The Phantom of Manhattan - By Frederick Forsyth Page 0,2

layers of cellars.

A visitor even today can descend to these levels (a special permit is needed) and peer through gratings at the buried lake. Every two years the level is lowered so that engineers in flat-bottomed punts can pole around and inspect the foundations for possible damage.

Storey by storey Garnier’s giant rose until he was back at ground level, then went onwards and upwards. In 1870 work came to a halt as yet another revolution swept France, triggered by the short but brutal Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon III was deposed, and died in exile. A new republic was declared but the Prussian army was at the gates of Paris. The French capital starved. The rich ate the elephants and giraffes from the zoo while the poor fricasseed dogs, cats and rats. Paris surrendered, and the working class of the city was so enraged at what they had gone through that they rose in revolt.

The insurrectionists called their regime the Commune and themselves the Communards, with 100,000 men and cannon spread throughout the city. The civil government had quit in panic and the Civil Guard took over as a military junta, finally crushing the Communards. But during their time in charge the rebels had used the shell of Garnier’s building with his labyrinth of cellars and storerooms as a base for weapons, powder … and prisoners. Terrible tortures and executions took place in those vaults far below ground and buried skeletons were still being discovered many years later. Even today there is a deep chill there that never goes away. It was this underground world and the idea of a lonely disfigured hermit living down there in the darkness that fascinated Gaston Leroux forty years later and fired his imagination.

By 1872 normality had been restored and Garnier got on with his job. In January 1875, almost seventeen years to the day since Orsini had thrown his bombs, the opera house, whose conception his act had triggered, held its gala opening.

It covers almost three acres, or 118,500 square feet. It is seventeen storeys from deepest cellar to pinnacle of roof, but with only ten above ground and an amazing seven storeys underground. Surprisingly, its auditorium is quite small, seating only 2,156 opera-goers as opposed to 3,500 at the Scala in Milan and 3,700 at the New York Met. But backstage it is vast, with ample dressing-rooms for hundreds of performers, workshops, canteens, wardrobe departments and storage areas for complete theatrical backdrops so that entire sets fifty feet high and weighing many tons can be lowered and stored without being dismantled, then raised again to be installed when needed.

The point about the Paris Opera is that it was always designed as more than just a site for the performance of opera. Hence the relative smallness of the auditorium, for much of the non-working space is taken up with reception halls, salons, sweeping staircases and areas fit to offer a glittering venue to great state occasions. It still has over 2,500 doors which take the resident firemen more than two hours to check before they go home. In Garnier’s day it employed a permanent staff of 1,500 (about 1,000 today) and was illuminated by 900 gaslight globes fed by ten miles of copper pipe. It was converted to electricity in stages through the 1880s.

This was the intensely dramatic building that caught Gaston Leroux’s vivid imagination when he visited in 1910 and first heard talk that once, years earlier, there had been a phantom living in the building; that things simply went missing; that unexplained accidents had occurred; and that a shadowy figure had occasionally been seen flitting from dark corners and always heading downwards to the catacombs where none dared follow. From these twenty-year-old rumours Leroux created his story.

Old Gaston seems to have been the sort of man with whom one would love to take a drink at some Parisian cafe if only the ninety interceding years could be breached. He was big, jovial, bluff and cheerful: a bon viveur and generous host, wildly eccentric with a pair of pince-nez perched on his nose to compensate for poor eyesight.

He was born in 1868 and though from Normandy he actually arrived in the world during a train-change in Paris when his mother was caught short. He was bright at school and in the manner of clever boys in middle-class France was destined to be a lawyer, being sent back to Paris to study law at the age of eighteen. It was a study he had no