d strangler for pleasure; one who delights in designing torture chambers and spying through a peephole on the wretches dying in agony within them; a man who worked for years in the service of the equally sadistic Empress of Persia, devising for her ever more revolting torments to inflict on her prisoners.
According to the Persian he and the young aristocrat, descending to the lowest cellars to try to recover the kidnapped Christine, were themselves captured, imprisoned in a torture room, almost fried alive, but then miraculously escaped, fainted and woke up safe and sound. So did Christine. It is a truly farcical story. Yet at the end of the book Leroux admits he harbours a certain sympathy for the Phantom, a sentiment utterly impossible if one believes the Persian. But in every other detail Leroux seems to have swallowed the Persian’s farrago of lies hook, line and sinker.
Fortunately there is one flaw in the Persian’s story so glaring as to permit us to disbelieve the whole lot. He claimed that Erik had had a long and fulfilling life before coming to dwell in the cellars beneath the opera house. According to the Persian, this grotesquely disfigured man had travelled widely through western, central and eastern Europe, far into Russia and down to the Persian Gulf. He then returned to Paris and became a contractor in the building of the Paris Opera under Gamier. This allegation has to be nonsense.
If the man had enjoyed such a life over so many years he would certainly have come to terms with his own disfigurement. To have been a contractor in the building of the Opera, he would have had to conduct many business meetings, confront commissioning architects, negotiate with subcontractors and workers. Why on earth should he then decide to flee into exile underground because he could not face other members of the human race? Such a man, with his astuteness and intelligence, would have made a tidy packet from his contracting work and then retired in comfort to a walled residence in the countryside to live out his days in self-willed isolation, attended perhaps by a house-servant immune to his ugliness.
The only logical step for a modern analyst to take, as Andrew Lloyd Webber has already done with the musical, is to discount the Persian’s accounts and allegations in their totality, and never more so than in disbelieving both the Persian and Leroux that the Phantom died shortly after the events narrated. The sensible path to follow is to return to the basics and to those things we can actually know or presume on the basis of logic. And these are:
That some time in the 1880s a desperately disfigured wretch, fleeing from contact with a society he felt loathed and reviled him, ran for sanctuary and took up residence in the labyrinth of cellars and storerooms beneath the Paris Opera. This is not so crazy a notion. Prisoners have survived many years in underground dungeons. But seven storeys spread over three acres is not exactly close confinement. Even the underground sections of the Opera (and when the building was completely vacated he could wander through the upper levels undisturbed) are like a small city, with everything needed to establish a life-support system.
That over the years rumours began to grow and develop among impressionable and gullible staff that too many things went missing, and that a shadowy figure had occasionally been surprised before fleeing into the darkness. Again, not so crazy. Such rumours usually abound in rather spooky buildings.
That in the year 1893 something strange happened which ended the Phantom’s kingdom in the darkness. Peering from a closed box at the opera on stage, which he was wont to do, he spotted a lovely young understudy and fell hopelessly in love with her. Being self-taught after listening for years to the finest voices in Europe, he voice-coached the young woman until one night, taking over the role from the leading diva, she set all Paris by its ears through the clarity and purity of her singing. Again, nothing impossible here, for overnight stardom through the revelation of a blazing but hitherto unsuspected talent is the stuff of which show-business legends are made, and there are many.
That the events moved to tragedy because the Phantom hoped that Christine might return his love. But she was courted by, and fell in love with, a handsome young vicomte, Raoul de Chagny. Driven to extremes by rage and jealousy, the Phantom abducted his young soprano from the very stage of the Opera in mid-performance and took her to his sanctuary at the seventh and deepest level of the catacombs by the edge of the buried lake.
And there something passed between them, though we know not what. Then the young vicomte, driven beyond fear of the dark and the caves, appeared to rescue her. Given a choice, Christine chose her Adonis. The Phantom had the chance to kill them both but, as the vengeful mob from above with a hundred burning torches to illuminate the darkness began to appear, he spared the lovers and disappeared into the last remaining shadows.
But before he did so she returned to him a single golden ring that he had earlier given her as a token of his love. And he left behind, for his persecutors to find, a mocking memento: a musical box in the form of a monkey that played a tune called ‘Masquerade’.
This is the story of the Lloyd Webber musical and it is the only one to make sense. The Phantom, broken and rejected once more, simply vanished and was never heard of again.
Or … was he?
1
THE CONFESSION OF ANTOINETTE GIRY
HOSPICE OF THE SISTERS OF CHARITY OF THE ORDER OF ST-VINCENT-DE-PAUL, PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1906
THERE IS A CRACK IN THE PLASTER OF THE CEILING far above my head and close to it a spider is creating a web. Strange to think this spider will outlive me, be here when I am gone, a few hours from now. Good luck, little spider, making a web to catch a fly to feed your babies.
How did it come to this? That I, Antoinette Giry, at the age of fifty-eight, am lying on my back in a hospice for the people of Paris, run by the good sisters, waiting to meet my Maker? I do not think I have been a very good person, not good like these sisters who clean up the endless mess, bound by their oath of poverty, chastity, humility and obedience. I could never have managed that. They have faith, you see. I was never able to have that faith. Is it time I learned it now? Probably. For I shall be gone before the night sky fills that small high window over there at the edge of my vision.
I am here, I suppose, because I simply ran out of money. Well, almost. There is a little bag under my pillow which no-one knows about. But that is for a special purpose. Forty years ago I was a ballerina, so slim and young and beautiful then. So they told me, the young men who came to the stage door. And handsome they were too, those clean, sweet-smelling hard young bodies that could give and take so much pleasure.
And the most beautiful was Lucien. All the chorus called him Lucien le Bel, with a face to make a girl’s heart hammer like a tambour. He took me out one sunny Sunday to the Bois de Boulogne and proposed, on one knee as it should be done, and I accepted him. One year later he was killed by the Prussian guns at Sedan. Then I wanted no more of marriage for a long time, nearly five years while I danced at the ballet.
I was twenty-eight when it ended, the dancing career. For one thing I had met Jules and we married and I became heavy with little Meg. More to the point, I was losing my litheness. Senior dancer of the corps, fighting every day to stay slim and supple. But the Director was very good to me, a kind man. The Mistress of the Chorus was retiring; he said I had the experience and he did not wish to look outside the Opera for her successor. He appointed me. Maitresse du Corps de Ballet. As soon as Meg was born and put with a wet-nurse I took up my duties. It was 1876, one year after the opening of Garnier’s new and magnificent opera house. At last we were out of those cramped shoe-boxes in the rue le Peletier, the war was well over, the damage to my beloved Paris repaired and life was good.
I did not even mind when Jules met his fat Belgian and ran off to the Ardennes. Good riddance. At least I had a job, which was more than he could ever say. Enough to keep my small apartment, raise Meg and nightly watch my girls delighting every crowned head in Europe. I wonder what happened to Jules? Too late to start enquiring now. And Meg? A ballet dancer and chorus girl like her mama - I could at least do that for her - until
the awful fall ten years ago which left the right knee stiff for ever. Even then she was lucky, with a bit of help from me. Dresser and personal maid to the greatest diva in Europe, Christine de Chagny. Well, if you discount that uncouth Australian Melba, which I do. I wonder where Meg is now? Milan, Rome, Madrid perhaps? Where the diva is singing. And to think I once used to shout at the Vicomtesse de Chagny to pay attention and stay in line!
So what am I doing here, waiting for a too-early grave? Well, there was retirement eight years ago, on my fiftieth birthday. They were very nice about it. The usual platitudes. And a generous bonus for my twenty-two years as Mistress. Enough to live on. Plus a little private coaching for the incredibly clumsy daughters of the rich. Not much but enough, and a little put by. Until last spring.
That was when the pains began, not many at first but sharp and sudden, deep in the lower stomach. They gave me bismuth for indigestion and charged a small fortune. I did not know then that the steel crab was in me, driving his great claws into me and always growing as he fed. Not until July. Then it was too late. So I lie here, trying not to scream with the pain, waiting for the next spoonful of the white goddess, the powder that comes from the poppies of the East.
Not long to wait now for the final sleep. I am not even afraid any more. Perhaps He will be merciful? I hope so, but surely He will take away the pain. I try to concentrate on something else. I look back and think of all the girls I trained, and my pretty young Meg with her stiff knee waiting to find her man - I hope she finds a good one. And of course I think of my boys, my two lovely tragic boys. I think of them most of all.
‘Madame, Monsieur l’Abbe is here.’
‘Thank you, Sister. I cannot see too well. Where is he?’
‘I am here, my child, Father Sebastien. By your side. Do you feel my hand on your arm?’
‘Yes, Father.’