Chapter III The Mysterious Reason

During this time, the farewell ceremony was taking place. I have

already said that this magnificent function was being given on the

occasion of the retirement of M. Debienne and M. Poligny, who had

determined to "die game," as we say nowadays. They had been assisted

in the realization of their ideal, though melancholy, program by all

that counted in the social and artistic world of Paris. All these

people met, after the performance, in the foyer of the ballet, where

Sorelli waited for the arrival of the retiring managers with a glass of

champagne in her hand and a little prepared speech at the tip of her

tongue. Behind her, the members of the Corps de Ballet, young and old,

discussed the events of the day in whispers or exchanged discreet

signals with their friends, a noisy crowd of whom surrounded the

supper-tables arranged along the slanting floor.

A few of the dancers had already changed into ordinary dress; but most

of them wore their skirts of gossamer gauze; and all had thought it the

right thing to put on a special face for the occasion: all, that is,

except little Jammes, whose fifteen summers--happy age!--seemed already

to have forgotten the ghost and the death of Joseph Buquet. She never

ceased to laugh and chatter, to hop about and play practical jokes,

until Mm. Debienne and Poligny appeared on the steps of the foyer, when

she was severely called to order by the impatient Sorelli.

Everybody remarked that the retiring managers looked cheerful, as is

the Paris way. 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. You know that one of your friends

is in trouble; do not try to console him: he will tell you that he is

already comforted; but, should he have met with good fortune, be

careful how you congratulate him: he thinks it so natural that he is

surprised that you should speak of it. In Paris, our lives are one

masked ball; and the foyer of the ballet is the last place in which two

men so "knowing" as M. Debienne and M. Poligny would have made the

mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be. And

they were already smiling rather too broadly upon Sorelli, who had

begun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little madcap

of a Jammes broke the smile of the managers so brutally that the

expression of distress and dismay that lay beneath it became apparent

to all eyes:

"The Opera ghost!"

Jammes yelled these words in a tone of unspeakable terror; and her

finger pointed, among the crowd of dandies, to 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.

"The Opera ghost! The Opera ghost!" Everybody laughed and pushed his

neighbor and wanted to offer the Opera ghost a drink, but he was gone.

He had slipped through the crowd; and the others vainly hunted for him,

while two old gentlemen tried to calm little Jammes and while little

Giry stood screaming like a peacock.

Sorelli was furious; she had not been able to finish her speech; the

managers, had kissed her, thanked her and run away as fast as the ghost

himself. No one was surprised at this, for it was known that they were

to go through the same ceremony on the floor above, in the foyer of the

singers, and that finally they were themselves to receive their

personal friends, for the last time, in the great lobby outside the

managers' office, where a regular supper would be served.

Here they found the new managers, M. Armand Moncharmin and M. Firmin

Richard, whom they hardly knew; nevertheless, they were lavish in

protestations of friendship and received a thousand flattering

compliments in reply, so that those of the guests who had feared that

they had a rather tedious evening in store for them at once put on

brighter faces. The supper was almost gay and a particularly clever

speech of the representative of the government, mingling the glories of

the past with the successes of the future, caused the greatest

cordiality to prevail.

The retiring managers had already handed over to their successors the

two tiny master-keys which opened all the doors--thousands of doors--of

the Opera house. And those little keys, the object of general

curiosity, were being passed from hand to hand, when the attention of

some of the guests was diverted by their discovery, at the end of the

table, of that strange, wan and fantastic face, with the hollow eyes,

which had already appeared in the foyer of the ballet and been greeted

by little Jammes' exclamation:

"The Opera ghost!"

There sat the ghost, as natural as could be, except that he neither ate

nor drank. Those who began by looking at him with a smile ended by

turning away their heads, for the sight of him at once provoked the

most funereal thoughts. No one repeated the joke of the foyer, no one

exclaimed:

"There's the Opera ghost!"

He himself did not speak a word and his very neighbors could not have

stated at what precise moment he had sat down between them; but every

one felt that if the dead did ever come and sit at the table of the

living, they could not cut a more ghastly figure. The friends of

Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinny

guest was an acquaintance of Debienne's or Poligny's, while Debienne's

and Poligny's friends believed that the cadaverous individual belonged

to Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin's party.

The result was that no request was made for an explanation; no

unpleasant remark; no joke in bad taste, which might have offended this

visitor from the tomb. A few of those present who knew the story of

the ghost and the description of him given by the chief

scene-shifter--they did not know of Joseph Buquet's death--thought, in

their own minds, that the man at the end of the table might easily have

passed for him; and yet, according to the story, the ghost had no nose

and the person in question had. But M. Moncharmin declares, in his

Memoirs, that the guest's nose was transparent: "long, thin and

transparent" are his exact words. I, for my part, will add that this

might very well apply to a false nose. M. Moncharmin may have taken

for transparency what was only shininess. Everybody knows that

orthopaedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who have

lost their noses naturally or as the result of an operation.

Did the ghost really take a seat at the managers' supper-table that

night, uninvited? And can we be sure that the figure was that of the

Opera ghost himself? Who would venture to assert as much? I mention

the incident, not because I wish for a second to make the reader

believe--or even to try to make him believe--that the ghost was capable

of such a sublime piece of impudence; but because, after all, the thing

is impossible.

M. Armand Moncharmin, in chapter eleven of his Memoirs, says:

"When I think of this first evening, I can not separate the secret

confided to us by MM. Debienne and Poligny in their office from the

presence at our supper of that GHOSTLY person whom none of us knew."

What happened was this: Mm. Debienne and Poligny, sitting at the

center of the table, had not seen the man with the death's head.

Suddenly he began to speak.

"The ballet-girls are right," he said. "The death of that poor Buquet

is perhaps not so natural as people think."

Debienne and Poligny gave a start.

"Is Buquet dead?" they cried.

"Yes," replied the man, or the shadow of a man, quietly. "He was

found, this evening, hanging in the third cellar, between a farm-house

and a scene from the Roi de Lahore."

The two managers, or rather ex-managers, at once rose and stared

strangely at the speaker. They were more excited than they need have

been, that is to say, more excited than any one need be by the

announcement of the suicide of a chief scene-shifter. They looked at

each other. They had both turned whiter than the table-cloth. At

last, Debienne made a sign to Mm. Richard and Moncharmin; Poligny

muttered a few words of excuse to the guests; and all four went into

the managers' office. I leave M. Moncharmin to complete the story. In

his Memoirs, he says:

"Mm. Debienne and Poligny seemed to grow more and more excited, and

they appeared to have something very difficult to tell us. First, they

asked us if we knew the man, sitting at the end of the table, who had

told them of the death of Joseph Buquet; and, when we answered in the

negative, they looked still more concerned. They took the master-keys

from our hands, stared at them for a moment and advised us to have new

locks made, with the greatest secrecy, for the rooms, closets and

presses that we might wish to have hermetically closed. They said this

so funnily that we began to laugh and to ask if there were thieves at

the Opera. They replied that there was something worse, which was the

GHOST. We began to laugh again, feeling sure that they were indulging

in some joke that was intended to crown our little entertainment.

Then, at their request, we became 'serious,' resolving to humor them

and to enter into the spirit of the game. They told us that they never

would have spoken to us of the ghost, if they had not received formal

orders from the ghost himself to ask us to be pleasant to him and to

grant any request that he might make. However, in their relief at

leaving a domain where that tyrannical shade held sway, they had

hesitated until the last moment to tell us this curious story, which

our skeptical minds were certainly not prepared to entertain. But the

announcement of the death of Joseph Buquet had served them as a brutal

reminder that, whenever they had disregarded the ghost's wishes, some

fantastic or disastrous event had brought them to a sense of their

dependence.

"During these unexpected utterances made in a tone of the most secret

and important confidence, I looked at Richard. Richard, in his student

days, had acquired a great reputation for practical joking, and he

seemed to relish the dish which was being served up to him in his turn.

He did not miss a morsel of it, though the seasoning was a little

gruesome because of the death of Buquet. He nodded his head sadly,

while the others spoke, and his features assumed the air of a man who

bitterly regretted having taken over the Opera, now that he knew that

there was a ghost mixed up in the business. I could think of nothing

better than to give him a servile imitation of this attitude of

despair. However, in spite of all our efforts, we could not, at the

finish, help bursting out laughing in the faces of MM. Debienne and

Poligny, who, seeing us pass straight from the gloomiest state of mind

to one of the most insolent merriment, acted as though they thought

that we had gone mad.

"The joke became a little tedious; and Richard asked half-seriously and

half in jest:

"'But, after all, what does this ghost of yours want?'

"M. Poligny went to his desk and returned with a copy of the

memorandum-book. The memorandum-book begins with the well-known words

saying that 'the management of the Opera shall give to the performance

of the National Academy of Music the splendor that becomes the first

lyric stage in France' and ends with Clause 98, which says that the

privilege can be withdrawn if the manager infringes the conditions

stipulated in the memorandum-book. This is followed by the conditions,

which are four in number.

"The copy produced by M. Poligny was written in black ink and exactly

similar to that in our possession, except that, at the end, it

contained a paragraph in red ink and in a queer, labored handwriting,

as though it had been produced by dipping the heads of matches into the

ink, the writing of a child that has never got beyond the down-strokes

and has not learned to join its letters. This paragraph ran, word for

word, as follows:

"'5. Or if the manager, in any month, delay for more than a fortnight

the payment of the allowance which he shall make to the Opera ghost, an

allowance of twenty thousand francs a month, say two hundred and forty

thousand francs a year.'

"M. Poligny pointed with a hesitating finger to this last clause, which

we certainly did not expect.

"'Is this all? Does he not want anything else?' asked Richard, with

the greatest coolness.

"'Yes, he does,' replied Poligny.

"And he turned over the pages of the memorandum-book until he came to

the clause specifying the days on which certain private boxes were to

be reserved for the free use of the president of the republic, the

ministers and so on. At the end of this clause, a line had been added,

also in red ink:

"'Box Five on the grand tier shall be placed at the disposal of the

Opera ghost for every performance.'

"When we saw this, there was nothing else for us to do but to rise from

our chairs, shake our two predecessors warmly by the hand and

congratulate them on thinking of this charming little joke, which

proved that the old French sense of humor was never likely to become

extinct. Richard added that he now understood why MM. Debienne and

Poligny were retiring from the management of the National Academy of

Music. Business was impossible with so unreasonable a ghost.

"'Certainly, two hundred and forty thousand francs are not be picked up

for the asking,' said M. Poligny, without moving a muscle of his face.

'And have you considered what the loss over Box Five meant to us? We

did not sell it once; and not only that, but we had to return the

subscription: why, it's awful! We really can't work to keep ghosts!

We prefer to go away!'

"'Yes,' echoed M. Debienne, 'we prefer to go away. Let us go.'"

"And he stood up. Richard said: 'But, after all all, it seems to me

that you were much too kind to the ghost. If I had such a troublesome

ghost as that, I should not hesitate to have him arrested.'

"'But how? Where?' they cried, in chorus. 'We have never seen him!'

"'But when he comes to his box?'

"'WE HAVE NEVER SEEN HIM IN HIS BOX.'

"'Then sell it.'

"'Sell the Opera ghost's box! Well, gentlemen, try it.'

"Thereupon we all four left the office. Richard and I had 'never

laughed so much in our lives.'"