The Phantom of the Opera Summary

Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, The Phantom of the Opera, follows a narrator’s investigation into the actions and identity of the mysterious Phantom of the Opera. In the 1880s, strange events have been unfolding at the Paris Opera House, convincing people that the Opera must be haunted. The Opera Ghost or Phantom has been said to appear as a black figure with a skull face covered in yellow, rotten skin with burning eyes. From the beginning, the narrator affirms that the Phantom does exist, but is in fact a human being, not a ghost.

In the 1880s, on Debienne and Poligny’s last night as Opera directors, chaos erupts when ballerinas claim to have see the Opera ghost. Moments later, chief stage machinist Joseph Buquet is found dead, hanging beneath the stage. Although his death is attributed to “suicide under natural circumstances,” when people arrive to retrieve his corpse they can find no sign of the rope. The narrator concludes that these can hardly be considered “natural” circumstances, and that there must be another explanation besides suicide.

On the same evening, Christine Daaé, a little-known soprano, replaces her colleague Carlotta, who is ill. Christine sings so beautifully that the public remains astonished, wondering why her talent has been hidden for so long. In the audience, Viscount Raoul de Chagny, Christine’s childhood friend, who is deeply in love with her, goes to talk with her backstage. However, Christine pretends not to recognize him, and later, Raoul hears her talk to a man in her dressing-room. The man declares his love for her, and Christine, in turn, tells him that she has given him her soul. Overcome by jealousy, Raoul waits for Christine to leave so that he can confront this rival, but when the room opens, Raoul is shocked to discover that Christine’s dressing-room is empty.

Raoul writes Christine many letters, and Christine finally replies, saying that she does remember him after all. She tells him Raoul she will be at Perros-Guirec, the village in Normandy where they first met as children, and Raoul hurries to meet her there. During the journey, Raoul recalls their childhood. Christine’s father was a musical prodigy in Sweden, considered the best violin player in Scandinavia. After a man named Professor Valerius discovered his talent, he brought Daaé and Christine to Paris, where Christine soon developed her own musical talent as a singer. During trips to Normandy, Christine became acquainted with Raoul. Together, they listened to local Breton legends and to Christine’s father’s stories. One story in particular remained impressed on Christine’s mind: the story of the Angel of Music, who can turn musicians into prodigies.

At Perros, Raoul declares his love to Christine but she laughs at him. He then attacks her for talking to a man in her dressing-room. Distressed, Christine leaves. Later, however, she tries to explain her situation to Raoul. She tells him that she has been visited by the Angel of Music, whom her father has sent her after his death. When Raoul realizes that Christine is not talking metaphorically, but about someone who gives her music lessons in her dressing-room, he bursts out laughing. Furious at the thought that Raoul no longer believes her to be a respectable woman—that is, one who does not welcome men in her dressing-room alone—Christine leaves.

That night, Raoul hears Christine leave the inn to go to the cemetery. He follows her, though she is too absorbed in her task to notice him. At the cemetery, in front of Christine’s father’s tomb, Christine suddenly raises her arms to the sky and music emerges from nowhere: the beautiful, heart-wrenching rendering of Lazarus, which Daaé used to perform on his violin when they were children. Once the music ends, Raoul pursues a mysterious man, whom he believes to be the musician, all the way to the church. There, Raoul grabs the man’s coat and, when the man turns around, Raoul sees a skull with burning eyes. Trusting that this must be a vision of Hell, Raoul faints and is found the next morning unconscious by the church.

Meanwhile, at the Opera, new directors Richard and Moncharmin are frustrated to receive the Phantom’s letters, which they believe to be a prank. They fire Mme Giry, the box attendant, who claims to have personal interactions with the ghost, which the directors believe to be a proof of her insanity. In the Phantom’s letters, however, he makes various requests: to leave his private box, Box Five, empty; to let Christine sing Marguerite in Faust, since Carlotta will be ill; and to make sure his box attendant, Mme Giry returns. The Phantom threatens to curse the theater if his desires are not respected. The directors ignore the Phantom’s demands. Carlotta, who has received an anonymous letter enjoining her not to perform, decides to sing anyway. As a result, the Phantom punishes her by causing her voice to croak in the middle of the performance—a shocking occurrence that the audience understands as some kind of conspiracy, since Carlotta’s voice is too perfect to break on its own. The Phantom then causes the chandelier to fall from the ceiling. One person dies from being crushed by it: Richard’s concierge, the woman with whom he planned to replace Mme Giry.

After this evening, Christine disappears. Raoul searches for her everywhere. When he interrogates Mme Valerius (Professor Valerius’s wife, who has taken care of Christine since she was a child), she says that Christine is spending time with her guardian spirit, the Angel of Music, who gives her music lessons and has forbidden her to marry. Raoul concludes that the old woman is crazy and might also have influenced Christine with her deluded belief in fairytales. However, Raoul’s emotions oscillate between fury and pity for Christine. He wonders if Christine is the victim of someone’s manipulation or if she herself is an expert manipulator, intent on deceiving him to hide a romantic affair.

Raoul then receives a letter from Christine enjoining him to meet her at the masked ball that evening. There, Christine invokes her love for him and declares that she wants to share her story with him. However, even though Raoul knows that he might be overreacting by distrusting her, he is too overcome with jealousy and insecurity to contain himself. He lashes out at Christine, accusing her of being deceitful. Upset, Christine leaves. Raoul then hides in her dressing-room, where he hears her pity a man called Erik and sees her disappear suddenly through the mirror, as in an act of magic. Utterly confused, Raoul nevertheless succeeds in meeting with Christine at the Opera again. There, Raoul tells Christine that he plans to leave on an expedition to the North Pole soon. He discovers that they do, in fact, share reciprocal love, and the two of them thus decide to become secret fiancés for the short time they have left together.

One night, Christine takes Raoul to the roof, where she tells Raoul her entire story. She explains that, when she first heard a beautiful voice talk and sing to her, she believed it to be the Angel of Music her father had promised to send her. However, on the night the chandelier fell, Christine magically found herself transported to the other side of her dressing-room mirror. When she found herself in a dark, damp tunnel, a masked figure took her to his lair on the other side of an underground lake. Realizing that this man was the same person as “the Voice,” and must also be the Opera ghost, Christine was deeply disappointed; the man was not an angelic figure but a mere human, Erik, who then declared his love to her. Although she concluded that he must be mad, she couldn’t help but be moved by his music. On one occasion, while Erik was singing, she forgot her promise never to touch his mask and removed it. With horror, she discovered a monstrous, skull-like face, whose ugliness terrified her. Furious and sad at Christine’s reaction, Erik planned to keep Christine with him forever. However, he ultimately let her leave after a couple of weeks, though he gave her a ring as a symbol of her faithfulness to him and made her promise to visit him regularly.

After hearing this story, Raoul concludes that they must leave together immediately, but Christine says that this would cause Erik too much grief. She agrees to escape with Raoul the following night, although she admits that she might lose her resolve and will then need Raoul to force her to follow him. During this conversation, neither character knows that Erik has been eavesdropping and is aware of their plans.

Raoul thus prepares his carriage to leave with Christine the following night. Aware of Raoul’s plan to marry Christine, Raoul’s older brother, Count Philippe, a respectable nobleman attached to social norms, tells Raoul that he disapproves of his relationship with Christine, a mere singer, not a member of the nobility. This leads the two brothers to fight—a circumstance that later convinces criminal investigators Inspector Mifroid and M. Faure to conclude (mistakenly) that Philippe’s later death and Raoul’s disappearance must be connected to the brothers’ disagreement.

That night, Christine is suddenly abducted in the middle of her performance. Desperate to find her, Raoul joins forces with a mysterious character, “the Persian,” who knows Erik intimately. The Persian leads Raoul to Erik’s secret retreat, although they fall in a torture chamber, a room whose walls are covered in mirrors, capable of creating strange illusions. There, they find a Punjab cord, the rope that the Persian concludes must have been used to murder Joseph Buquet. He assumes Buquet discovered Erik’s lair and thus caused his wrath, which led Erik to kill him. The Persian also recounts important aspects of Erik’s life. He explains that, after leaving his family, who rejected him because of his horrible appearance, Erik worked as an illusionist and an assassin for the Shah in Persia, where he became an expert at torture techniques. The Persian notes that Erik was one of the workers who built the Paris Opera House, the Palais Garnier. In this way, he was able to built a complex system of walls and traps that would allow him to come and go at will, without being seen, like a ghost.

In the torture chamber, Raoul and the Persian hear Erik give Christine the choice either to marry him or to die. Although Christine initially plans to die, so as to remain faithful to her love for Raoul, she later discovers that Erik plans to blow up the entire Opera House if she rejects him. As a result, she agrees to become Erik’s wife. She asks Erik to release Raoul and the Persian from the torture chamber, which he does. Despite being horrified by Erik’s appearance, Christine remains committed to her promise to be Erik’s wife. When Erik removes his mask and kisses her on the forehead, he begins to cry, saying that no other woman has ever let him touch her like this. Christine begins to cry as well. Convinced that this must be a sign of Christine’s love, Erik is deeply moved and realizes that he no longer wants to keep Christine captive against her will. He decides to free her, allowing her to escape peacefully with Raoul. He makes her promise to put the ring he gave her on his finger when he dies.

Dying of love, Erik visits the Persian, to whom he recounts these events—and the Persian, in turn, later tells the narrator about them. Erik says that Count Philippe died while trying to rescue his brother by crossing the underground lake. However, Erik says that he played no part in Philippe’s death, as the Count was dead before he found him. Erik then dies, and the Persian places an announcement in the newspaper about it. When the narrator later discovers a body under the Opera wearing this ring, he realizes that Christine has obeyed the Phantom’s dying wish and that this body constitutes unequivocal proof that the Phantom of the Opera actually existed.