Fiction · 1910
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux · translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Beneath the Paris Opera there are cellars, and beneath the cellars a lake; in the theatre above, a young singer named Christine Daaé is being taught by a voice she believes belongs to an angel. Gaston Leroux tells the story as an investigation, with a preface insisting that the Opera ghost really existed and that he can prove it.
Leroux was a court reporter and foreign correspondent before he was a novelist, and he built the book out of the Palais Garnier itself — its machinery, its underground reservoir, the counterweight that fell from the chandelier in 1896 — and set inside it a Gothic love story between a girl, a young viscount and a man who cannot be looked at.
The novel appeared in 1910. This edition uses the English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, published in 1911. Bibliomancer presents the complete text.
Contents
- Introductory
- Sir
- Chapter I — Is it the Ghost?
- Chapter II — The New Margarita
- Chapter III — The Mysterious Reason
- Chapter IV — Box Five
- Chapter V — The Enchanted Violin
- Chapter VI — A Visit to Box Five
- Chapter VII — Faust and What Followed
- Chapter VIII — The Mysterious Brougham
- Chapter IX — At the Masked Ball
- Chapter X — Forget the Name of the Man’s Voice
- Chapter XI — Above the Trap-Doors
- Chapter XII — Apollo’s Lyre
- Chapter XIII — A Master-Stroke of the Trap-Door Lover
- Chapter XIV — The Singular Attitude of a Safety-Pin
- Chapter XV — Christine! Christine!
- Chapter XVI — Mme. Giry’s Astounding Revelations as to Her Personal Relations with the Opera Ghost
- Chapter XVII — The Safety-Pin Again
- Chapter XVIII — The Commissary, the Viscount and the Persian
- Chapter XIX — The Viscount and the Persian
- Chapter XX — In the Cellars of the Opera
- Chapter XXI — Interesting and Instructive Vicissitudes of a Persian in the Cellars of the Opera
- Chapter XXII — In the Torture Chamber
- Chapter XXIII — The Tortures Begin
- Chapter XXIV — “Barrels! … Barrels! … Any Barrels to Sell?”
- Chapter XXV — The Scorpion or the Grasshopper: Which?
- Chapter XXVI — The End of the Ghost’s Love Story
- Epilogue
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of The Gothic Library.
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About the author
1868–1927 · Modern
Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) was born in Paris, trained as a lawyer, and worked instead as a court reporter and then as a foreign correspondent for Le Matin, covering the Russian upheavals of 1905. He turned to fiction in his forties: The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), a locked-room puzzle introducing the reporter Rouletabille, and The Phantom of the Opera (1910). He died at Nice.
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