Chapter III The Mysterious Reason
During this time, the farewell ceremony was taking place. I havealready said that this magnificent function was being given on theoccasion of the retirement of M. Debienne and M. Poligny, who haddetermined to "die game," as we say nowadays. They had been assistedin the realization of their ideal, though melancholy, program by allthat counted in the social and artistic world of Paris. All thesepeople met, after the performance, in the foyer of the ballet, whereSorelli waited for the arrival of the retiring managers with a glass ofchampagne in her hand and a little prepared speech at the tip of hertongue. Behind her, the members of the Corps de Ballet, young and old,discussed the events of the day in whispers or exchanged discreetsignals with their friends, a noisy crowd of whom surrounded thesupper-tables arranged along the slanting floor.
A few of the dancers had already changed into ordinary dress; but mostof them wore their skirts of gossamer gauze; and all had thought it theright thing to put on a special face for the occasion: all, that is,except little Jammes, whose fifteen summers--happy age!--seemed alreadyto have forgotten the ghost and the death of Joseph Buquet. She neverceased to laugh and chatter, to hop about and play practical jokes,until Mm. Debienne and Poligny appeared on the steps of the foyer, whenshe was severely called to order by the impatient Sorelli.
Everybody remarked that the retiring managers looked cheerful, as isthe Paris way. None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learnedto wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredomor indifference over his inward joy. You know that one of your friendsis in trouble; do not try to console him: he will tell you that he isalready comforted; but, should he have met with good fortune, becareful how you congratulate him: he thinks it so natural that he issurprised that you should speak of it. In Paris, our lives are onemasked ball; and the foyer of the ballet is the last place in which twomen so "knowing" as M. Debienne and M. Poligny would have made themistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be. Andthey were already smiling rather too broadly upon Sorelli, who hadbegun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little madcapof a Jammes broke the smile of the managers so brutally that theexpression of distress and dismay that lay beneath it became apparentto all eyes:
"The Opera ghost!"
Jammes yelled these words in a tone of unspeakable terror; and herfinger pointed, among the crowd of dandies, to a face so pallid, solugubrious and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under thestraddling eyebrows, that the death's head in question immediatelyscored a huge success.
"The Opera ghost! The Opera ghost!" Everybody laughed and pushed hisneighbor 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 littleGiry stood screaming like a peacock.
Sorelli was furious; she had not been able to finish her speech; themanagers, had kissed her, thanked her and run away as fast as the ghosthimself. No one was surprised at this, for it was known that they wereto go through the same ceremony on the floor above, in the foyer of thesingers, and that finally they were themselves to receive theirpersonal friends, for the last time, in the great lobby outside themanagers' office, where a regular supper would be served.
Here they found the new managers, M. Armand Moncharmin and M. FirminRichard, whom they hardly knew; nevertheless, they were lavish inprotestations of friendship and received a thousand flatteringcompliments in reply, so that those of the guests who had feared thatthey had a rather tedious evening in store for them at once put onbrighter faces. The supper was almost gay and a particularly cleverspeech of the representative of the government, mingling the glories ofthe past with the successes of the future, caused the greatestcordiality to prevail.
The retiring managers had already handed over to their successors thetwo tiny master-keys which opened all the doors--thousands of doors--ofthe Opera house. And those little keys, the object of generalcuriosity, were being passed from hand to hand, when the attention ofsome of the guests was diverted by their discovery, at the end of thetable, of that strange, wan and fantastic face, with the hollow eyes,which had already appeared in the foyer of the ballet and been greetedby little Jammes' exclamation:
"The Opera ghost!"
There sat the ghost, as natural as could be, except that he neither atenor drank. Those who began by looking at him with a smile ended byturning away their heads, for the sight of him at once provoked themost funereal thoughts. No one repeated the joke of the foyer, no oneexclaimed:
"There's the Opera ghost!"
He himself did not speak a word and his very neighbors could not havestated at what precise moment he had sat down between them; but everyone felt that if the dead did ever come and sit at the table of theliving, they could not cut a more ghastly figure. The friends ofFirmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinnyguest was an acquaintance of Debienne's or Poligny's, while Debienne'sand Poligny's friends believed that the cadaverous individual belongedto Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin's party.
The result was that no request was made for an explanation; nounpleasant remark; no joke in bad taste, which might have offended thisvisitor from the tomb. A few of those present who knew the story ofthe ghost and the description of him given by the chiefscene-shifter--they did not know of Joseph Buquet's death--thought, intheir own minds, that the man at the end of the table might easily havepassed for him; and yet, according to the story, the ghost had no noseand the person in question had. But M. Moncharmin declares, in hisMemoirs, that the guest's nose was transparent: "long, thin andtransparent" are his exact words. I, for my part, will add that thismight very well apply to a false nose. M. Moncharmin may have takenfor transparency what was only shininess. Everybody knows thatorthopaedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who havelost their noses naturally or as the result of an operation.
Did the ghost really take a seat at the managers' supper-table thatnight, uninvited? And can we be sure that the figure was that of theOpera ghost himself? Who would venture to assert as much? I mentionthe incident, not because I wish for a second to make the readerbelieve--or even to try to make him believe--that the ghost was capableof such a sublime piece of impudence; but because, after all, the thingis impossible.
M. Armand Moncharmin, in chapter eleven of his Memoirs, says:
"When I think of this first evening, I can not separate the secretconfided to us by MM. Debienne and Poligny in their office from thepresence at our supper of that GHOSTLY person whom none of us knew."
What happened was this: Mm. Debienne and Poligny, sitting at thecenter 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 Buquetis 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 wasfound, this evening, hanging in the third cellar, between a farm-houseand a scene from the Roi de Lahore."
The two managers, or rather ex-managers, at once rose and staredstrangely at the speaker. They were more excited than they need havebeen, that is to say, more excited than any one need be by theannouncement of the suicide of a chief scene-shifter. They looked ateach other. They, had both turned whiter than the table-cloth. Atlast, Debienne made a sign to Mm. Richard and Moncharmin; Polignymuttered a few words of excuse to the guests; and all four went intothe managers' office. I leave M. Moncharmin to complete the story. Inhis Memoirs, he says:
"Mm. Debienne and Poligny seemed to grow more and more excited, andthey appeared to have something very difficult to tell us. First, theyasked us if we knew the man, sitting at the end of the table, who hadtold them of the death of Joseph Buquet; and, when we answered in thenegative, they looked still more concerned. They took the master-keysfrom our
hands, stared at them for a moment and advised us to have newlocks made, with the greatest secrecy, for the rooms, closets andpresses that we might wish to have hermetically closed. They said thisso funnily that we began to laugh and to ask if there were thieves atthe Opera. They replied that there was something worse, which was theGHOST. We began to laugh again, feeling sure that they were indulgingin some joke that was intended to crown our little entertainment.Then, at their request, we became 'serious,' resolving to humor themand to enter into the spirit of the game. They told us that they neverwould have spoken to us of the ghost, if they had not received formalorders from the ghost himself to ask us to be pleasant to him and togrant any request that he might make. However, in their relief atleaving a domain where that tyrannical shade held sway, they hadhesitated until the last moment to tell us this curious story, whichour skeptical minds were certainly not prepared to entertain. But theannouncement of the death of Joseph Buquet had served them as a brutalreminder that, whenever they had disregarded the ghost's wishes, somefantastic or disastrous event had brought them to a sense of theirdependence.
"During these unexpected utterances made in a tone of the most secretand important confidence, I looked at Richard. Richard, in his studentdays, had acquired a great reputation for practical joking, and heseemed 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 littlegruesome because of the death of Buquet. He nodded his head sadly,while the others spoke, and his features assumed the air of a man whobitterly regretted having taken over the Opera, now that he knew thatthere was a ghost mixed up in the business. I could think of nothingbetter than to give him a servile imitation of this attitude ofdespair. However, in spite of all our efforts, we could not, at thefinish, help bursting out laughing in the faces of MM. Debienne andPoligny, who, seeing us pass straight from the gloomiest state of mindto one of the most insolent merriment, acted as though they thoughtthat we had gone mad.
"The joke became a little tedious; and Richard asked half-seriously andhalf in jest:
"'But, after all, what does this ghost of yours want?'
"M. Poligny went to his desk and returned with a copy of thememorandum-book. The memorandum-book begins with the well-known wordssaying that 'the management of the Opera shall give to the performanceof the National Academy of Music the splendor that becomes the firstlyric stage in France' and ends with Clause 98, which says that theprivilege can be withdrawn if the manager infringes the conditionsstipulated 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 exactlysimilar to that in our possession, except that, at the end, itcontained a paragraph in red ink and in a queer, labored handwriting,as though it had been produced by dipping the heads of matches into theink, the writing of a child that has never got beyond the down-strokesand has not learned to join its letters. This paragraph ran, word forword, as follows:
"'5. Or if the manager, in any month, delay for more than a fortnightthe payment of the allowance which he shall make to the Opera ghost, anallowance of twenty thousand francs a month, say two hundred and fortythousand francs a year.'
"M. Poligny pointed with a hesitating finger to this last clause, whichwe certainly did not expect.
"'Is this all? Does he not want anything else?' asked Richard, withthe greatest coolness.
"'Yes, he does,' replied Poligny.
"And he turned over the pages of the memorandum-book until he came tothe clause specifying the days on which certain private boxes were tobe reserved for the free use of the president of the republic, theministers 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 theOpera ghost for every performance.'
"When we saw this, there was nothing else for us to do but to rise fromour chairs, shake our two predecessors warmly by the hand andcongratulate them on thinking of this charming little joke, whichproved that the old French sense of humor was never likely to becomeextinct. Richard added that he now understood why MM. Debienne andPoligny were retiring from the management of the National Academy ofMusic. Business was impossible with so unreasonable a ghost.
"'Certainly, two hundred and forty thousand francs are not be picked upfor 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? Wedid not sell it once; and not only that, but we had to return thesubscription: 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 methat you were much too kind to the ghost. If I had such a troublesomeghost 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 'neverlaughed so much in our lives.'"