Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is published.

1904 La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (The Double Life of Théophraste Longuet), Leroux’s first novel, is serialized in Le Matin.

1905 Leroux travels with Cayatte to Russia to report on the revolution. A son, André-Gaston, is born to the couple. Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel is published .

1907 Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room) is published to strong sales; it is the first of a series featuring investigative reporter Joseph Rouletabille. Leroux devotes himself to writing fiction.

1908 Le Parfum de la Dame en noir (The Perfume of the Lady in Black), the first sequel to The Mystery of the Yellow Room, is serialized in L’Illustration beginning in September and ending in January 1909. The region’s nice weather and elegant gambling halls inspire Leroux to move to the French Riviera. He and Cayatte have a daughter, Madeleine.

1909 Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera) is published serially in the newspaper Le Gaulois from September until January of the following year; the book’s tepid early reception offers no hint of its future fame and enduring popularity.

1912 Balaoo, about a mad scientist who turns an ape half human, is serialized in Le Matin.

1913 Balaoo is adapted for the cinema—the first of what will be more than twenty film versions of novels by Leroux. He begins publication in Le Matin of a new series of mysteries , starring the character Chéri-Bibi; after the Rouletabille stories, these are Leroux’s most successful.

1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes is serialized. World War I begins.

1917 After obtaining a divorce from his first wife, Leroux marries Jeanne Cayatte.

1918 He writes the screenplay for a film, La Nouvelle Aurore (The New Dawn), that consists of sixteen 30-minute installments. World War I ends.

1919 La Nouvelle Aurore opens in Paris. Leroux forms a film company dedicated to producing serialized films but abandons the enterprise after three years.

1920 Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is published.

1925 Universal Studios adapts The Phantom of the Opera as a silent film starring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin. More film, stage, and television adaptations will follow, including , in 2004, a film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s popular 1986 musical.

1927 Gaston Leroux dies in April at his home in Nice one day after surgery for an attack of uremia.

Introduction

Long before The Phantom of the Opera became a perennial film favorite and a Broadway fixture of enormous success, it was a novel of modest critical and commercial acclaim, written by one Gaston Leroux, a lawyer turned journalist turned novelist. First published serially in the newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910, Le Fantôme de l’Opéra might well have shared the fate of the bulk of Leroux’s fiction—which is largely unread today—had it not been for its elevation to the big screen with Rupert Julian’s 1925 film version starring Lon Chaney as the phantom. Chaney’s astonishing performance in the role, coupled with a tale that lends itself particularly well to visual rendering, inspired such a considerable number of remakes in various mediums over the course of the twentieth century that the phantom’s story has taken on a life of its own.

Indeed, readers picking up Leroux’s novel for the first time may be surprised to discover the extent to which the novel differs from the many versions that they have seen or heard. For while the adaptations have generally remained faithful to the novel’s core themes—attraction and repulsion, artistry and suffering, love, loss, and redemption—they have taken more extreme liberties in regard to the narrative elements: Leroux’s original plot has been streamlined and at times greatly altered, the pacing quickened, and the journalistic tone of the novel has been expunged in favor of dramatic suspense. Whether or not the many cinematic interpretations have improved upon Leroux’s original is a matter of taste; what is more certain is that The Phantom of the Opera, the novel, merits our attention: Not only does the very readable story capture the mood and sentiment of the years immediately leading up to the golden period of art and innovation that would later be dubbed La Belle Époque (literally, “The Beautiful Age”), it also serves as an interesting marker in the history and evolution of the French novel. It is indebted to the Gothic tradition and the fantastic literature and serial novel of the nineteenth century; at the same time it is a precursor of the twentieth-century detective and mystery story that would flourish