A VISIT TO BOX FIVE
We left M. Firmin Richard and M. Armand Moncharmin at the
moment when they were deciding "to look into that little
matter of Box Five."
Leaving behind them the broad staircase which leads from
the lobby outside the managers' offices to the stage and its
dependencies, they crossed the stage, went out by the
subscribers' door and entered the house through the first
little passage on the left. Then they made their way through
the front rows of stalls and looked at Box Five on the grand
tier, They could not see it well, because it was half in
darkness and because great covers were flung over the red
velvet of the ledges of all the boxes.
They were almost alone in the huge, gloomy house; and a
great silence surrounded them. It was the time when most of
the stage-hands go out for a drink. The staff had left the
boards for the moment, leaving a scene half set. A few rays
of light, a wan, sinister light, that seemed to have been
stolen from an expiring luminary, fell through some opening or
other upon an old tower that raised its pasteboard battlements
on the stage; everything, in this deceptive light, adopted a
fantastic shape. In the orchestra stalls, the drugget
covering them looked like an angry sea,
whose glaucous waves had been suddenly rendered
stationary by a secret order from the storm phantom, who, as
everybody knows, is called Adamastor. MM. Moncharmin and
Richard were the shipwrecked mariners amid this motionless
turmoil of a calico sea. They made for the left boxes,
plowing their way like sailors who leave their ship and try to
struggle to the shore. The eight great polished columns stood
up in the dusk like so many huge piles supporting the
threatening, crumbling, big-bellied cliffs whose layers were
represented by the circular, parallel, waving lines of the
balconies of the grand, first and second tiers of boxes. At
the top, right on top of the cliff, lost in M. Lenepveu's
copper ceiling, figures grinned and grimaced, laughed and
jeered at MM. Richard and Moncharmin's distress. And yet
these figures were usually very serious. Their names were
Isis, Amphitrite, Hebe, Pandora, Psyche, Thetis, Pomona,
Daphne, Clytie, Galatea and Arethusa. Yes, Arethusa herself
and Pandora, whom we all know by her box, looked down upon the
two new managers of the Opera, who ended by clutching at some
piece of wreckage and from there stared silently at Box Five
on the grand tier.
I have said that they were distressed. At least, I
presume so. M. Moncharmin, in any case, admits that he was
impressed. To quote his own words, in his Memoirs:
"This moonshine about the Opera ghost in which, since we
first took over the duties of MM. Poligny and Debienne, we had
been so nicely steeped — "Moncharmin's style is not always
irreproachable —
"had no doubt ended by blinding my imaginative and also my
visual faculties. It may be that the exceptional surroundings
in which we found ourselves, in the midst of an incredible
silence, impressed us to an unusual extent. It may be that we
were the sport of a kind of hallucination brought about by the
semi-darkness of the theater and the partial gloom that filled
Box Five. At any rate, I saw and Richard also saw a shape in
the box. Richard said nothing, nor I either. But we
spontaneously seized each other's hand. We stood like that
for some minutes, without moving, with our eyes fixed on the
same point; but the figure had disappeared. Then we went out
and, in the lobby, communicated our impressions to each other
and talked about `the shape.' The misfortune was that my
shape was not in the least like Richard's. I had seen a thing
like a death's head resting on the ledge of the box, whereas
Richard saw the shape of an old woman who looked like Mame
Giry. We soon discovered that we had really been the victims
of an illusion, whereupon, without further delay and laughing
like madmen, we ran to Box Five on the grand tier, went inside
and found no shape of any kind."
Box Five is just like all the other grand tier boxes.
There is nothing to distinguish it from any of the others. M.
Moncharmin and M. Richard, ostensibly highly amused and
laughing at each other, moved the furniture of the box, lifted
the cloths and the chairs and particularly examined the
arm-chair in which "the man's voice" used to sit. But they
saw that it was a respectable arm-chair, with no magic about
it. Altogether, the box was the most ordinary box in the
world, with its red hangings, its chairs,
its carpet and its ledge covered in red velvet. After
,feeling the carpet in the most serious manner possible, and
discovering nothing more here or anywhere else, they went down
to the corresponding box on the pit tier below. In Box Five
on the pit tier, which is just inside the first exit from the
stalls on the left, they found nothing worth mentioning
either.
"Those people are all making fools of us!" Firmin Richard
ended by exclaiming. "It will be Faust on Saturday: let us
both see the performance from Box Five on the grand tier!"
