The Phantom of the Opera

Summary

The narrator, presenting himself as a researcher, announces that the Opera ghost really existed and that he has proved it from archives, the memories of old employees and the papers of a mysterious Persian. In the 1880s the ballet girls of the Paris Opera whisper about a ghost in evening dress with a death's head; the scene-shifter Joseph Buquet, who claims to have seen him, is found hanged in the third cellar. At the farewell gala for the retiring managers Debienne and Poligny, the little-known Swedish singer Christine Daaé replaces the star Carlotta and triumphs. In the audience the young Viscount Raoul de Chagny, younger brother of Count Philippe, recognizes her as the childhood friend whose scarf he once rescued from the sea in Brittany, and outside her dressing-room he hears a man's voice telling her she must love him. The new managers, Richard and Moncharmin, laugh at the ghost's demands for Box Five and a monthly salary of twenty thousand francs, until the box-keeper Mme. Giry tells of his voice, Carlotta croaks like a toad in the middle of Faust, and the great chandelier crashes into the stalls, killing a woman. Christine has been taught by a voice she believes is the Angel of Music her dying father promised to send her. At her father's grave at Perros-Guirec, Raoul hears an unseen violin and is struck down by a figure with a death's head; at the masked ball he sees the same figure dressed as the Red Death. On the roof of the Opera, beneath the statue of Apollo's lyre, Christine tells Raoul the truth: the voice led her through her mirror to a house on an underground lake, where he revealed himself as Erik, a musician of genius hidden behind a mask; when she tore it off, she saw a face like a corpse's. Raoul plans to take her away after her last performance, but Erik overhears them. During Faust Christine vanishes from the stage in darkness. Raoul, guided by the Persian, a former police chief who knew Erik at the court of Persia, descends through the cellars and is trapped in Erik's torture chamber of mirrors and heat. Erik gives Christine a choice of two bronze figures, the scorpion meaning marriage and the grasshopper meaning that the Opera, mined with gunpowder, will be blown up. She turns the scorpion; the cellar floods instead, and the prisoners nearly drown. Moved when Christine lets him kiss her forehead and weeps with him, Erik releases her and Raoul, asking only that she return his ring and bury him. Three weeks later a newspaper announces that Erik is dead. In the epilogue the narrator traces Erik's origins near Rouen, his years as a fairground living corpse and an architect in Persia, and identifies his skeleton by the gold ring. Le Fantôme de l'Opéra was serialized in Le Gaulois in 1909-10 and published as a book in 1910; Alexander Teixeira de Mattos's English translation appeared in 1911.

Top Lessons

• The angel and the voice

  Christine's father told her that every great artist is visited by the Angel of Music. Erik uses that childlike faith to make himself her teacher and master. The novel shows how a gift and a hope can be turned into a means of control, and how hard it is for Christine to separate the beauty of the music from the man who sings it.

• Mask and face

  Erik's mask hides a face like a skull, and when Christine tears it away he cries that she can never leave him now. Leroux makes Erik both frightening and pitiable: rejected by his own parents, shown at fairs as a living corpse, he wants nothing more than an ordinary life. Leroux sets his loneliness side by side with the deaths and terror he causes, and leaves the reader to weigh the two.

• Compassion that changes a heart

  Erik is finally moved not by force or threats but by Christine's free kindness: she lets him kiss her forehead and weeps with him. In the last chapter Erik tells the Persian that no one, not even his mother, had ever let him do this. The climax turns from mechanical traps to a single act of pity.

• Courage in the dark

  Raoul is rash and often foolish, but he descends into the cellars knowing he may not come back, and the Persian, who could stay safe, goes with him. Their friendship under the Opera gives the novel its adventure-story courage.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Erik's congenital disfigurement, described by Buquet and Christine as a face without a nose and with skin like yellow parchment, is central to the novel, which traces how his parents' horror, his exhibition at fairs as a living corpse and his concealment shaped his life; Leroux gives no medical explanation, and attempts to name a condition are speculative. His fixation on Christine is drawn in the language of romantic passion and genius rather than of psychiatry, though the narrator and the Persian speak of him as a monster of madness and pride. Christine's trances, pallor and fits of terror while under the voice's influence are described in the period's vocabulary of nervous strain. Erik's own death is attributed by him to love, a literary rather than clinical cause.

• Chapter I

  Buquet's description of the ghost's skeletal face and the discovery of Buquet hanged in the cellar.

• Chapter XII

  Christine's account of unmasking Erik and his despairing reaction.

• Epilogue

  Erik's childhood rejection by his parents and exhibition at fairs as a living corpse.