The result was that no request was made for an explanation; no
unpleasant remark; no joke in bad taste, which might have offended this
visitor from the tomb. A few of those present who knew the story of
the ghost and the description of him given by the chief
scene-shifter--they did not know of Joseph Buquet's death--thought, in
their own minds, that the man at the end of the table might easily have
passed for him; and yet, according to the story, the ghost had no nose
and the person in question had. But M. Moncharmin declares, in his
Memoirs, that the guest's nose was transparent: "long, thin and
transparent" are his exact words. I, for my part, will add that this
might very well apply to a false nose. M. Moncharmin may have taken
for transparency what was only shininess. Everybody knows that
orthopaedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who have
lost their noses naturally or as the result of an operation.
Did the ghost really take a seat at the managers' supper-table that
night, uninvited? And can we be sure that the figure was that of the
Opera ghost himself? Who would venture to assert as much? I mention
the incident, not because I wish for a second to make the reader
believe--or even to try to make him believe--that the ghost was capable
of such a sublime piece of impudence; but because, after all, the thing
is impossible.
M. Armand Moncharmin, in chapter eleven of his Memoirs, says: "When I think of this first evening, I can not separate the secret
confided to us by MM. Debienne and Poligny in their office from the
presence at our supper of that GHOSTLY person whom none of us knew."
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."
Debienne and Poligny gave a start.
"Is Buquet dead?" they cried.
"Yes," replied the man, or the shadow of a man, quietly. "He was
found, this evening, hanging in the third cellar, between a farm-house
and a scene from the Roi de Lahore."
The two managers, or rather ex-managers, at once rose and stared
strangely at the speaker. They were more excited than they need have
been, that is to say, 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 seemed to grow more and more excited, and
they 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, when we answered in the
negative, they looked still more concerned. They took the master-keys
from our hands, stared at them for a moment and advised us to have new
locks made, with the greatest secrecy, for the rooms, closets and
presses that we might wish to have hermetically closed. 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, feeling sure that they were indulging
in some joke that was intended to crown our little entertainment.
Then, at their request, we became 'serious,' resolving to humor them
and to enter into the spirit of the game. 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. However, in their relief at
leaving a domain where that tyrannical shade held sway, they had
hesitated until the last moment to tell us this curious story, which
our skeptical minds were certainly not prepared to entertain. But the
announcement of the death of Joseph Buquet had served them as a brutal
reminder that, whenever they had disregarded the ghost's wishes, some
fantastic or disastrous event had brought them to a sense of their
dependence.