The reader knows and guesses the rest. It is all in keeping with this
incredible and yet veracious story. Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity
him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be "some one," like
everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius OR
USE IT TO PLAY TRICKS WITH, when, with an ordinary face, he would have
been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that
could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to
content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera
ghost.
I have prayed over his mortal remains, that God might show him mercy
notwithstanding his crimes. Yes, I am sure, quite sure that I prayed
beside his body, the other day, when they took it from the spot where
they were burying the phonographic records. It was his skeleton. I
did not recognize it by the ugliness of the head, for all men are ugly
when they have been dead as long as that, but by the plain gold ring
which he wore and which Christine Daae had certainly slipped on his
finger, when she came to bury him in accordance with her promise.
The skeleton was lying near the little well, in the place where the
Angel of Music first held Christine Daae fainting in his trembling
arms, on the night when he carried her down to the cellars of the
opera-house.
And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will
not bury it in the common grave! ... I say that the place of the
skeleton of the Opera ghost is in the archives of the National Academy
of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.
[1] Even so, I am convinced that it would be easy to reach it by
draining the lake, as I have repeatedly requested the Ministry of Fine
Arts to do. I was speaking about it to M. Dujardin-Beaumetz, the
under-secretary for fine arts, only forty-eight hours before the
publication of this book. Who knows but that the score of DON JUAN
TRIUMPHANT might yet be discovered in the house on the lake?
[2] See the interview of the special correspondent of the MATIN, with
Mohammed-Ali Bey, on the day after the entry of the Salonika troops
into Constantinople.