Fantôme – Prologue

If you take a tour of the Paris Opera in the year of our lord 2019, as I did, you are visiting a building constructed in the 1870s. It has been open to the public for a hundred and thirty years, and if you choose not to see a show, as I did, you will roam the building on a leash, like a medieval citadel-town, a war machine, restricted as to what art and décor you see and which stairs you clamber up and down. Like the fortress you might see it as, the Opera built a community rather like a town. You can still see the rooms that were schools, stables, smithys and shops, and the evidence that it was busy from dawn to dusk, with firemen, composers, cleaners, dressers, dashing hither and thither, this way and that, pins in their mouths and envelopes in hand, to complete every task before that night’s performance and pre-empt every possible pitfall. You are walking in the footsteps of well-dressed, graceful ghosts of the hoi polloi; down every corridor a headstrong, hair-tossing woman of the last century walked, teasing her beau or telling stories to the other girls. The walls vibrate with a century of whispered secrets, and we can never be privy to them all.

Although you may, as I did, have the best of guides and spend your visit to the city learning art, music, architecture, and history, you will not learn the true histories from any such tourist source. The basement, although not consumed by furnaces and gas-men, is still a working space, and you will be kept out of it – although that is the least of the building’s secrets. Five layers of deep, high-walled cellar contain sets, costumes, archives, and workshops, and only the very privileged few make it down to the bottom of this tartarus. You will never see the underground lake of no return, hear the hushed-up gossip from days of old, or be shown the passages and the secret doors in a historic place, built in the days when rich men followed bright women around in secret, and perhaps against their wishes. True history is oral, passed down in whispers and gossip, and only snippets of the truth make it to the records and become the very facts we take for granted. Most of the secrets here have been lost to time, buried in the walls and never heard in the land beyond the stage. It is only with imaginative license that we can come anywhere close to understanding how it must have been to live in the orbit of the Opera in its heyday. This is the role of narrative, when it is fictionalised only loosely, like this one – it is a passage into history, throwing us into a world that is no longer there to be experienced.

In my youth I became fascinated by the account of a journalist named Gaston – of all the histories I read, his compelled me. How could the things he described have been true? How could they have gone so long unacknowledged? What were these feats of secular magic performed in plain sight in the Opera Garnier – were they truly possible? His words have haunted me for years, the uncertainty was too much to bear. I was aching for confirmation that the investigating he conducted turned up facts, not fiction. I needed to know the story of the Opera Ghost, of the young singer who went missing in her prime, of the suspicious death of a high-born Frenchman. I needed to see if they were, in fact, connected – or if the gossamer threads of speculation had woven their way into his narrative. I took it upon myself to understand the narrative’s core. I learned to read Français, visited the city to explore the catacombs and comb the archives, until I was sufficiently satisfied that I knew everything. This tale has multiple interpretations, and I had to know every incident from multiple perspectives before I could write my own account. I write these words having seen it for myself, from the basement of the original – Paris Opera.

***

Gaston Leroux was a Journalist of the lowest orders and a Parisian of the highest calibre. His flânerie, conversation, and access I cannot hope to imitate; a hundred years later many events have been lost to time and the story will be carried by ancient hearsay as well as paper clippings and oft-repeated whispers, subject to the whims of change as gossip is. He will dip in and out of the narrative, I hope to only defer to his voice when other narratives are lacking.

Besides Leroux, dissident journalist, our main players are: –

At the Opera:

• Armand Moncharmin, a businessman taking up management of the great theatre, and his partner,
• Firmin Richard, an experienced composer and social head of Paris’ musical world
• Debienne and Poligny, the outgoing managers
• Madame Giry, who monitors box 5, and her daughter,
• Little Meg Giry, a ballet girl whose tuition is paid by char-work and who consequently grew up a rat of the theatre
• La Sorelli, the generous and self-made Principal dancer, Italian
• Carlotta, the beautiful and proud Prima Donna, Spanish
• Christine Daaé, a young soprano, trained by her now-deceased father, Swedish
• Pedro Gailliard, a former opera manager
• Monsieur Remy, secretary to the managers
• Monsieur Mercier, acting manager
• Monsieur Gabriel, chorus master
• Monsieur Lachenel, groom
• Monsieur Mauclair, organ-grinder
• Joseph Buquet, a scene-changer
• The Staff of The National Academy of Music, teachers and administrators, based at the opera
• Workmen and wealthy patrons, chaperones and floozies, artists and artisans – all the people it takes to make an Opera run

Visitors to the Opera

• Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, younger brother of the Comte de Chagny, and
• Philippe, his elder brother, heir to the title
• Madame Élise de Chagny, wife of Philippe
• Madame Valerius, a music lover, benefactress to the Opera
• Monsieur Mifroid, Commissionner of the Paris police force
• The Persian

Perhaps:-

• our Fantôme

Leroux points us to his own sources: legal papers, memoirs of those present at the time, a narrative by one of the key players, but he wove them together until it was impossible to know who was trustworthy and who was taken in by cheap conjuring tricks. What is fact, and what was reported as such in the Parisian papers in 1910, is that when the Opera was renovated in that year, a body was found in its basement. We are told by official sources that it was a victim of the communes, another example of France’s bloody past, a ghoulish souvenir of unremarkable mass death like those littering the catacombs all over the city – but for Leroux, it struck a chord. Like France’s most famous unknown corpse, found unburied with his Romany love, the journalist sensed a story in the placing and the timing of this corpse, choosing to investigate this small irregularity until he could connect it with a much bigger narrative. Leroux’s tenacious curiosity and his well-constructed narrative is marred by the sensibilities of his time, but his narrative is the basis of this one, and it was his research that guided me.

What is our purpose in telling the story of a crime that really happened? Why do I tell this narrative again? We are in a renaissance of grisly murder stories, tales of cults and true-life narratives which re-appraise both victims and perpetrators for the eyes and ears of women – yes, our self-same retiring women – the world over. Leroux tell us that he is easing the mourning of adjacent people, involved or onlookers, by answering the mystery in public, but a century on that cannot be the function, and yet people – myself included – remain fascinated by his sparse, journalistic account. Perhaps we are obscuring the truth – after all, it is easier to believe in the honour of noble men taken down by a ghost than it is that they committed the greatest of crimes, and killed one another. It is easier to blame a shadowy foreigner with oriental powers than it is to see that a viscount might be a rapist, that women can be tortured more effectively by those who know them. Leroux’s narrative marries cynical rationalism with the unheimlich lurking in our minds, answers our questions with technology and genius, but creates such an image of the players that his reader truly feels that they understand their motivations, and that a woman of the world can recognise their behaviours even in those she encounters in the modern age. We deserve this story he unearthed without his subjectivity – so, humbly, I submit my own to a jury of readers, and tell you how I, following the footsteps of Gaston Leroux, acquired certainty that the Opera Ghost really existed.

Entr’acte.