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.




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