Book of the Week - The Phantom of the Opera

There's nothing like a good ghost story! Actually, this isn't a ghost story, because Erik isn't a ghost, but all the same. Anyway, I don't know what else Leroux wrote, but this is a very finely written story - full of detail, which, while not absolutely pertinent to the plot, enriches the story, and is necessary in making the tale as good as it is, I think.


Notwithstanding the horrors of a situation which seemed definitely to abandon them to their deaths, M de Chagny and his companion were saved by the sublime devotion of Christine Daae. I had the rest of the story from the lips of the daroga himself.

When I went to see him, he was still living in his little flat in the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries. He was very ill and it took all my ardour as an historian pledged to tell the truth to persuade him to live the incredible tragedy over again for my benefit. His faithful old servant Darius showed me in. The daroga received me at a window overlooking the garden of the Tuileries. He still had his magnificent eyes, but his poor face looked very worn. He had shaved the whole of his head, which was usually covered with an astrakhan cap; he was dressed in a long, very plain coat and amused himself by unconsciously twisting his thumbs inside the sleeves; but his mind was quite clear and he told me his story with perfect lucidity, as follows.

It seems that, when he opened his eyes, the daroga found himself lying on a bed. M de Chagny was asleep on a sofa, beside the wardrobe. An angel and a devil were watching over them...

After the deceptions and illusions of the torture-chamber, the precision of the middle-class details in that quiet little room seemed invented for the express purpose of once more puzzling the mind of the mortal rash enough to stray into that abode of living nightmare. The wooden bedstead, the beeswaxed mahogany chairs, the chest of drawers, the brasses, the little square anti-macassars carefully laced on the backs of the chairs, the clock on the mantelpiece and the harmless-looking ebony caskets at either end... lastly, the what-not filled with shells, with red pin-cushions, with mother-of-pearl boats and an enormous ostrich-egg... the whole discreetly lighted by a shaded lamp standing on a small round table: this collection of ugly, peaceable, reasonable furniture, at the bottom of the Opera cellars, bewildered the imagination more than all the late fantastic happenings.