hose who laughed the loudest were not the most at ease.
When he did not show himself, he betrayed his presence or his passing
by accident, comic or serious, for which the general superstition held
him responsible. Had any one met with a fall, or suffered a practical
joke at the hands of one of the other girls, or lost a powderpuff, it
was at once the fault of the ghost, of the Opera ghost.

After all, who had seen him? You meet so many men in dress-clothes at
the Opera who are not ghosts. But this dress-suit had a peculiarity of
its own. It covered a skeleton. At least, so the ballet-girls said.
And, of course, it had a death's head.

Was all this serious? The truth is that the idea of the skeleton came
from the description of the ghost given by Joseph Buquet, the chief
scene-shifter, who had really seen the ghost. He had run up against
the ghost on the little staircase, by the footlights, which leads to
"the cellars." He had seen him for a second--for the ghost had
fled--and to any one who cared to listen to him he said:

"He is extraordinarily thin and his dress-coat hangs on a skeleton
frame. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils.
You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man's skull. His skin,
which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but
a nasty yellow. His nose is so little worth talking about that you
can't see it side-face; and THE ABSENCE of that nose is a horrible
thing TO LOOK AT. All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks
on his forehead and behind his ears."

This chief scene-shifter was a serious, sober, steady man, very slow at
imagining things. His words were received with interest and amazement;
and soon there were other people to say that they too had met a man in
dress-clothes with a death's head on his shoulders. Sensible men who
had wind of the story began by saying that Joseph Buquet had been the
victim of a joke played by one of his assistants. And then, one after
the other, there came a series of incidents so curious and so
inexplicable that the very shrewdest people began to feel uneasy.

For instance, a fireman is a brave fellow! He fears nothing, least of
all fire! Well, the fireman in question, who had gone to make a round
of inspection in the cellars and who, it seems, had ventured a little
farther than usual, suddenly reappeared on the stage, pale, scared,
trembling, with his eyes starting out of his head,