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 disappearance2 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 rivalry3 between the two brothers; and nobody suspected what had really happened, nobody understood that, as Raoul and Christine had both disappeared, both had withdrawn4 far from the world to enjoy a happiness which they would not have cared to make public after the inexplicable5 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 pigeonholed6 by the unintelligent care of M. le Juge d’Instruction Faure, the newspapers made efforts, at intervals7, to fathom8 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 irony9.
The Persian alone knew the whole truth and held the main proofs, which came to him with the pious10 relics11 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 inquiries12; 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 recesses14. 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, spoke15 of Erik sometimes as a demigod and sometimes as the lowest of the low —“Poligny was superstitious16 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 blackmailer17 to whom Debienne himself had fallen a prey18. 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 Memoirs20 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 thoroughly21 as if he had written them himself, observed that I should find the explanation of the whole business if I would just recollect13 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 redeemed22 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, inscribed23, 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 treasury24. 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 butt25 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 investigation26 on the spot, I should certainly find the solution to the riddle27 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 perfectly28 satisfactory; and I hardly believed that I should ever discover so many undeniable proofs of the authenticity29 of the feats30 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 worthy31 Madame Giry, I am sorry to say, is no more) and by Sorelli, who is now living in retirement32 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 penetrated33 into the cellars of the opera-house. In the Communists’ dungeon34, 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 chisel35; and I do not despair of one day discovering the ornament36 that could be raised or lowered at will, so as to admit of the ghost’s mysterious correspondence with Mme. Giry and of his generosity37.
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 dexterously38 fumble39 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 himself without the pale of humanity, he was restrained by no scruples40 and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity41 and imagination, which he had received by way of compensation for his extraordinary uglinesss, to prey upon his fellow-men. His reason for restoring the forty-thousand francs, of his own accord, was that he no longer wanted it. He had relinquished42 his marriage with Christine Daae. He had relinquished everything above the surface of the earth.”
According to the Persian’s account, Erik was born in a small town not far from Rouen. He was the son of a master-mason. He ran away at an early age from his father’s house, where his ugliness was a subject of horror and terror to his parents. For a time, he frequented the fairs, where a showman exhibited him as the “living corpse43.” He seems to have crossed the whole of Europe, from fair to fair, and to have completed his strange education as an artist and magician at the very fountain-head of art and magic, among the Gipsies. A period of Erik’s life remained quite obscure. He was seen at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, where he displayed himself in all his hideous44 glory. He already sang as nobody on this earth had ever sung before; he practised ventriloquism and gave displays of legerdemain45 so extraordinary that the caravans46 returning to Asia talked about it during the whole length of their journey. In this way, his reputation penetrated the walls of the palace at Mazenderan, where the little sultana, the favorite of the Shah-in-Shah, was boring herself to death. A dealer47 in furs, returning to Samarkand from Nijni-Novgorod, told of the marvels48 which he had seen performed in Erik’s tent. The trader was summoned to the palace and the daroga of Mazenderan was told to question him. Next the daroga was instructed to go and find Erik. He brought him to Persia, where for some months Erik’s will was law. He was guilty of not a few horrors, for he seemed not to know the difference between good and evil. He took part calmly in a number of political assassinations49; and he turned his diabolical50 inventive powers against the Emir of Afghanistan, who was at war with the Persian empire. The Shah took a liking51 to him.
This was the time of the rosy52 hours of Mazenderan, of which the daroga’s narrative53 has given us a glimpse. Erik had very original ideas on the subject of architecture and thought out a palace much as a conjuror54 contrives55 a trick-casket. The Shah ordered him to construct an edifice56 of this kind. Erik did so; and the building appears to have been so ingenious that His Majesty57 was able to move about in it unseen and to disappear without a possibility of the trick’s being discovered. When the Shah-in-Shah found himself the possessor of this gem19, he ordered Erik’s yellow eyes to be put out. But he reflected that, even when blind, Erik would still be able to build so remarkable58 a house for another sovereign; and also that, as long as Erik was alive, some one would know the secret of the wonderful palace. Erik’s death was decided59 upon, together with that of all the laborers60 who had worked under his orders. The execution of this abominable61 decree devolved upon the daroga of Mazenderan. Erik had shown him some slight services and procured62 him many a hearty63 laugh. He saved Erik by providing him with the means of escape, but nearly paid with his head for his generous indulgence.
Fortunately for the daroga, a corpse, half-eaten by the birds of prey, was found on the shore of the Caspian Sea, and was taken for Erik’s body, because the daroga’s friends had dressed the remains64 in clothing that belonged to Erik. The daroga was let off with the loss of the imperial favor, the confiscation65 of his property and an order of perpetual banishment66. As a member of the Royal House, however, he continued to receive a monthly pension of a few hundred francs from the Persian treasury; and on this he came to live in Paris.
As for Erik, he went to Asia Minor67 and thence to Constantinople, where he entered the Sultan’s employment. In explanation of the services which he was able to render a monarch68 haunted by perpetual terrors, I need only say that it was Erik who constructed all the famous trap-doors and secret chambers69 and mysterious strong-boxes which were found at Yildiz-Kiosk after the last Turkish revolution. He also invented those automata, dressed like the Sultan and resembling the Sultan in all respects,2 which made people believe that the Commander of the Faithful was awake at one place, when, in reality, he was asleep elsewhere.
Of course, he had to leave the Sultan’s service for the same reasons that made him fly from Persia: he knew too much. Then, tired of his adventurous70, formidable and monstrous71 life, he longed to be some one “like everybody else.” And he became a contractor72, like any ordinary contractor, building ordinary houses with ordinary bricks. He tendered for part of the foundations in the Opera. His estimate was accepted. When he found himself in the cellars of the enormous playhouse, his artistic73, fantastic, wizard nature resumed the upper hand. Besides, was he not as ugly as ever? He dreamed of creating for his own use a dwelling74 unknown to the rest of the earth, where he could hide from men’s eyes for all time.
The reader knows and guesses the rest. It is all in keeping with this incredible and yet veracious story. 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 distinguished75 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. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera ghost.
I have prayed over his mortal remains, that God might show him mercy notwithstanding his crimes. Yes, I am sure, quite sure that I prayed beside his body, the other day, when they took it from the spot where they were burying the phonographic records. It was his skeleton. I did not recognize it by the ugliness of the head, for all men are ugly when they have been dead as long as that, but by the plain gold ring which he wore and which Christine Daae had certainly slipped on his finger, when she came to bury him in accordance with her promise.
The skeleton was lying near the little well, in the place where the Angel of Music first held Christine Daae fainting in his trembling arms, on the night when he carried her down to the cellars of the opera-house.
And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will not bury it in the common grave! . . . I say that the place of the skeleton of the Opera ghost is in the archives of the National Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.
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1
veracious
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| adj.诚实可靠的 | |
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disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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rivalry
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| n.竞争，竞赛，对抗 | |
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withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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pigeonholed
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| v.把…搁在分类架上( pigeonhole的过去式和过去分词 )；把…留在记忆中；缓办；把…隔成小格 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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fathom
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| v.领悟，彻底了解 | |
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irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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relics
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| [pl.］n.遗物，遗迹，遗产；遗体，尸骸 | |
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inquiries
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| n.调查( inquiry的名词复数 )；疑问；探究；打听 | |
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recollect
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| v.回忆，想起，记起，忆起，记得 | |
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recesses
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| n.壁凹( recess的名词复数 )；（工作或业务活动的）中止或暂停期间；学校的课间休息；某物内部的凹形空间v.把某物放在墙壁的凹处( recess的第三人称单数 )；将（墙）做成凹形，在（墙）上做壁龛；休息，休会，休庭 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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superstitious
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| adj.迷信的 | |
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blackmailer
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| 敲诈者，勒索者 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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gem
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| n.宝石，珠宝；受爱戴的人 [同]jewel | |
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memoirs
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| n.回忆录；回忆录传( mem,自oir的名词复数) | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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redeemed
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| adj. 可赎回的，可救赎的 动词redeem的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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treasury
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| n.宝库；国库，金库；文库 | |
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butt
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| n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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riddle
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| n.谜，谜语，粗筛；vt.解谜，给…出谜，筛，检查，鉴定，非难，充满于；vi.出谜 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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authenticity
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| n.真实性 | |
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feats
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| 功绩，伟业，技艺( feat的名词复数 ) | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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retirement
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| n.退休，退职 | |
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penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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dungeon
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| n.地牢，土牢 | |
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chisel
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| n.凿子；v.用凿子刻，雕，凿 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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dexterously
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| adv.巧妙地，敏捷地 | |
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fumble
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| vi.笨拙地用手摸、弄、接等，摸索 | |
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scruples
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| n.良心上的不安( scruple的名词复数 )；顾虑，顾忌v.感到于心不安，有顾忌( scruple的第三人称单数 ) | |
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dexterity
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| n.(手的)灵巧，灵活 | |
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42
relinquished
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| 交出，让给( relinquish的过去式和过去分词 )； 放弃 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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legerdemain
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| n.戏法，诈术 | |
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caravans
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| （可供居住的）拖车（通常由机动车拖行）( caravan的名词复数 )； 篷车； （穿过沙漠地带的）旅行队（如商队） | |
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dealer
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| n.商人，贩子 | |
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marvels
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| n.奇迹( marvel的名词复数 )；令人惊奇的事物（或事例）；不平凡的成果；成就v.惊奇，对…感到惊奇( marvel的第三人称单数 ) | |
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49
assassinations
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| n.暗杀( assassination的名词复数 ) | |
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50
diabolical
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| adj.恶魔似的，凶暴的 | |
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liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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54
conjuror
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| n.魔术师，变戏法者 | |
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contrives
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| （不顾困难地）促成某事( contrive的第三人称单数 )； 巧妙地策划，精巧地制造（如机器）； 设法做到 | |
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56
edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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laborers
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| n.体力劳动者，工人( laborer的名词复数 )；（熟练工人的）辅助工 | |
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61
abominable
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| adj.可厌的，令人憎恶的 | |
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62
procured
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| v.（努力）取得， （设法）获得( procure的过去式和过去分词 )；拉皮条 | |
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hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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64
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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65
confiscation
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| n. 没收, 充公, 征收 | |
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66
banishment
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| n.放逐，驱逐 | |
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67
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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68
monarch
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| n.帝王，君主，最高统治者 | |
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chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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70
adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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71
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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72
contractor
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| n.订约人，承包人，收缩肌 | |
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73
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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74
dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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