, when you think of it.
He said that he had no name and no country and that he had taken the name of Erik by accident.
‘One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity.’
I began that work twenty years ago. When I have finished, I shall take it away with me in that coffin and never wake up again.’
‘You see, Christine, there is some music that is so terrible that it consumes all those who approach it.
‘Look! You want to see! See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik’s face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like! Oh, you women are so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I’m a very good-looking fellow, eh? . . . When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me. She loves me for ever. I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!’
M. de Chagny is in love with you and is going abroad. Before he goes, I want him to be as happy as I am.’ Are people so unhappy when they love?” “Yes, Christine, when they love and are not sure of being loved.”
“Erik will hear me wherever I call him. He told me so. He is a very curious genius. You must not think, Raoul, that he is simply a man who amuses himself by living underground. He does things that no other man could do; he knows things which nobody in the world knows.”
“No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”
“Erik’s secrets concern no one but himself ! ”
“In this duel, we shall be two to one; but you must be prepared for everything, for we shall be fighting the most terrible adversary that you can imagine. But you love Christine Daaé, do you not?” “I worship the ground she stands on!
“I do not understand you. You treat him as a monster, you speak of his crime, he has done you harm and I find in you the same inexplicable pity that drove me to despair when I saw it in Christine!”
“How imprudent you are!” he said, as he stood before me, dripping with water. “Why try to enter my house? I never invited you! I don’t want you there, nor anybody! Did you save my life only to make it unbearable to me? However great the service you rendered him, Erik may end by forgetting it; and you know that nothing can restrain Erik, not even Erik himself.”
“Wretched man!” I cried. “Have you forgotten the rosy hours of Mazenderan?”
When Erik laughed, he was more terrible than ever. He jumped into the boat, chuckling so horribly that I could not help trembling.
Ever since I had discovered Erik installed in the Opera, I lived in a perpetual terror of his horrible fancies, not in so far as I was concerned, but I dreaded everything for others.
Erik announced to me very solemnly that he had changed and that he had become the most virtuous of men since he was loved for himself
“I won’t answer for anything! . . . If Erik’s secrets cease to be Erik’s secrets, it will be a bad lookout for a goodly number of the human race! That’s all I have to tell you, and unless you are a great booby, it ought to be enough for you . . . except that you don’t know how to take a hint.”
I was quite certain that she had been juggled away by Erik, that prince of conjurers.
for he is the king of stranglers even as he is the prince of conjurors.
He had lived in India and acquired an incredible skill in the art of strangulation. He would make them lock him into a courtyard to which they brought a warrior—usually, a man condemned to death—armed with a long pike and broadsword. Erik had only his lasso; and it was always just when the warrior thought that he was going to fell Erik with a tremendous blow that we heard the lasso whistle through the air. With a turn of the wrist, Erik tightened the noose round his adversary’s neck and, in this fashion, dragged him before the little sultana and her women, who sat looking from a window and
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worked the stone, and we jumped into the house which Erik had built himself in the double case of the foundation-walls of the Opera. And this was the easiest thing in the world for him to do, because Erik was one of the chief contractors under Philippe Garnier, the architect of the Opera, and continued to work by himself when the works were officially suspended, during the war, the siege of Paris and the Commune.
You must take a resolution and know your own mind! I can’t go on living like this, like a mole in a burrow! Don Juan Triumphant is finished; and now I want to live like everybody else.
