Page 160 - HandbookMarch1

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Dorota Babilas
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aspect of a phantom is, like Erik, an Angel of Music’. Brotherly love does not,
however, explain everything. The very choice of the name is puzzling. The foreign
spelling makes Erik even more of a social outcast – like Heathcliff and Svengali,
he lacks a surname – the Scandinavian name creating a peculiar connection with
Christine. Still, two of Leroux’s contemporaries used exactly the same spelling of
their names. One was an eccentric French composer Erik Satie who employed the
foreign spelling possibly for an artistic effect. The other was Erik Weisz, better
known as Harry Houdini – a celebrated American magician. Between them, they
embody two of the extraordinary talents of the Phantom – his amazing skills as a
musician, composer and singer, and his powers of a consummate illusionist and
ventriloquist. As regards the physical deformities which had been the reason of
Erik’s alienation and eventually pushed him to crime, Leroux had no shortage of
inspiration. The sad story of Joseph Merrick, ‘the Elephant Man’ who had died
in 1890, was well publicised. There were also the victims of the recent Franco-
Prussian war, many of whom disfigured in their faces by combat wounds.
Gaston Leroux asserts in the preface to the novel that his great anti-hero really
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existed. We could dismiss this as a mere literary trick, or accept the invitation
to a game of riddles. A skeleton found in the third cellar – reminiscent of the fate
of Quasimodo – is, according to Leroux, the mortal remains of Erik who had built
the opera house as a magic box of wonders and was buried there after he had died
of unrequited love for Christine. In the Paris Opera there is only one such spectre;
someone whose talent and wit have shaped this edifice; whose name and face are
hidden from the view of most visitors while at the same time appearing in perfectly
visible places. Someone who has been the true spiritus loci of this place and who
has given it his name – Charles Garnier.
Throughout his life, despite success and wealth, the architect of the Opera
struggled with the opinion of an outcast not fitted for good society. His working-
class origins were mocked, as was his physical appearance. He was a frequent
target of newspaper caricatures, and although he took it with good humour, his
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friends could see his insecurity. As an artist and a lover of beauty, Garnier
must have been aware just how distant he was from the canons of attractiveness.
Perhaps, then, his life’s work – just like Erik’s great opus Don Juan Triumphant –
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is a challenge. ‘I could easily imagine this music to be written in blood,’ admits
Leroux’s Christine commenting on Don Juan:
Listening to it [...] I experienced the abyss inhabited by an ugly

10
Leroux, Le Fantôme, 7.
11 Ibid., 9.
12 Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, 38-40.
13
Leroux, Le Fantôme, 258.