Призрак оперы / The Phantom of the Opera

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The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies and their mothers. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood.

I began to study the archives of the National Academy of Music[1]. The events do not date more than thirty years back. The truth was slow to enter my mind, at last, I received the proof that my presentiments had not deceived me, and I was rewarded for all my efforts on the day when I acquired the certainty that the Opera ghost was more than a mere shade.

On that day, I had spent long hours in the library. I had just left the library in despair, when I met the delightful acting-manager [2]of our National Academy, who was chatting with a lively old man, to whom he introduced me gaily. The acting-manager knew all about my investigations and how eagerly and unsuccessfully I had been trying to discover the whereabouts of the examining magistrate [3]M. Faure[4]. Nobody knew what had become of him, alive or dead; and here he was back from Canada, where he had spent fifteen years, and the first thing he had done, on his return to Paris, was to come to the Opera. The old man was M. Faure himself.

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