But travel then was harder and more tiring than now. After ten years covering stories across Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa he had become a celebrity but was exhausted. In 1907, aged thirty-nine, he decided to settle down and write novels. None in fact was more than what we would today call a potboiler, which is probably why virtually nothing he wrote is easily available. Most of his stories were thrillers and for these he invented his own detective; but his creation never became Sherlock Holmes, his personal icon. Still, he made a good living, enjoyed every moment of it, spent his advances as fast as the publishers could produce them and churned out sixty-three books in his twenty years of professional writing. He died aged fifty-nine in 1927, just two years after Carl Laemmle’s version of The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney received its premiere and went on to become a classic.
Looking at his original text today, frankly one is in a quandary. The basic idea is there and it is brilliant, but the way poor Gaston tells it is a mess. He begins with an introduction, above his own name, claiming that every line and word is true. Now that is a very dangerous thing to do. To claim quite clearly that a work of fiction is absolutely true and therefore a historical record is to offer oneself as a hostage to fortune and to the sceptical reader, because from that moment on every single claim made that can be checked must be absolutely true. Leroux breaks this rule on almost every page.
An author can start a story ‘cold’, seemingly recounting true history but without saying so, leaving the reader guessing as to whether what he is reading truly happened or not. Thus is created that blend of truth and invention now called ‘faction’. A useful ploy in this methodology is to intersperse the fiction with genuinely true interludes that the reader can either recall or check out. Then the puzzlement in the reader’s mind deepens but the author remains innocent of an outright lie. But there is a golden rule to this: everything you say must either by provably true or completely unprovable either way. For example, an author might write:
‘At dawn on the morning of 1 September 1939, fifty divisions of Hitler’s army invaded Poland. At that same hour a soft-spoken man with perfectly forged papers arrived from Switzerland at Berlin’s main station and disappeared into the waking city.’
The first is a historical fact and the second cannot now be either proved or disproved. With a bit of luck the reader will believe both are true and read on. Leroux, however, begins by telling us that what he has in store is nothing but the truth and buttresses this with claims of conversations with witnesses of the actual events, perusal of records and newly discovered (by him) diaries never seen before.
But his narration then hares off in all sorts of different directions, down blind alleys and back again, passing by a host of unexplained mysteries, unsupported claims and factual howlers until one is seized by the urge to do what Andrew Lloyd Webber did. This is, take a large blue pencil and trim out the rather breathless diversions to haul the story back to what is, after all, an amazing but credible tale.
Having been so critical of Monsieur Leroux, it would be only right and proper to justify one’s censures with a few examples. Quite early in his narrative he refers to the Phantom as Erik but without ever explaining how he learned this. The Phantom was hardly in the habit of small talk and was not accustomed to go about introducing himself. As it happens, Leroux was right and we can only surmise he learned this name from Madame Giry, of whom more anon.
Much more bewildering, Leroux tells his entire story without ever giving a date when it happened. For an investigative reporter, which he purports to be, this is a bizarre omission. The nearest clue is a single phrase in his own introduction. Here he says: ‘The events do not date more than thirty years back.’
This has led some critics to subtract thirty years from the appearance of his book in 1911 and presume the year to be 1881. But ‘not more than’ can also mean considerably less than, and there are several small clues that indicate the date of his story was probably much later than 1881 and more likely around 1893. Chief among these clues is the affair of the complete power failure of the lights in both auditorium and stage area which lasted only a few seconds.
According to Leroux, the Phantom, outraged by his rejection by Christine, the girl he loved with an obsessive passion, chose to abduct her. For maximum effect, the moment he selected was when she was on centre stage in a performance of Faust. (In the musical Lloyd Webber has changed this to Don Juan Triumphant, an opera entirely composed by the Phantom himself.) The lights suddenly failed, plunging the theatre into pitch-darkness, and when they went up again, she was gone. Now this cannot be done with 900 gas globes.
True, a mysterious saboteur who knew his way around could pull the master lever shutting off the gas supply to this host of globes. But they would extinguish in sequence as the gas supply ran out and after much spluttering and popping. Worse, as automatic reignition was not known then, they could only be relit by someone going round with a taper. That was what the humble profession of lamplighter was all about. The only way to produce utter darkness at the pull of a switch, and illumination again in another millisecond is to operate the master control of a fully electric lighting system. This puts the date rather later than some would have it.
Leroux appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Madame Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical. This lady appears in the original book as a half-witted cleaner. She was in fact the mistress of the chorus and the corps de ballet who hid behind the veneer of a starchy martinet (necessary to control a corps of excitable girls) a most courageous and compassionate nature.
One must forgive Leroux for this, for he was relying on human memory, that of his informants, and they were clearly describing another woman. But any policeman or court reporter will happily confirm that witnesses in court, honest and upright people, have some difficulty agreeing with each other and recalling with precision the events they witnessed last month, let alone eighteen years ago.
In a much more glaring error, Leroux describes a moment when the Phantom in another fit of pique causes the entire chandelier above the auditorium to crash down upon the audience, killing a single woman sitting beneath. That this lady turns out to be the woman hired to replace the Phantom’s dismissed friend Mme Giry is a lovely storyteller’s touch. But he then goes on to say that the chandelier weighed 200,000 kilograms. That happens to be 200 tonnes, enough to bring it and half the ceiling down every night. The chandelier weighs seven tonnes; it did when it went up, it is still there and it still does!
But far and away the most bizarre departure by Leroux from even the most basic rules of investigation and reporting is his end-of-book seduction by a mysterious character known only as ‘the Persian’. This strange mountebank is briefly mentioned twice in the first two-thirds of the story, and in a most passing manner. Yet after the abduction of the soprano from centre stage Leroux allows this man to take over the whole narrative and tell the entire story through his own eyes for the last third of the book. And what an implausible story it is.
Yet Leroux never attempts to cross-check his allegations. Although the young Vicomte Raoul de Chagny was supposed to have been present at every stage of the events described by the Persian, Leroux claims he could not find the vicomte later to check the story. Of course he could have!
We will never know why the Persian had such a loathing of the Phantom but he produced a character assassination of the man that blackened him to the very gates of hell. Prior to the intervention of the Persian, Leroux the writer and most readers might have felt some human sympathy for the Phantom. Clearly he was monstrously disfigured in a society that too often equates ugliness with sin, but that was not his fault. He was evidently filled with hatred of society but, rejected and an exile, he must have had a truly appalling life. Until the Persian, we can see Erik as the Beast to the singer Christine’s Beauty, but not intrinsically evil.
The Persian, however, paints him as a raging sadist; a serial killer an
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.