Beneath the Paris Opera lie five cellars, an underground lake, and a tenant whom the management pays not to think about. Leroux was a crime reporter first, and he built the novel as an investigation: witness statements, an inquest tone, and real machinery of the Palais Garnier, which does have a lake. The result is less a horror story than the strangest love triangle in French fiction. Sixty plates by Jean Béraud and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from 1816 to 1921, catch the opera house, its crowds, and its dancers in the same reportorial light Leroux turned on its cellars.
Beneath the Paris Opera lie five cellars, an underground lake, and a tenant whom the management pays not to think about. Leroux was a crime reporter first, and he built the novel as an investigation: witness statements, an inquest tone, and real machinery of the Palais Garnier, which does have a ...