At that moment the door opened. It must have been deserted by its
usual Cerberus, for Mme. Giry entered without ceremony, holding a
letter in her hand, and said hurriedly: "I beg your pardon, excuse me, gentlemen, but I had a letter this
morning from the Opera ghost. He told me to come to you, that you had
something to ..."
She did not complete the sentence. She saw Firmin Richard's face; and
it was a terrible sight. He seemed ready to burst. He said nothing,
he could not speak. But suddenly he acted. First, his left arm seized
upon the quaint person of Mme. Giry and made her describe so unexpected
a semicircle that she uttered a despairing cry. Next, his right foot
imprinted its sole on the black taffeta of a skirt which certainly had
never before undergone a similar outrage in a similar place. The thing
happened so quickly that Mme. Giry, when in the passage, was still
quite bewildered and seemed not to understand. But, suddenly, she
understood; and the Opera rang with her indignant yells, her violent
protests and threats.
About the same time, Carlotta, who had a small house of her own in the
Rue du Faubourg St. Honore, rang for her maid, who brought her letters
to her bed. Among them was an anonymous missive, written in red ink,
in a hesitating, clumsy hand, which ran: If you appear to-night, you must be prepared for a great misfortune at
the moment when you open your mouth to sing ... a misfortune worse than
death.
The letter took away Carlotta's appetite for breakfast. She pushed
back her chocolate, sat up in bed and thought hard. It was not the
first letter of the kind which she had received, but she never had one
couched in such threatening terms.
She thought herself, at that time, the victim of a thousand jealous
attempts and went about saying that she had a secret enemy who had
sworn to ruin her. She pretended that a wicked plot was being hatched
against her, a cabal which would come to a head one of those days; but
she added that she was not the woman to be intimidated.
The truth is that, if there was a cabal, it was led by Carlotta herself
against poor Christine, who had no suspicion of it. Carlotta had never
forgiven Christine for the triumph which she had achieved when taking
her place at a moment's notice. When Carlotta heard of the astounding
reception bestowed upon her understudy, she was at once cured of an
incipient attack of bronchitis and a bad fit of sulking against the
management and lost the slightest inclination to shirk her duties.
From that time, she worked with all her might to "smother" her rival,
enlisting the services of influential friends to persuade the managers
not to give Christine an opportunity for a fresh triumph. Certain
newspapers which had begun to extol the talent of Christine now
interested themselves only in the fame of Carlotta. Lastly, in the
theater itself, the celebrated, but heartless and soulless diva made
the most scandalous remarks about Christine and tried to cause her
endless minor unpleasantnesses.