After avoiding the commissary of police, a number of door-shutters and
the firemen, after meeting the rat-catcher and passing the man in the
felt hat unperceived, the viscount and I arrived without obstacle in
the third cellar, between the set piece and the scene from the Roi de
Lahore. I worked the stone, and we jumped into the house which Erik
had built himself in the double case of the foundation-walls of the
Opera. And this was the easiest thing in the world for him to do,
because Erik was one of the chief contractors under Philippe Garnier,
the architect of the Opera, and continued to work by himself when the
works were officially suspended, during the war, the siege of Paris and
the Commune.
I knew my Erik too well to feel at all comfortable on jumping into his
house. I knew what he had made of a certain palace at Mazenderan.
From being the most honest building conceivable, he soon turned it into
a house of the very devil, where you could not utter a word but it was
overheard or repeated by an echo. With his trap-doors the monster was
responsible for endless tragedies of all kinds. He hit upon
astonishing inventions. Of these, the most curious, horrible and
dangerous was the so-called torture-chamber. Except in special cases,
when the little sultana amused herself by inflicting suffering upon
some unoffending citizen, no one was let into it but wretches condemned
to death. And, even then, when these had "had enough," they were
always at liberty to put an end to themselves with a Punjab lasso or
bowstring, left for their use at the foot of an iron tree.
My alarm, therefore, was great when I saw that the room into which M.
le Vicomte de Chagny and I had dropped was an exact copy of the
torture-chamber of the rosy hours of Mazenderan. At our feet, I found
the Punjab lasso which I had been dreading all the evening. I was
convinced that this rope had already done duty for Joseph Buquet, who,
like myself, must have caught Erik one evening working the stone in the
third cellar. He probably tried it in his turn, fell into the
torture-chamber and only left it hanged. I can well imagine Erik
dragging the body, in order to get rid of it, to the scene from the Roi
de Lahore, and hanging it there as an example, or to increase the
superstitious terror that was to help him in guarding the approaches to
his lair! Then, upon reflection, Erik went back to fetch the Punjab
lasso, which is very curiously made out of catgut, and which might have
set an examining magistrate thinking. This explains the disappearance
of the rope.