The Phantom of the Opera
daroga!--and they went off together... Christine had stopped crying
... I alone cried ... Daroga, daroga, if Christine keeps her promise,
she will come back soon! ..."
The Persian asked him no questions. He was quite reassured as to the
fate of Raoul Chagny and Christine Daae; no one could have doubted the
word of the weeping Erik that night.
The monster resumed his mask and collected his strength to leave the
daroga. He told him that, when he felt his end to be very near at
hand, he would send him, in gratitude for the kindness which the
Persian had once shown him, that which he held dearest in the world:
all Christine Daae's papers, which she had written for Raoul's benefit
and left with Erik, together with a few objects belonging to her, such
as a pair of gloves, a shoe-buckle and two pocket-handkerchiefs. In
reply to the Persian's questions, Erik told him that the two young
people, at soon as they found themselves free, had resolved to go and
look for a priest in some lonely spot where they could hide their
happiness and that, with this object in view, they had started from
"the northern railway station of the world." Lastly, Erik relied on
the Persian, as soon as he received the promised relics and papers, to
inform the young couple of his death and to advertise it in the EPOQUE.
That was all. The Persian saw Erik to the door of his flat, and Darius
helped him down to the street. A cab was waiting for him. Erik
stepped in; and the Persian, who had gone back to the window, heard him
say to the driver:
"Go to the Opera."
And the cab drove off into the night.
The Persian had seen the poor, unfortunate Erik for the last time.
Three weeks later, the Epoque published this advertisement:
"Erik is dead."
Epilogue.
I have now told the singular, but veracious story of the Opera ghost.
As I declared on the first page of this work, it is no longer possible
to deny that Erik really lived. There are to-day so many proofs of his
existence within the reach of everybody that we can follow Erik's
actions logically through the whole tragedy of the Chagnys.
There is no need to repeat here how greatly the case excited the
capital. The kidnapping of the artist, the death of the Comte de
Chagny under such exceptional conditions, the disappearance of his
brother, the drugging of the gas-man at the Opera and of his two
assistants: what tragedies, what passions, what crimes had surrounded
the idyll of Raoul and the sweet and charming Christine! ... What had
become of that wonderful, mysterious artist of whom the world was
never, never to hear again? ... She was represented as the victim of a
rivalry between the two brothers; and nobody suspected what had really
happened, nobody understood that, as Raoul and Christine had both
disappeared, both had withdrawn far from the world to enjoy a happiness
which they would not have cared to make public after the inexplicable
death of Count Philippe ... They took the train one day from "the
northern railway station of the world." ... Possibly, I too shall take
the train at that station, one day, and go and seek around thy lakes, O
Norway, O silent Scandinavia, for the perhaps still living traces of
Raoul and Christine and also of Mamma Valerius, who disappeared at the
same time! ... Possibly, some day, I shall hear the lonely echoes of
the North repeat the singing of her who knew the Angel of Music! ...
Long after the case was pigeonholed by the unintelligent care of M. le
Juge d'Instruction Faure, the newspapers made efforts, at intervals, to
fathom the mystery. One evening paper alone, which knew all the gossip
of the theaters, said:
"We recognize the touch of the Opera ghost."
And even that was written by way of irony.
The Persian alone knew the whole truth and held the main proofs, which
came to him with the pious relics promised by the ghost. It fell to my
lot to complete those proofs with the aid of the daroga himself. Day
by day, I kept him informed of the progress of my inquiries; and he
directed them. He had not been to the Opera for years and years, but
he had preserved the most accurate recollection of the building, and
there was no better guide than he possible to help me discover its most
secret recesses. He also told me where to gather further information,
whom to ask; and he sent me to call on M. Poligny, at a moment when the
poor man was nearly drawing his last breath. I had no idea that he was
so very ill, and I shall never forget the effect which my questions
about the ghost produced upon him. He looked at me as if I were the
devil and answered only in a few incoherent sentences, which showed,
however--and that was the main thing--the extent of the perturbation
which O. G., in his time, had brought into that already very restless
life (for M. Poligny was what people call a man of pleasure).
When I came and told the Persian of the poor result of my visit to M.
Poligny, the daroga gave a faint smile and said:
"Poligny never knew how far that extraordinary blackguard of an Erik
humbugged him."--The Persian, by the way, spoke of Erik sometimes as a
demigod and sometimes as the lowest of the low--"Poligny was
superstitious and Erik knew it. Erik knew most things about the public
and private affairs of the Opera. When M. Poligny heard a mysterious
voice tell him, in Box Five, of the manner in which he used to spend
his time and abuse his partner's confidence, he did not wait to hear
any more. Thinking at first that it was a voice from Heaven, he
believed himself damned; and then, when the voice began to ask for
money, he saw that he was being victimized by a shrewd blackmailer to
whom Debienne himself had fallen a prey. Both of them, already tired
of management for various reasons, went away without trying to
investigate further into the personality of that curious O. G., who had
forced such a singular memorandum-book upon them. They bequeathed the
whole mystery to their successors and heaved a sigh of relief when they
were rid of a business that had puzzled them without amusing them in
the least."
I then spoke of the two successors and expressed my surprise that, in
his Memoirs of a Manager, M. Moncharmin should describe the Opera
ghost's behavior at such length in the first part of the book and
hardly mention it at all in the second. In reply to this, the Persian,
who knew the MEMOIRS as thoroughly as if he had written them himself,
observed that I should find the explanation of the whole business if I
would just recollect the few lines which Moncharmin devotes to the
ghost in the second part aforesaid. I quote these lines, which are
particularly interesting because they describe the very simple manner
in which the famous incident of the twenty-thousand francs was closed:
"As for O. G., some of whose curious tricks I have related in the first
part of my Memoirs, I will only say that he redeemed by one spontaneous
fine action all the worry which he had caused my dear friend and
partner and, I am bound to say, myself. He felt, no doubt, that there
are limits to a joke, especially when it is so expensive and when the
commissary of police has been informed, for, at the moment when we had
made an appointment in our office with M. Mifroid to tell him the whole
story, a few days after the disappearance of Christine Daae, we found,
on Richard's table, a large envelope, inscribed, in red ink, "WITH O.
G.'S COMPLIMENTS." It contained the large sum of money which he had
succeeded in playfully extracting, for the time being, from the
treasury. Richard was at once of the opinion that we must be content
with that and drop the business. I agreed with Richard. All's well
that ends well. What do you say, O. G.?"
Of course, Moncharmin, especially after the money had been restored,
continued to believe that he had, for a short while, been the butt of
Richard's sense of humor, whereas Richard, on his side, was convinced
that Moncharmin had amused himself by inventing the whole of the affair
of the Opera ghost, in order to revenge himself for a few jokes.
I asked the Persian to tell me by what trick the ghost had taken
twenty-thousand francs from Richard's pocket in spite of the
safety-pin. He replied that he had not gone into this little detail,
but that, if I myself cared to make an investigation on the spot, I
should certainly find the solution to the riddle in the managers'
office by remembering that Erik had not been nicknamed the trap-door
lover for nothing. I promised the Persian to do so as soon as I had
time, and I may as well tell the reader at once that the results of my
investigation were perfectly satisfactory; and I hardly believed that I
should ever discover so many undeniable proofs of the authenticity of
the feats ascribed to the ghost.
The Persian's manuscript, Christine Daae's papers, the statements made
to me by the people who used to work under MM. Richard and Moncharmin,
by little Meg herself (the worthy Madame Giry, I am sorry to say, is no
more) and by Sorelli, who is now living in retirement at Louveciennes:
all the documents relating to the existence of the ghost, which I
propose to deposit in the archives of the Opera, have been checked and
confirmed by a number of important discoveries of which I am justly
proud. I have not been able to find the house on the lake, Erik having
blocked up all the secret entrances.[1] On the other hand, I have
discovered the secret passage of the Communists, the planking of which
is falling to pieces in parts, and also the trap-door through which
Raoul and the Persian penetrated into the cellars of the opera-house.
In the Communists' dungeon, I noticed numbers of initials traced on the
walls by the unfortunate people confined in it; and among these were an
"R" and a "C." R. C.: Raoul de Chagny. The letters are there to this
day.
If the reader will visit the Opera one morning and ask leave to stroll
where he pleases, without being accompanied by a stupid guide, let him
go to Box Five and knock with his fist or stick on the enormous column
that separates this from the stage-box. He will find that the column
sounds hollow. After that, do not be astonished by the suggestion that
it was occupied by the voice of the ghost: there is room inside the
column for two men. If you are surprised that, when the various
incidents occurred, no one turned round to look at the column, you must
remember that it presented the appearance of solid marble, and that the
voice contained in it seemed rather to come from the opposite side,
for, as we have seen, the ghost was an expert ventriloquist.
The column was elaborately carved and decorated with the sculptor's
chisel; and I do not despair of one day discovering the ornament that
could be raised or lowered at will, so as to admit of the ghost's
mysterious correspondence with Mme. Giry and of his generosity.
However, all these discoveries are nothing, to my mind, compared with
that which I was able to make, in the presence of the acting-manager,
in the managers' office, within a couple of inches from the desk-chair,
and which consisted of a trap-door, the width of a board in the
flooring and the length of a man's fore-arm and no longer; a trap-door
that falls back like the lid of a box; a trap-door through which I can
see a hand come and dexterously fumble at the pocket of a swallow-tail
coat.
That is the way the forty-thousand francs went! ... And that also is
the way by which, through some trick or other, they were returned.
Speaking about this to the Persian, I said:
"So we may take it, as the forty-thousand francs were returned, that
Erik was simply amusing himself with that memorandum-book of his?"
"Don't you believe it!" he replied. "Erik wanted money. Thinking