Christine Daaé has disappeared in the middle of a performance, there are people running about the Paris Opera in various stages of alarm, and M. Moncharmin would like a safety-pin. He would like it immediately. The unfortunate man sent to inform him of the missing soprano receives a furious demand for this article of haberdashery and is promptly shown the door. Moncharmin has twenty thousand francs to worry about, and at present the integrity of his colleague’s coat pocket is a matter of considerably greater importance than the whereabouts of a young woman. I read the episode twice, partly because it amused me so much, and partly because I had quite forgotten about Christine myself.

I first read Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera at eighteen, and had remembered it ever since as a solemn book, full of music drifting through dark corridors and a terribly unhappy man living beneath a lake. Perhaps the musical has something to answer for. The novel is considerably noisier than I remembered. People are forever rushing into rooms, accusing one another of dishonesty, making unfortunate discoveries about their colleagues. The managers have inherited an opera house whose employees appear determined to make their lives disagreeable. And the narrator, who undertakes to prove that the Opera Ghost really existed, is so pleased with his documentary evidence that I found myself believing him almost against my will. He has spoken to witnesses. He has examined papers. When he mentions his investigation into the disappearance of the twenty thousand francs, one gets the impression that he considers it among his professional triumphs.

The money belongs, supposedly, to the ghost, whose agreement with the previous management entitles him to a monthly allowance and the exclusive use of Box Five. Richard and Moncharmin refuse to honour these arrangements, an attitude which seems reasonable enough. Nobody has introduced them to the gentleman in question, and they are suspicious of the letters arriving on his behalf. The ghost becomes increasingly difficult. He wants Carlotta removed from Faust, objects to the treatment of Madame Giry and threatens consequences if his instructions are ignored. His letters have all the offended authority of a performer who cannot believe the management has disregarded him. I began to understand why the former managers had retired without resolving the matter. There are certain problems one might prefer to leave to one’s successor.

Madame Giry is the keeper of Box Five, and she takes the ghost far more seriously than the gentlemen who pay her wages. She also has a bonnet adorned with two black feathers, which Leroux describes with a particular affection. When she is summoned before the managers, the feathers betray her indignation long before she has finished speaking. He even has them change from question marks into exclamation marks when Richard threatens to arrest her. I was much taken with this. The woman has come to defend her professional conduct and finds herself obliged to do so before two men who have already decided that she is either dishonest or insane. She is neither sufficiently humble nor sufficiently frightened to satisfy them.

Her faith in the ghost rests upon a prophecy concerning her daughter Meg, who is destined, according to a letter discovered in Box Five, to become an empress. The letter provides a list of ballet dancers who have married into royalty, ending with the triumphant prediction, “1885. Meg Giry, Empress!” Madame Giry has committed the entire document to memory. Meg’s promotion to the front row of dancers has already been secured, and her mother regards this as promising evidence that the rest will follow. I spent some time wondering about Meg, who must have endured an extraordinary amount of maternal encouragement. Presumably every new gentleman at the Opera was examined for signs of royal blood.

Erik has understood Madame Giry perfectly. He has offered her something she wants to believe, and in return acquired a loyal assistant. The future of Meg Giry matters to her every bit as much as Box Five matters to him. The managers, who cannot comprehend her devotion, merely grow angrier. At one point she becomes so offended by their accusations that she strikes Richard with the envelope containing the ghost’s allowance, scattering banknotes around the office. There is no dignity left in the proceedings. Moncharmin has already begun to suspect Richard of stealing the money himself, which leads eventually to the safety-pin and the elaborate business of fastening a coat pocket against supernatural theft.

I had nearly forgotten about Carlotta.

She is the Opera’s celebrated soprano, whose professional security has been threatened by Christine’s sudden success, and she has no intention of surrendering her position because an anonymous correspondent disapproves of her singing. She insists upon appearing in Faust. I admire her for it, although her conviction that the entire world ought to acknowledge her superiority cannot have made her an easy colleague. She and the ghost are both convinced that the casting of Faust is their personal business. The performance begins successfully. The audience applauds, Carlotta grows confident, and then, just as she is singing one of Marguerite’s most beautiful passages, an impossible noise escapes her throat.

“Co-ack!”

Leroux seems to be having the time of his life. Carlotta tries to convince herself that she has imagined the noise. She resumes singing, only for the toad to make another appearance. The audience is horrified, the managers are beside themselves, and the narrator compares the catastrophe to the destruction of the Venus de Milo’s arms, which is an extravagant comparison even by the standards of a theatrical novel. Carlotta’s voice has turned against her in public, and there is almost nothing she can do except attempt the offending passage again.

Then the chandelier falls.

Leroux has a tendency to allow his absurdities to become dreadful while one is laughing at them. It is rather unfair upon the reader. The ghost has warned the managers that something terrible will happen. A woman is killed, several people are injured, and Carlotta’s humiliation becomes a comparatively minor incident in an evening of genuine horror. The dead woman is the concierge appointed to replace Madame Giry. The following morning’s newspaper disposes of her with a coarse little headline about two hundred thousand kilos falling upon a concierge’s head. Leroux includes it almost casually. I had been laughing at the toad only a moment earlier, and now there was this woman, whose first visit to the Opera had also been her last.

It occurred to me here that Erik differs from the other inhabitants of the Opera chiefly in the extent to which he can make his displeasure everybody else’s problem. Carlotta has her vanity, the managers their offended authority, Madame Giry her ambitions for Meg. They quarrel, interfere and make themselves objectionable in the ordinary human fashion. Erik is sensitive to the same offences, particularly to the possibility of being ignored. He can make the ceiling answer for him.

He is alarmingly good at arranging things. The voices in the walls, the concealed passages, the mirror through which Christine disappears: all of them have been prepared with an attention to detail which might have been admirable in a less homicidal man. He knows how to make somebody believe that an Angel of Music has come to instruct her, and Christine, who has been waiting for the angel promised by her dead father, listens to him. His musical instruction transforms her voice. When she finally reaches his underground home, she finds a drawing room with ordinary furnishings and flowers in baskets, which she can scarcely reconcile with the circumstances of her arrival. She even thinks she could estimate what some of these things had cost. It is such a peculiarly practical observation to make while trapped five storeys beneath an opera house that I felt an immediate affection for her.

Erik, meanwhile, wants a wife, a home, perhaps even the possibility of going out on Sundays. A life whose chief attraction is that other people are allowed to have it.

The trouble is that Christine has ideas of her own, and Erik is a difficult man to disappoint. During her fortnight’s captivity she discovers that the most effective way of managing him is to pretend to return his affection. She is a professional singer, but this must have required a quite different order of talent. Erik becomes attentive, even submissive, and permits her to go out with him, though every excursion depends upon her maintaining the deception. She admits to Raoul that his sobbing when they parted affected her so deeply that she returned to him. I can understand the impulse. Erik, naturally, interprets her increasing kindness as encouragement. He has spent years perfecting the arts of illusion without learning how difficult it can be to distinguish affection from politeness, a deficiency which must have caused trouble even before he took to living underground.

Later, Erik presents Christine with two little bronze creatures, a scorpion and a grasshopper, and instructs her to choose between them. One will prevent an explosion; the other will destroy part of the Opera. If she chooses the scorpion, she is to become his wife. I cannot imagine what possessed him to think this an appropriate method of courtship, although by this stage I had ceased to expect him to approach anything in the ordinary way. He has turned a marriage proposal into an elaborate piece of stage machinery. The alternative to accepting him is mass murder. Afterwards Erik informs the Persian that Christine became engaged to him “of her own free will.” Richard and Moncharmin had their difficulties with contractual obligations, but even they might have questioned the terms of this agreement.

I kept returning to those words, though. They belong to the same man who has spent the novel dictating what everybody must sing, where they may sit and what they are permitted to know. He has constructed a situation in which Christine can scarcely refuse him and then congratulates himself upon securing her consent.

The final conversation with the Persian is painful, even so. Erik is beside himself because Christine has allowed him to kiss her forehead, because she has wept over him, because she has not recoiled from his face. He repeats these facts with such astonishment that I found myself forgetting, for a moment, the extraordinary lengths to which he had gone to secure her affection. When she kisses him of her own accord, he lets her and Raoul leave. The kiss means the world to Erik. For Christine it comes after a sequence of choices which have scarcely been choices at all. I was moved by his gratitude, though I should have liked to hear what Christine made of that last night. He tells the story himself, and is so overcome by the novelty of being treated kindly that he seems scarcely able to finish it.

I keep thinking about those Sunday outings. He had imagined Christine beside him in daylight, pausing at shop windows, coming home afterwards to their respectable little drawing room. I can even imagine him being happy, for an hour or two. The difficulty would have been the first Sunday she said she wanted to go somewhere alone.

---

Nishat Hossain is the founder and editor of Moorland & Mayfair, an independent literary journal devoted to books, culture and the occasional pleasure of taking literature a little too seriously.