"During these unexpected utterances made in a tone of the most secret
and important confidence, I looked at Richard. Richard, in his student
days, had acquired a great reputation for practical joking, and he
seemed to relish the dish which was being served up to him in his turn.
He did not miss a morsel of it, though the seasoning was a little
gruesome because of the death of Buquet. He nodded his head sadly,
while the others spoke, and his features assumed the air of a man who
bitterly regretted having taken over the Opera, now that he knew that
there was a ghost mixed up in the business. I could think of nothing
better than to give him a servile imitation of this attitude of
despair. However, in spite of all our efforts, we could not, at the
finish, help bursting out laughing in the faces of MM. Debienne and
Poligny, who, seeing us pass straight from the gloomiest state of mind
to one of the most insolent merriment, acted as though they thought
that we had gone mad.
"The joke became a little tedious; and Richard asked half-seriously and
half in jest: "'But, after all, what does this ghost of yours want?' "M. Poligny went to his desk and returned with a copy of the
memorandum-book. The memorandum-book begins with the well-known words
saying that 'the management of the Opera shall give to the performance
of the National Academy of Music the splendor that becomes the first
lyric stage in France' and ends with Clause 98, which says that the
privilege can be withdrawn if the manager infringes the conditions
stipulated in the memorandum-book. This is followed by the conditions,
which are four in number.
"The copy produced by M. Poligny was written in black ink and exactly
similar to that in our possession, except that, at the end, it
contained a paragraph in red ink and in a queer, labored handwriting,
as though it had been produced by dipping the heads of matches into the
ink, the writing of a child that has never got beyond the down-strokes
and has not learned to join its letters. This paragraph ran, word for
word, as follows: "'5. Or if the manager, in any month, delay for more than a fortnight
the payment of the allowance which he shall make to the Opera ghost, an
allowance of twenty thousand francs a month, say two hundred and forty
thousand francs a year.' "M. Poligny pointed with a hesitating finger to this last clause, which
we certainly did not expect.
"'Is this all? Does he not want anything else?' asked Richard, with
the greatest coolness.
"'Yes, he does,' replied Poligny.
"And he turned over the pages of the memorandum-book until he came to
the clause specifying the days on which certain private boxes were to
be reserved for the free use of the president of the republic, the
ministers and so on. At the end of this clause, a line had been added,
also in red ink: "'Box Five on the grand tier shall be placed at the disposal of the
Opera ghost for every performance.' "When we saw this, there was nothing else for us to do but to rise from
our chairs, shake our two predecessors warmly by the hand and
congratulate them on thinking of this charming little joke, which
proved that the old French sense of humor was never likely to become
extinct. Richard added that he now understood why MM. Debienne and
Poligny were retiring from the management of the National Academy of
Music. Business was impossible with so unreasonable a ghost.