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.




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