But in the matter of brains, everyone seemed to agree that she didn’t have many. No one held it against her.
A second time she told the dancers:
‘No girls, you must pull yourselves together… Ghost? What ghost? Maybe you didn’t actually see it!…’
‘No! No! We did see it!… We saw it a little while ago!’ the girls said. ‘He had a death’s head and his black coat on, exactly the way he looked the evening he appeared to Joseph Buquet!’
‘And Gabriel saw him too!’ said Jammes, ‘just yesterday! yesterday afternoon!… in broad daylight…’
‘Gabriel? The chorus master?’
‘Oh yes!… What, you didn’t know?’
‘And he was wearing tails, in broad daylight?’
‘Who do you mean? Gabriel?’
‘No, the ghost!’
‘Of course he was wearing tails!’ said Jammes. ‘Gabriel told me himself… That was how he knew who it was. It was like this. Gabriel was in the stage manager’s office. Suddenly the door opened. It was the Persian. You know the Persian’s got the “evil eye”, don’t you?…’
‘Of course we do!’ chorused the young dancers who, the moment they’d conjured up the Persian in their minds, warded off Fate by holding their index and little fingers out straight while keeping their middle and third fingers pressed against their palm and holding them there by the thumb.
‘Gabriel’s ever so superstitious!’ Jammes went on, ‘but he’s always very polite. Whenever he sees the Persian he usually just puts one hand quietly in his pocket and touches his keys for luck… Well, the minute the door opened and he saw the Persian, Gabriel leaped out of his chair and had his hand on the lock of the cupboard like a shot, touching iron! In the process, he caught his coat on a nail and made a great big tear in it. He was so anxious to get out of there, that he bumped his forehead on a coat stand which left an almighty lump; and then, stepping back quickly, he brushed one arm against the screen next to the piano; he tried to steady himself by leaning on the piano but unfortunately the lid fell on his hands and trapped his fingers; he rushed out of the office like a lunatic and was in such a hurry to get away from the first floor that he tumbled all the way down the stairs and ended up on his back. I happened to be passing just then with my mother. We rushed to help him to his feet. He was black and blue and there was blood all over his face. It gave us an awful fright. But all at once he smiled at us and started shouting: “Thank you, God! for letting me off so lightly!” Then we asked him what was the matter and he told us all about being frightened. Do you know why? He’d seen the ghost! It had been standing just behind the Persian! The ghost with the death’s head, just the way Joseph Buquet had described him.’
A frightened hush greeted the conclusion to her tale. When Jammes reached the end, she was quite out of breath from having told it so fast, as if she were being chased by the ghost. Then there was another silence which was broken by a faint mutter from Meg Giry while La Sorelli, looking very flustered, polished her nails.
‘Joseph Buquet should keep his mouth shut,’ said she of the olive eyes.
‘Why should he keep his voice shut?’ asked someone.
‘That’s what Ma thinks…’ replied Meg, in the barest whisper this time, and she looked all around her as if she was scared that what she said was being heard by more ears than were there present.
‘And why does your Ma think that?’
‘Keep your voice down! Ma says the ghost doesn’t like being pestered.’
‘But why does your mother say that?’
‘Because… Because… oh nothing!’
Such knowing reticence had the effect of making the dancers even more curious. They crowded round Meg and begged her to say what she meant exactly. They stood there, elbow to elbow, craning forward eagerly in a single surge of pleading and terror. They communicated their fear to each other, feeling a delicious thrill which sent shivers up their spines.
‘I swore I wouldn’t say anything!’ said Meg again in a low voice.
But they wouldn’t leave her alone and promised they’d keep the secret until Meg, who was itching to tell what she knew, began, with her eyes fixed on the door:
‘Well… it’s all on account of the box…’
‘What box?’
‘The ghost’s stage-box!’
‘The ghost’s got a box?’
At the thought that the ghost had a box of his own in the auditorium, the other girls could not contain the delicious sensation of the awful fear they felt. They gave little gasps and said:
‘Oh Lordy! Tell all… let’s have it…’
‘Not so loud!’ hissed Meg. ‘It’s in the first tier, number 5, you know, stage left.’
‘It’s not possible!’
‘It’s like I say… Ma’s the attendant who looks after it… But you swear you won’t tell anybody?’
‘Of course, silly!…’
‘Well, it’s the ghost’s box… No one’s set foot in it for over a month, except the ghost of course, and the management has been told not to sell tickets for it, ever!’
‘And does the ghost really use it?’
‘I should say!’
‘Someone actually comes?’
‘Not someone, the ghost uses it, but there’s never anyone in it!’
The girls looked at each other. If the ghost really used the box, he should be visible, because he wore a dress suit and had a skull for a head. That’s what they tried to get Meg to understand, but she replied:
‘But the point is you can’t see the ghost! And he doesn’t have evening dress or have a horrible head like that either!… All this talk about him having a face like a skull and a fiery head is all phooey! He doesn’t have anything at all!… You can only hear him when he’s in his box. Ma has never seen him, but she’s heard him. And Ma should know. She’s the one who gives him his programme!’
La Sorelli thought it was time she said something:
‘Meg Giry, you’re having us on.’
At this, the girl started to cry.
‘I shouldn’t have told… If Ma was to find out!… But one thing’s for sure, Joseph Buquet should keep his nose out of what don’t concern him… it’ll bring him nothing but bad luck… Ma was saying so only last night.’
The same moment, heavy, heavy footsteps were heard hurrying along the corridor and a breathless voice called:
‘Cécile! Cécile! Are you in there?’
‘That’s my mother’s voice!’ said Jammes. ‘What’s the matter?’
And she opened the door. A respectable woman, solidly built like a Pomeranian grenadier, swept into the dressing room and collapsed with a groan onto a chair. She rolled her eyes and the fear in them lit up her gloom-laden, brick-red face.
‘What a terrible thing!’ she gasped… ‘It’s horrible!’
‘What is? What’s happened?’
‘Joseph Buquet…’
‘What about Joseph Buquet…’
‘Joseph Buquet is dead!’
The room was suddenly filled with cries of shock, disbelief and panicky demands for an explanation.
‘It’s true!… They’ve just found him hanging under the stage, on the third level down… But the worst thing,’ the worthy lady went on breathlessly, ‘the worst thing is that the scene-shifters who found the body are saying they heard a sound like a death march echoing over the corpse!’
‘It was the ghost!’ Meg Giry cried instinctively and then, controlling herself, she put both hands to her mouth and added: ‘No!… I didn’t mean that… I didn’t speak!’
The other girls gathered round her saying in terrified whispers:
‘There’s no doubt about it! It was the ghost!’
La Sorelli had turned pale…
‘I’ll never get to say my speech now,’ she said.
Jammes’s mother drained a glass of spirits she found on a table and gave her opinion: the ghost most certainly had had a hand in what had happened.
The fact is, no on
e ever discovered how Joseph Buquet died. The investigation into it was brief and its verdict was straightforward: suicide. In his Memoirs of a Theatre Manager, M. Moncharmin, one of the two Directors who succeeded Messrs Debienne and Poligny, gave his own version of this business of the hanged man:
‘A most disagreeable incident cast a pall over the modest party organized by Messrs Debienne and Poligny to mark their departure. I was in the manager’s office when M. Mercier—the Administrator—suddenly burst in. Visibly upset, he said the body of a man had been found, a stage-setter, hanging, in the area below the stage, three levels down, between a flat and a part of the set of the Roi de Lahore.* I said: “We must cut him down!” By the time I’d rushed down the stairs and scrambled down the frame ladder, the rope around the dead man’s neck had gone!’
In other words, it was a circumstance in which M. Moncharmin found nothing untoward. A man is found hanging at the end of a rope. But when help arrives to cut him down, the rope has disappeared: odd. Of course, M. Moncharmin came up with a simple enough explanation. This is what he said: ‘It was nearly time for the ballet and all the girls, seniors and beginners, had been quick to protect themselves against the evil eye.’ There, are you following? You can see it now, the whole of the company clambering down the frame ladder and cutting up and dividing a hanged man’s rope among themselves in less time than it takes to write it down. It’s laughable. When on the other hand I think of the exact spot where the body was found—under the stage, three levels down—I can imagine that there might just be someone somewhere who might want the rope to vanish into thin air after doing its deadly work. We will see in due course if I am right in imagining such a thing.
The grisly news had spread through the whole Opera House where Joseph Buquet was well liked. The dressing rooms emptied and the dancers gathered round La Sorelli like frightened sheep around a shepherd. Then they headed off down to the lobby, along ill-lit passages and stairways, scurrying along as fast as their pink little feet would take them.
CHAPTER 2
The New Marguerite
ON the first landing, La Sorelli met the Count de Chagny coming up the stairs. The Count, normally so calm, seemed greatly excited.
‘I was on my way to call on you,’ said the Count, greeting her with consummate gallantry. ‘Ah! What an amazing evening! And Christine Daaé! A triumph!’
‘That’s hard to believe!’ said Meg Giry. ‘Six months ago she couldn’t sing to save her life! But pray let us pass, dear Count,’ she added with a cheeky curtsy, ‘we’re on our way to hear the latest about a poor man who’s been found hanged.’
Just at that moment, the Administrator, looking flustered, bustled past but stopped as he caught her words.
‘What? You girls have already heard?’ he said curtly. ‘Well, keep it to yourselves… and for heaven’s sake don’t breathe a word of it to M. Debienne and M. Poligny! It would be too upsetting for them on their last day.’
The dancers made for the foyer which was already packed.
The Count de Chagny was right. There had never been a concert like it. Those privileged enough to have been there still talk about it to their children and their grandchildren and thrill at the memory. Imagine: Gounod, Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Guiraud and Delibes strode up to the rostrum in turn to conduct performances of their own works. Among the artists appearing were Faure and La Krauss, and it was on that evening that the astounded, ecstatic Paris audience was first introduced to Christine Daaé whose mysterious fate I have set out to reveal in this book.
Gounod conducted a performance of La Marche funèbre d’une marionette; Ryer, the fine overture from his Sigurd; Saint-Saëns, La Danse macabre and a Rêverie orientale; Massenet, a newly composed Marche hongroise; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse lente from Sylvia and the pizzicati from Coppélia. Mlle Krauss and Denise Bloch had sung, the first, the bolero for the Vêpres siciliennes and the second, the drinking song from Lucrèce Borgia.*
But the triumph was Christine Daaé’s alone. She had begun with excerpts from Roméo et Juliette. It was the first time the young artist had performed any part of this work by Gounod which had not yet been staged at the Opera House. It had just been revived at the Opéra-Comique years after it was first performed at the old Théâtre-Lyrique by Madame Carvalho.* You can only feel sorry for those who never heard Christine Daaé as Juliette, never saw her innocent grace, were never stirred by her seraphic voice, never felt their spirits take wing above the tombs of the lovers from Verona: ‘Lord! Lord! Lord! Forgive us!’
But that was as nothing compared with the stupendous intensity she achieved in the prison scene and the final trio of Faust for which she replaced Carlotta who was indisposed. No one had ever heard or seen anything like it!
That night Mlle Daaé delivered ‘the New Marguerite’, a Marguerite of hitherto hidden splendour and radiance.
The whole auditorium erupted, carried away by their euphoria, cheering and applauding a sobbing Christine who collapsed into the arms of her fellow artists. She had to be helped back to her dressing room and looked more dead than alive.
The great critic P. de St.-V. preserved the memory of that wonderful night in a piece which he called ‘The New Marguerite’. Like the great artist that he himself was, he revealed in the simplest terms what the beautiful, sweet creature had brought to the stage of the Opera that night: not just her art, but her whole heart. Every last devotee of the Paris Opera knew that Christine had stayed as pure as she had been at fifteen, and P. de St.-V. wrote that ‘to understand the change that has come over Daaé, it must be supposed that she has just discovered love for the first time! I am perhaps being indiscreet’, he went on, ‘but only love could bring about such a miracle, so overwhelming a transformation. Two years ago, we heard Christine Daaé sing when she auditioned for a place at the Conservatoire. Then she seemed to be a charming prospect. Where on earth did she get the glorious voice she has today? If it did not float down from heaven on the wings of love, I can only conclude that it rose from hell and that Christine, like the master-singer of Ofterdingen,* has signed a pact with the devil! If you have never heard Christine sing the final trio of Faust you do not know Faust: for exaltation of voice and the sacred rapture of a pure heart, it will never be bettered!’
But some subscribers protested. Why had such a pearl been kept hidden from them for so long? Until then, Christine Daaé had been adequate singing Siebel* to the Marguerite of the emphatically voluptuous Carlotta. It had taken the unexplained and inexplicable absence of Carlotta from the gala concert for Mlle Daaé, at short notice, to have her chance, to rise to the occasion and show what she could do in a part of the programme featuring the Spanish diva! Finally, what had made Messrs Debienne and Poligny think of Christine Daaé? Did it mean they had known about her great, hidden talent all along? And if they had, why had they kept it hidden? Oddly, she didn’t have a singing teacher at the time. Several times she had said that henceforth she would manage without one. It was all very puzzling.
The Count de Chagny had been present in his box and had jumped to his feet and joined in the barrage of bravos.
Philippe-Georges-Marie, Count de Chagny, was then exactly forty-one years of age. He was a great noble and a fine-looking man. He was of above average height, had an agreeable face though his brow was heavy and his eyes were cold. He always behaved with exquisite courtesy to the ladies and was rather aloof with men who were not always inclined to forgive his worldly success. He was considerate and had a conscience. By the death of old Count Philibert, he had become head of one of the oldest and most illustrious families in France. Its aristocratic pedigree dated from the time of Louis le Hutin.* The Chagny fortune was enormous. When the old Count, a widower, died, it was no small burden that fell on Philippe’s shoulders: that of managing the inheritance. His two sisters and his brother Raoul wanted to be no part of it and refused to allow the estate to be divided. They left everything to Philippe, as if the right of the firstborn to inherit had n
ever been abolished.* When both sisters married—on the same day—they were given their shares by their brother, not as something that was theirs by right but as a dowry for which they were suitably grateful.
The Countess de Chagny—née de Moerogis de La Martynière—had died giving birth to Raoul who was born twenty years after his older brother. When the old Count died, Raoul was twelve. Philippe took an active interest in his education. In this task he was admirably seconded at first by his two sisters and then by an old aunt, the widow of a naval officer, who lived at Brest and gave young Raoul a taste for the sea. The young man went to the Borda* from which he emerged near the top of his class and duly completed his training by sailing round the world. Thanks to powerful contacts, he had just been selected to take part in the official expedition of the Requin which was being sent to the North Pole to look for survivors of the Artois expedition from which nothing had been heard for three years.* Meantime, he was to make the most of a long leave which still had six months to run. In aristocratic circles, all the dowager ladies noticed this handsome young man and pitied him in advance for the hardships which lay in store.
He was exceptionally diffident, I’m almost tempted to say innocent. He seemed to have only just emerged from the influence of women. Indeed, cosseted by two sisters and his old aunt, his almost exclusively female upbringing had made him open and honest and given him a boyish charm none of which had yet rubbed off. At that point, he had just reached the age of twenty-one but looked eighteen. He had a small, blond moustache, fine blue eyes and a girlish complexion.
The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics) Page 5
