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.’”
