The column was elaborately carved and decorated with the sculptor's

chisel; and I do not despair of one day discovering the ornament that

could be raised or lowered at will, so as to admit of the ghost's

mysterious correspondence with Mme. Giry and of his generosity.

However, all these discoveries are nothing, to my mind, compared with

that which I was able to make, in the presence of the acting-manager,

in the managers' office, within a couple of inches from the desk-chair,

and which consisted of a trap-door, the width of a board in the

flooring and the length of a man's fore-arm and no longer; a trap-door

that falls back like the lid of a box; a trap-door through which I can

see a hand come and dexterously fumble at the pocket of a swallow-tail

coat.

That is the way the forty-thousand francs went! ... And that also is

the way by which, through some trick or other, they were returned.

Speaking about this to the Persian, I said: "So we may take it, as the forty-thousand francs were returned, that

Erik was simply amusing himself with that memorandum-book of his?"

"Don't you believe it!" he replied. "Erik wanted money. Thinking

himself without the pale of humanity, he was restrained by no scruples

and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination,

which he had received by way of compensation for his extraordinary

uglinesss, to prey upon his fellow-men. His reason for restoring the

forty-thousand francs, of his own accord, was that he no longer wanted

it. He had relinquished his marriage with Christine Daae. He had

relinquished everything above the surface of the earth."

According to the Persian's account, Erik was born in a small town not

far from Rouen. He was the son of a master-mason. He ran away at an

early age from his father's house, where his ugliness was a subject of

horror and terror to his parents. For a time, he frequented the fairs,

where a showman exhibited him as the "living corpse." He seems to have

crossed the whole of Europe, from fair to fair, and to have completed

his strange education as an artist and magician at the very

fountain-head of art and magic, among the Gipsies. A period of Erik's

life remained quite obscure. He was seen at the fair of

Nijni-Novgorod, where he displayed himself in all his hideous glory.

He already sang as nobody on this earth had ever sung before; he

practised ventriloquism and gave displays of legerdemain so

extraordinary that the caravans returning to Asia talked about it

during the whole length of their journey. In this way, his reputation

penetrated the walls of the palace at Mazenderan, where the little

sultana, the favorite of the Shah-in-Shah, was boring herself to death.

A dealer in furs, returning to Samarkand from Nijni-Novgorod, told of

the marvels which he had seen performed in Erik's tent. The trader was

summoned to the palace and the daroga of Mazenderan was told to

question him. Next the daroga was instructed to go and find Erik. He

brought him to Persia, where for some months Erik's will was law. He

was guilty of not a few horrors, for he seemed not to know the

difference between good and evil. He took part calmly in a number of

political assassinations; and he turned his diabolical inventive powers

against the Emir of Afghanistan, who was at war with the Persian

empire. The Shah took a liking to him.




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