He trembled as he rang at a little flat in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. The door was opened by the maid whom he had
seen coming out of Christine's dressing-room one evening. He asked if
he could speak to Mme. Valerius. He was told that she was ill in bed
and was not receiving visitors.
"Take in my card, please," he said.
The maid soon returned and showed him into a small and scantily
furnished drawing-room, in which portraits of Professor Valerius and
old Daae hung on opposite walls.
"Madame begs Monsieur le Vicomte to excuse her," said the servant.
"She can only see him in her bedroom, because she can no longer stand
on her poor legs."
Five minutes later, Raoul was ushered into an ill-lit room where he at
once recognized the good, kind face of Christine's benefactress in the
semi-darkness of an alcove. Mamma Valerius' hair was now quite white,
but her eyes had grown no older; never, on the contrary, had their
expression been so bright, so pure, so child-like.
"M. de Chagny!" she cried gaily, putting out both her hands to her
visitor. "Ah, it's Heaven that sends you here! ... We can talk of HER."
This last sentence sounded very gloomily in the young man's ears. He
at once asked: "Madame ... where is Christine?"
And the old lady replied calmly: "She is with her good genius!"
"What good genius?" exclaimed poor Raoul.
"Why, the Angel of Music!"
The viscount dropped into a chair. Really? Christine was with the
Angel of Music? And there lay Mamma Valerius in bed, smiling to him
and putting her finger to her lips, to warn him to be silent! And she
added: "You must not tell anybody!"
"You can rely on me," said Raoul.
He hardly knew what he was saying, for his ideas about Christine,
already greatly confused, were becoming more and more entangled; and it
seemed as if everything was beginning to turn around him, around the
room, around that extraordinary good lady with the white hair and
forget-me-not eyes.
"I know! I know I can!" she said, with a happy laugh. "But why don't
you come near me, as you used to do when you were a little boy? Give
me your hands, as when you brought me the story of little Lotte, which
Daddy Daae had told you. I am very fond of you, M. Raoul, you know.
And so is Christine too!"
"She is fond of me!" sighed the young man. He found a difficulty in
collecting his thoughts and bringing them to bear on Mamma Valerius'
"good genius," on the Angel of Music of whom Christine had spoken to
him so strangely, on the death's head which he had seen in a sort of
nightmare on the high altar at Perros and also on the Opera ghost,
whose fame had come to his ears one evening when he was standing behind
the scenes, within hearing of a group of scene-shifters who were
repeating the ghastly description which the hanged man, Joseph Buquet,
had given of the ghost before his mysterious death.