The Phantom of the Opera

by Gaston Leroux

“The genius gives her lessons! . . . And where, pray?” “Now that she has gone away with him, I can’t say; but, up to a fortnight ago, it was in Christine’s dressing-room. It would be impossible in this little flat. The whole house would hear them. Whereas, at the Opera, at eight o’clock in the morning, there is no one about, do you see!” “Yes, I see! I see!” cried the viscount. And he hurriedly took leave of Mme. Valerius, who asked herself if the young nobleman was not a little off his head.

Lol! Poor Raoul!

he could not help noticing a group crowding round a person whose disguise, eccentric air and gruesome appearance were causing a sensation. 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!”

Putting that extortion money to good use !

“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 is the second time that you have listened behind the door, M. de Chagny!” “I was not behind the door. . . . I was in the dressing-room, in the inner room, mademoiselle.” “Oh, unhappy man!” moaned the girl, showing every sign of unspeakable terror. “Unhappy man! Do you want to be killed?” “Perhaps.”

I didn't expect this book so be so humorous! 😆

“but if we can not be married, we can . . . we can be engaged! Nobody will know but ourselves, Raoul. There have been plenty of secret marriages: why not a secret engagement? . . . We are engaged, dear, for a month! In a month, you will go away, and I can be happy at the thought of that month all my life long!” She was enchanted with her inspiration. Then she became serious again. “This,” she said, “is a happiness that will harm no one.”

😰

It was the prettiest game in the world and they enjoyed it like the children that they were. Oh, the wonderful speeches they made to each other and the eternal vows they exchanged! They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.

“To-morrow, my dear betrothed! And be happy, Raoul: I sang for you to-night!” He returned the next day. But those two days of absence had broken the charm of their delightful make-believe. They looked at each other, in the dressing-room, with their sad eyes, without exchanging a word. Raoul had to restrain himself not to cry out: “I am jealous! I am jealous! I am jealous!” But she heard him all the same.

She moved among them like a popular queen, encouraging them in their labors, sitting down in the workshops, giving words of advice to the workmen whose hands hesitated to cut into the rich stuffs that were to clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practised every trade. There were cobblers, there were goldsmiths. All had learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself in all their troubles and all their little hobbies.

Those old people remembered nothing outside the Opera. They had lived there for years without number. Past managements had forgotten them; palace revolutions had taken no notice of them; the history of France had run its course unknown to them; and nobody recollected their existence.

“You have shown me over the upper part of your empire, Christine, but there are strange stories told of the lower part. Shall we go down?” She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice, whispered: “Never! . . . I will not have you go there! . . . Besides, it’s not mine. . . . Everything that is underground belongs to him!”

Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not even see the hand that worked it; and they remained quite dazed.

“But suppose it were he, Christine?” “No, no! He has shut himself up, he is working.” “Oh, really! He’s working, is he?” “Yes, he can’t open and shut the trap-doors and work at the same time.” She shivered. “What is he working at?” “Oh, something terrible! . . . But it’s all the better for us. . . . When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time . . .

👀

Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky. It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted slowly by;

if I do not go, he will come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him, underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death’s head. And he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears, Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death’s head! I can not see those tears flow again!”

And it not only sang, but it spoke to me and answered my questions, like a real man’s voice, with this difference, that it was as beautiful as the voice of an angel. I had never got the Angel of Music whom my poor father had promised to send me as soon as he was dead. I really think that Mamma Valerius was a little bit to blame. I told her about it; and she at once said, ‘It must be the Angel; at any rate, you can do no harm by asking him.’ I did so; and the man’s voice replied that, yes, it was the Angel’s voice,

Of course he did 🙈

The voice seemed to understand mine exactly, to know precisely where my father had left off teaching me. In a few weeks’ time, I hardly knew myself when I sang. I was even frightened. I seemed to dread a sort of witchcraft behind it; but Mamma Valerius reassured me. She said that she knew I was much too simple a girl to give the devil a hold on me. . .

I saw no reason for keeping our story secret or concealing the place which you filled in my heart. Then the voice was silent. I called to it, but it did not reply; I begged and entreated, but in vain. I was terrified lest it had gone for good. I wish to Heaven it had, dear! . . .

Whatever happened, your position in society forbade me to contemplate the possibility of ever marrying you; and I swore to the voice that you were no more than a brother to me nor ever would be and that my heart was incapable of any earthly love. And that, dear, was why I refused to recognize or see you when I met you on the stage or in the passages. Meanwhile, the hours during which the voice taught me were spent in a divine frenzy,

I was dragged toward the little red light and then I saw that I was in the hands of a man wrapped in a large cloak and wearing a mask that hid his whole face. I made one last effort; my limbs stiffened, my mouth opened to scream, but a hand closed it, a hand which I felt on my lips, on my skin . . . a hand that smelt of death. Then I fainted away.

I had once been down into those cellars, but had stopped at the third floor, though there were two lower still, large enough to hold a town. But the figures of which I caught sight had made me run away. There are demons down there, quite black, standing in front of boilers, and they wield shovels and pitchforks and poke up fires and stir up flames and, if you come too near them, they frighten you by suddenly opening the red mouths of their furnaces. . . .

“I should like to know with what feeling he inspires you, since you do not hate him.” “With horror!” she said. “That is the terrible thing about it. He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness! . . . He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. . . .

I felt sure that I had fallen into the hands of a madman. I ran round my little apartment, looking for a way of escape which I could not find. I upbraided myself for my absurd superstition, which had caused me to fall into the trap. I felt inclined to laugh and to cry at the same time.

Erik did not eat or drink. I asked him what his nationality was and if that name of Erik did not point to his Scandinavian origin. He said that he had no name and no country and that he had taken the name of Erik by accident.

The walls were all hung with black, but, instead of the white trimmings that usually set off that funereal upholstery, there was an enormous stave of music with the notes of the Dies Irae, many times repeated. In the middle of the room was a canopy, from which hung curtains of red brocaded stuff, and, under the canopy, an open coffin. ‘That is where I sleep,’ said Erik. ‘One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity.’ The sight upset me so much that I turned away my head. “Then I saw the keyboard of an organ which filled one whole side of the walls. On the desk was a music-book covered with red notes.

He replied, ‘I sometimes work at it for fourteen days and nights together, during which I live on music only, and then I rest for years at a time.’ ‘Will you play me something out of your Don Juan Triumphant?’ I asked, thinking to please him. ‘You must never ask me that,’ he said, in a gloomy voice. ‘I will play you Mozart, if you like, which will only make you weep; but my Don Juan, Christine, burns; and yet he is not struck by fire from Heaven.’

Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me! . . . When my own father never saw me and when my mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask!’

His Don Juan Triumphant (for I had not a doubt but that he had rushed to his masterpiece to forget the horror of the moment) seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But, little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable. It intoxicated me;

“Do you doubt it still, Raoul? . . . Then know that each of my visits to Erik increased my horror of him; for each of those visits, instead of calming him, as I hoped, made him mad with love! And I am so frightened, so frightened! . . .” “You are frightened . . . but do you love me? If Erik were good-looking, would you love me, Christine?”

A good question, some might say. I'm going to say : yes, idiot. 🙈 Christine could never have loved Erik back—because of his extreme possessiveness. She was always going to love Raoul due to their close friendship; there is no one else she has known that well. He is "the one that got away". If Erik was born handsome, I doubt he would be hiding away in the walls and bowels of the opera house, wearing a mask and pretending to be a ghost. So they would probably never meet otherwise. Even if Erik was handsome, and they met some other way, and he was her mentor who fell in love with her, *Christine would still love Raoul*. Erik would probably still be possessive of Christine, freaking her the fuck out, and killing what affection she had for him. So, the only way Chrstine could have loved Erik, is if Raoul never existed. This is so ironic with the movie that everyone in my generation ships Christine and Erik from because he's "hot" Gerard Butler. 😆

“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.” “Take care, Christine, you are making a ghost of him again!” “No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”

“She told me that his eyes only showed in the dark. His eyes have disappeared in the light, but he may be there still.” And he rose, hunted about, went round the room. He looked under his bed, like a child. Then he thought himself absurd, got into bed again and blew out the candle. The eyes reappeared.

I gasped 😆

The feminine element in the brilliant audience seemed curiously puzzled; and the viscount’s absence gave rise to any amount of whispering behind the fans. Christine Daaé met with a rather cold reception. That special audience could not forgive her for aiming so high.

"This uppity hussy !"

As for Mifroid, he looked at the managers and at Raoul by turns and wondered whether he had strayed into a lunatic asylum. He passed his hand through his hair. “A ghost,” he said, “who, on the same evening, carries off an opera-singer and steals twenty-thousand francs is a ghost who must have his hands very full!

Do you know this person? Have you seen him?” “Yes.” “Where?” “In a churchyard.” M. Mifroid gave a start, began to scrutinize Raoul again and said: “Of course! . . . That’s where ghosts usually hang out! . . .

Ha !

“I don’t know for a moment whether M. le Comte de Chagny has really carried Christine Daaé off or not . . . but I want to know and I believe that, at this moment, no one is more anxious to inform us than his brother. . . . And now he is flying in pursuit of him! He is my chief auxiliary! This, gentlemen, is the art of the police, which is believed to be so complicated and which, nevertheless appears so simple as soon it’s you see that it consists in getting your work done by people who have nothing to do with the police.”

I laughed out loud 😂

Raoul and the Persian saw the startled faces of the joint managers appear above the landing—and they heard Moncharmin’s excited voice: “There are things happening here, Mr. Commissary, which we are unable to explain.” And the two faces disappeared. “Thank you for the information, gentlemen,” said Mifroid, with a jeer.

🤣

Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be “some one,” like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.