The workmen answered:
“‘That’ is Joseph Buquet, who was found in the third cellar, hanging between a farm-house and decorations.”
He took off his hat and went out.
Chapter III
During this time, the farewell ceremony was taking place. This ceremony was being given on the occasion of the retirement of M. Debienne and M. Poligny. All these people met, after the performance, in the foyer of the ballet, where Sorelli waited for the arrival of the retiring managers with a glass of champagne in her hand and a little prepared speech at the tip of her tongue. Behind her, the members of the Corps de Ballet[25], young and old, discussed the events of the day in whispers or exchanged discreet signals with their friends, a noisy crowd of whom surrounded the supper-tables.
Little Jammes seemed already to have forgotten the ghost and the death of Joseph Buquet. She never ceased to laugh and chatter, to hop about and play jokes.
Everybody remarked that the retiring managers looked cheerful. All were already smiling broadly upon Sorelli, who had begun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little Jammes broke the smile of the managers brutally:
“The Opera ghost!”
Jammes yelled these words in a tone of unspeakable terror; and her finger pointed, among the crowd of dandies, to a face so pallid, so lugubrious and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under the straddling eyebrows, that the death’s head immediately scored a huge success.
“The Opera ghost! The Opera ghost!”
Everybody laughed and pushed his neighbor 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.
Sorelli was furious; she had not been able to finish her speech; the managers, had kissed her, thanked her and run away as fast as the ghost himself. No one was surprised at this, for it was known that they were to go through the same ceremony on the floor above, in the foyer of the singers, and in the great lobby a regular supper would be served.
Here they found the new managers, M. Armand Moncharmin and M. Firmin Richard[26], whom they hardly knew. The retiring managers handed over to their successors the two tiny master-keys which opened all the doors—thousands of doors—of the Opera house. And those little keys, the object of general curiosity, were being passed from hand to hand, when the attention of some of the guests was diverted by their discovery, at the end of the table, of that strange, wan and fantastic face, with the hollow eyes, which had already appeared in the foyer of the ballet and been greeted by little Jammes’ exclamation:
“The Opera ghost!”
There sat the ghost. He neither ate nor drank. He did not speak a word.
What happened was this: Mm. Debienne and Poligny, sitting at the center 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 Buquet is perhaps not so natural as people think.”
“Is Buquet dead?” Debienne and Poligny cried.
“Yes,” replied the man, or the shadow of a man, quietly. “He was found, this evening, hanging in the third cellar.”
The two managers, or rather ex-managers, at once rose and stared strangely at the speaker. They were more excited than any one need be by the announcement of the suicide of a chief scene-shifter. They looked at each other. They had both turned whiter than the table-cloth. At last, Debienne made a sign to Mm. Richard and Moncharmin; Poligny muttered a few words of excuse to the guests; and all four went into the managers’ office. I leave M. Moncharmin to complete the story. In his Memoirs, he says:
“Mm. Debienne and Poligny appeared to have something very difficult to tell us. First, they asked us if we knew the man, sitting at the end of the table, who had told them of the death of Joseph Buquet; and we answered in the negative. They took the master-keys from our hands, stared at them for a moment and advised us to have new locks made. They said this so funnily that we began to laugh and to ask if there were thieves at the Opera. They replied that there was something worse, which was the ghost. We began to laugh again. They told us that they never would have spoken to us of the ghost, if they had not received formal orders from the ghost himself to ask us to be pleasant to him and to grant any request that he might make. The announcement of the death of Joseph Buquet had served them as a brutal reminder that some fantastic or disastrous event had brought them to a sense of their dependence.
“Richard asked half-seriously and half in jest:
‘But, after all, what does this ghost of yours want?’
M. Poligny went to his desk and returned with a copy of the memorandum-book[27]. The copy produced by M. Poligny was written in black ink and exactly similar to that in our possession, except that, at the end, it contained a paragraph in red ink and in a queer handwriting. This paragraph ran, word for word, as follows:
“‘5. If the manager, in any month, delays for more than a fortnight the payment of the allowance which he shall make to the Opera ghost, an allowance of twenty thousand francs a month, say two hundred and forty thousand francs a year.’
M. Poligny pointed with a hesitating finger to this last clause, which we certainly did not expect.
‘Is this all? Does he not want anything else?’ asked Richard, with the greatest coolness.
‘Yes, he does,’ replied Poligny.
And he turned over the pages of the memorandum-book until he came to the clause:
‘Box Five on the grand tier shall be placed at the disposal of the Opera ghost for every performance.’
‘So you see, two hundred and forty thousand francs are not nothing,’ said M. Poligny. ‘And have you considered what the loss over Box Five meant to us? 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, it seems to me that you were much too kind to the ghost. If I had such a troublesome ghost 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 never laughed so much in our lives.”
Chapter IV
Armand Moncharmin wrote voluminous Memoirs during the long period of his co-management. He was a charming fellow and showed that he was not lacking in intelligence, for he selected the best possible active manager and went straight to Firmin Richard.
Firmin Richard was a famous composer, who had published a number of successful pieces of all kinds and who liked nearly every form of music and every sort of musician.
They had forgotten all about that curious, fantastic story of the ghost, when an incident occurred that proved to them that the joke was not over. M. Firmin Richard reached his office that morning at eleven o’clock. His secretary, M. Remy, showed him half a dozen letters which he had not opened because they were marked “private.” One of the letters had at once attracted Richard’s attention, the envelope was addressed in red ink. He soon remembered that it was the red handwriting in which the memorandum-book had been so curiously completed. He recognized the clumsy childish hand. He opened the letter and read:
Dear Mr. Manager,
I am sorry to have to trouble you at a time when you must be so very busy. I know what you have done for Carlotta, Sorelli and little Jammes and for a few others whose admirable qualities of talent or genius you have suspected.
26
M. Armand Moncharmin and M. Firmin Richard – господин Арман Моншармен и господин Фирмен Ришар