were loudly running riot in Republican ranks—not that there was anything unusual about the suggestions themselves, which were as old as convent life.
Even so, as I watched the ballet through my opera-glasses, I could not help feeling that, just as identifying Robert the Great as the legendary Robert the Devil, even while allowing him to remain fundamentally virtuous, was something of an insult, Scribe’s invention was an even more blatant insult to poor Saint Rosalia, who had allegedly been one of the relatively few female hermits, and highly unlikely to have participated in any orgies. So far as I could tell, she was only cited in the story because of her connection with Palermo, where the action was set, although I knew—as Scribe and Delavigne has presumably known—that she was descended from a Norman family. That had presumably been the hook on which the librettists had hung Duke Robert’s entirely imaginary romance. The actual Saint Rosalia had dated from at least a century later than Robert the Great, and could not possibly have had a convent named after her during his lifetime, let alone a ruined one.
As the ballet drew toward its close, knowing that the plot was about to return to the romantic entanglements of Robert and Alice, and Bertram’s doomed attempt to complete his diabolical bargain, I lowered my opera-glasses and sat back in my chair, expecting the opera to become even less interesting to me, given my confused state of mind. Had Dupin been there, the situation would have been different, but I was on my own, and feeling increasingly awkward in my isolation...except that, all of sudden, I realized that I was no longer isolated.
I honestly do not know how long the ghost had been there, and in a strange way, the fact that it might have been there throughout the ballet without my realizing it—perhaps without my ever realizing it, had I not sat back at that particular moment—was more alarming than the specter’s presence. I had been associated with Dupin for so long, and had seen so many bizarre things in consequence, that my awareness that I was looking at a ghost seemed almost run-of-the-mill; and what shot through my mind was neither terror nor amazement, but the thought that Dupin would never have forgiven me if I had not seen it. Not that either of us would ever have known, if I had let it pass unnoticed...but the principle remained the same.
Perhaps that thought was itself bizarre, but from the instant I caught sight of the ghost, I thought I knew why Dupin had instructed me to hire a three-seater box for an audience of two. He had surely known—or at least, suspected—that the ghost would appear, and that was why he had wanted to come.
But he had missed it.
He had been unavoidably detained.
The ghost was not phosphorescent, but nor was it entirely a creature of shadow. It reflected the distant lights of the stage just as an ordinary person would have done, in spite of the fact that it was not really solid, that it was the mere appearance of a person. I was not in doubt about that, and not merely because I had not heard anyone come into the box. There was something about the presence that was unmistakably spectral, although I could not pin down exactly what it was. It was not transparent any more than it was phosphorescent, but it was not truly present either; it had no mass; it did not belong.
There was, however, something odd even about the quality of its unbelonging. It did not seem out of place. It seemed, in fact, to be exactly where it ought to be, in the empty seat next to mine...but if it was not out of place, it was definitely out of time. It belonged to the past—perhaps not to a very distant past, but one that was definitely dead.
It was wearing spectral clothes, in a style that might still have passed muster even today, and there was nothing unusual about the cut of its black hair and beard, but there was something in its attitude and its gaze that spoke of displacement. Even before it turned to look directly at me, I could measure a peculiar puzzlement and disorientation in its perception, as if it could not quite understand why everything around it was different. When it did turn its head, the movement was slightly awkward—and it was then that I noticed that its hands, positioned on the handle of a wooden walking-stick wedged vertically between its knees, were gnarled by arthritis—an arthritis that probably affected its neck too.
Ghosts, I presumed, did not usually suffer from arthritis, so I deduced that this one must be more like some kind of strange echo of an arthritic person who really had sat in an equivalent chair in an equivalent box, perhaps in 1834. If the image really had been displaced in time, I thought, then of course everything looked different. This was still the Salle Favart, but it had been completely rebuilt after the fire of 1838. And Robert le Diable was still Robert le Diable, but this was not the same version of the opera that had been played here in 1834, if what Saint-Germain had said could be trusted. Not only were the dancers different, but so was the dance, and the music accompanying it.
The ghost was that of a man of about sixty, probably a little older than Meyerbeer and Scribe, but when he turned to look at me and I stared into his dark, ungleaming eyes, I had an impression of much greater antiquity than that. His overall appearance, I felt sure, dated from 1834—I was even convinced that I could guess the name of the man at whom I was looking—but there was something within and beyond that appearance that was much older, and much less human.
The Devil himself?
I thought not; the gaze did not seem particularly friendly, but it did not seem to be malevolent either—mischievous, perhaps, or at worst slyly malicious. Even so, I told myself, it might conceivably have been one of the many pale simulacra of the Christian Devil that haunted the interstices between our material world and what some people called the dream dimensions. There are, as Hamlet remarked, more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.
I almost contrived to unfreeze my throat in time to speak, although I have no idea what I would have said. Instead, the ghost spoke, perhaps thus proving that it had some small measure of material presence.
“Yesterday never dies,” it said, “but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing.”
There was a measure of melancholy in the words—as, I suppose, befitted their content—but there was also an odd note of satisfaction, of intellectual triumph. The latter was a note that I had heard before, in Auguste Dupin’s voice, when he had solved a puzzle of some sort.
“Can you see me?” I enquired, interestedly.
I could not see any sign in the phantom’s expression that it had heard what I said, but it did give the impression that it could see someone sitting where I was sitting...or had been sitting in a chair alongside his own, in 1834 or some other time: Auguste Dupin, I guessed, if this really was an echo of 1834 caught on the wing...with how many other undying yesterdays caught in its uncanny net?
Seized by a sudden intuition, I looked across the auditorium, wondering whether Chapelain, the mystery woman, and Jana Valdemar could also see the phantom. Chapelain was staring at the stage, his profile reflecting the distant limelight—but both masked women were ignoring the final steps of the ballet and looking across the auditorium. The combination of the masks and the angle of the feeble lighting made it impossible to judge their expressions, or to see where their gazes were focused, but I was immediately convinced that they could see that I was not alone, even if they did not know that my companion was not human.
I immediately looked back at the ghost again, in order to estimate how much they might be able to see of it by the light reflected from the phantom visage—at least, I tried to. As unobtrusively as it had appeared, the specter had vanished again.
Perhaps they didn’t see it, I thought. Perhaps they were merely looking at me. I did not believe it.
Strangely enough, even though I had not felt frightened—and ironically, in view of the observations I had earlier made of Lucien Groix—I found that my hand was convulsively closed on the pommel of my own
