Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the third chapter of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.

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Take a look in a book and let's see what we can find take a chapter by chapter, one by one at a time So many adventures and mountains we can climb Take it word for word, line by line we fight at a time.

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Wherever you listen to podcasts today, we'll be continuing The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux chapter Three The Mysterious Reason During this time, the farewell ceremony was taking place.

I've already said that this magnificent function was being given on the occasion of the retirement as Monsieur's Debunhing and Poligny, who had determined to die game, as we say nowadays.

They had been assisted in the realization of their ideal, though melancholy, programmed by all that counted in the social and artistic world of Paris.

All these people met after the performance in the foyer of the ballet, where Sorelli waited for the arrival of the retiring managers with a glass of champagne in her hand and a little prepared speech at the tip of her tongue.

Behind her, the members of the Corde Ballet, young and old, discussed the events of the day in whispers or exchange discreet signals with their friends, a noisy crowd of whom surrounded the supper tables arranged along the slanting floor.

A few of the dancers had already changed into ordinary dress, but most of them wore their skirts of gossamer gauze, and all had thought it the right thing to put on a special face for the occasion.

All, that is, except little Jamas, whose 15 summers happy age seemed already to have forgotten the ghost and the death of Joseph Buuquet.

She never ceased to laugh and chatter, to hop about and play practical jokes, until Monsieur's Zebine and pulling knee appeared on the steps of the Fourier, when she was severely called to order by the impatient.

Sorrelli everybody remarked that the retiring managers looked cheerful, as is the Paris way.

None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gayety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy.

You know that one of your friends is in trouble.

Do not try to console him, but he will tell you that he has already comforted.

But should he have met with good fortune, be careful how you congratulate him.

He thinks it's so natural that he is surprised that you should speak of it.

In Paris our lives are one masked ball and the fouryear of the ballet is the last place in which two men, so knowing as Monsieur de Benie and Monsieur Pulling Me would have made the mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be.

And they were already smiling rather too broadly upon Sorelli, who had begun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little mad cap of a Jamis broke the smile of the managers so brutally that the expression of distress and dismay that lay beneath it became apparent to all eyes.

The opera ghost.

Jemis yelled these words in a tone of unspeakable terror and her finger pointed among the crowd of dandies to a face so pallid, so lugerbreous and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under the straddling eyebrows that the death's head in question immediately scored a huge success.

The opera ghost.

The opera ghost.

Everybody laughed and pushed his neighbor and wanted to offer the Opera Ghost a drink, but he was gone.

He had slipped through the crowd and the others vainly hunted for him while two old gentlemen tried to calm little Jamis, and while little Jirey stood screaming like a peacock.

Cereli was furious.

She had not been able to finish her speech.

The managers had kissed her, thanked her, and run away as fast as the ghost himself.

No one was surprised at this, for it was known that they were to go through the same ceremony on the floor above in the foyer of the singers, and that finally they were themselves to receive their personal friends for the last time in the great lobby outside the manager's office, where a regular supper would be served.

Here they found the new managers, monsieur Armand Mont Sherman and Monsieur Ferman Richard, whom they hardly knew.

Nevertheless, they were lavish in protestations of friendship and received a thousand flattering compliments in reply, so that those of the guests who had feared that they had a rather tedious evening in store for them at once put on brighter faces.

The supper was almost gay, and a particularly clever speech of the representative of the government mingling the glories of the past with the successes of the future caused the greatest cordiality to prevail.

The retiring managers had already handed over to their successors the two tiny master keys which opened all the doors, thousands of doors of the opera house.

And those little keys, the object of general curiosity were being passed from hand to hand when the attention of some of the guests was diverted by their discovery at the end of the table of that strange, wan and fantastic face with the hollow eyes which had already appeared in the foyer of the ballet and been greeted by little jamis's exclamation the opera ghost.

There's not the ghost as natural as could be, except that he neither ate nor drank.

Those who began by looking at him with a smile ended by turning away their heads, for the sight of him at once provoked the most frenurial thoughts.

No one repeated the joke of the foyer.

No one exclaimed, there's the opera ghost.

He himself did not speak a word, and his very neighbors could not have stated at what precise moment he had sat down between them.

But everyone felt that if the dead did ever come and sit at the table of the living, they could not cut a more ghastly figure.

The friends of Furman Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinny guest was an acquaintance of Debunes or Paulingnees, while Debians and Paulingneese friends believed that the cadaverous individual belonged to Furman Richard and Armand Montchermin's party.

The result was that no request was made for an explanation, no unpleasant remark, no joke and bad taste which might have offended this visitor from the tomb.

A few of those present who knew the story of the ghost and the description of him given by the chief sceneshifter they did not know of Joseph Buquette's death, thought in their own minds that the man at the end of the table might easily have passed for him.

And yet, according to the story, the ghost had no nose, and the person in question had.

But Monsieur Montremin declares in his memoirs that the guest's nose was transparent.

Long, thin and transparent are his exact words.

I, for my part, will add that this might very well apply to a false nose.

Monsieur Moncharmin may have taken for transparency what was only shininess.

Everybody knows that.

Orthopedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who have lost their noses naturally or as a result of an operation.

Did the ghost really take a seat at the manager supper table that night, uninvited?

And can we be sure that the figure was that of the opera ghost himself?

Who would venture to assert as much?

I mention the incident not because I wish for a second to make the reader believe, or even to try to make him believe, that the ghost was capable of such a sublime piece of impudence, but because, after all, the thing is impossible.

Monsieur Armand Montcharmin, in chapter eleven of his memoirs, says when I think of this first evening, I cannot separate the secret confided to us by Monsieur's Deb and Knee and pulling knee in their office from the presence at our supper of that ghostly person whom none of us knew.

What happened was this monsieur's Debin Knee and Pulling, me, sitting at the center of the table, had not seen the man with the death's head.

Suddenly he began to speak.

The ballet girls are right, he said.

The death of that poor Bouquet is perhaps not so natural as people think.

Dipini and Polony gave a start.

Is bouquet dead?

They cried.

Yes, replied the man, or the shadow of a man.

Quietly he was found this evening hanging in the third cellar between a farmhouse and a scene from the Roy de Lahore.

The two managers, or other ex managers at once rose and stared strangely at the speaker.

They were more excited than they need have been, that is to say, more excited than anyone need be by the announcement of the suicide of a chief.

Sceneshifter they looked at each other.

They had both turned wider than the tablecloth.

At last debunee made a sign to Monsieur's Richard and Monsharmin Pauling.

Ni muttered a few words of excuse to the guests and all four went into the manager's office.

I leave Monsieur Moncharmine to complete the story.

In his memoirs, he says monsieurs debin Knee and Paulingne seem to grow more and more excited and they appear to have something very difficult to tell us.

First, they asked us if we knew the man sitting at the end of the table who had told them of the death of Joseph Fouquet and when we answered in the negative, they looked still more concerned.

They took the master keys from our hands, stared at them for a moment and advised us to have new locks made with the greatest secrecy for the rooms, closets and presses that we might wish to have hermetically closed.

They said this so funnily that we began to laugh and ask if there were thieves at the opera.

They replied that there was something worse, which was the ghost.

We began to laugh again, feeling sure that they were indulging in some joke that was intended to crown our little entertainment.

Then, at their request, we became furious.

Resolving to humor them and to enter into the spirit of the game.

They told us that they never would have spoken to us of the ghost if they had not received formal orders from the ghost himself to ask us to be pleasant to him and to grant any request that he might make.

However, in their relief at leaving a domain or that tyrannical shade held sway, they had hesitated until the last moment to tell us this curious story, which our skeptical minds were certainly not prepared to entertain.

But the announcement of the death of Joseph Buuquette had served them as a brutal reminder that whenever they had disregarded the ghosts wishes, some fantastic or disastrous event had brought them to a sense of their dependence.

During these unexpected utterances, made in a tone of the most secret and important confidence, I looked at Richard.

Richard and his student days had acquired a great reputation for practical joking and he seemed to relish the dish which was being served up to him in his turn.

He did not miss a morsel of it.

Though the seasoning was a little gruesome because of the death of Bouquet.

He nodded his head sadly.

All the others spoke and his features assumed the heir of a man who bitterly regretted having taken over the Opera.

Now that he knew that there was a ghost mixed up in the business I could think of nothing better than to give him a servile imitation of this attitude of despair.

However, in spite of all our efforts, we could not at the finish help bursting out laughing in the faces of Monsieur debin Knee and pulling Knee, who, seeing us pass straight from the gloomy a state of mind to one of the most insolent merriment acted as though they thought that we had gone mad.

The joke became a little tedious and Richard asked half seriously and half injust but after all, what does this ghost of yours want?

Monsieur Pauling knee went to his desk and returned with a copy of the memorandum book.

The memorandum book begins with the wellknown words saying that the management of the Opera shall give to the performance of the National Academy of Music the splendor that becomes the first lyric stage in France and ends with clause 98, which says that the privilege can be withdrawn if the Manager infringes the conditions stipulated in the memorandum book.

This is followed by the conditions which are four in number.

The copy produced by Monsieur Paulingne was written in black ink and exactly similar to that in our possession, except that at the end it contained a paragraph in red ink and in a queer Laboured handwriting as though it had been produced by dipping the heads of matches into the ink.

The writing of a child that has never got beyond the downstrokes and is not learned to join its letters.

This paragraph ran word for word as follows five or if the Manager, in any month delay for more than a fortnight the payment of the allowance which he shall make to the Opera Ghost an allowance of 20,000 francs a month, say 2400 francs a year.

Monsieur Pollingy pointed with a hesitating finger to this last clause, which we certainly did not expect.

Is this all?

Does he not want anything else?

Asked Richard with the greatest coolness.

Yes, he does, replied Polling knee and he turned over the pages of the memorandum book until he came to the clause specifying the days on which certain private boxes were to be reserved for the free use of the President of the Republic, the ministers and so on.

At the end of this clause a line had been added also in red ink.

Box five on the grand tier shall be placed at the disposal of the Opera Ghost for every performance.

When we saw this.

There was nothing else for us to do but to rise from our chairs.

Shake our two predecessors warmly by the hand and congratulate them on thinking of this charming little joke which proved that the old French sense of humor was never likely to become extinct richard added that he now understood why Monsieur's debin Ni and Pauling Knee were retiring from the management of the National Academy of Music business was impossible was so unreasonable a ghost?

Certainly 2400 francs are not to be picked up for the asking said Monsieur Pollingi without moving a muscle of his face and have you considered what the loss over Box Five meant to us?

We did not sell it once and not only that, but we had to return the subscription why it's awful.

We really can't work to keep ghosts we prefer to go away yes echoed Monsieur Debini, we prefer to go away.

Let us go.

And he stood up richard said but after all all it seems to me that you were much too kind to the ghost if I had such a troublesome ghost as that I should not hesitate to have him arrested but how?

Where?

They cried in chorus we've never seen him but when he comes to his box we have never seen him in his box then sell it.

Sell the opera Ghost's Box.

Well gentlemen, try it thereupon we all four left the office richard and I had never left so much in our lives thank you for joining Bite at the Time books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlyle and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of The Phantom of the Opera.

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