of the
living, they could not cut a more ghastly figure. The friends of
Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinny
guest was an acquaintance of Debienne's or Poligny's, while Debienne's
and Poligny's friends believed that the cadaverous individual belonged
to Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin's party.

The result was that no request was made for an explanation; no
unpleasant remark; no joke in 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
scene-shifter--they did not know of Joseph Buquet'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 M. Moncharmin 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. M. Moncharmin may have taken
for transparency what was only shininess. Everybody knows that
orthopaedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who have
lost their noses naturally or as the result of an operation.

Did the ghost really take a seat at the managers' 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.

M. Armand Moncharmin, in chapter eleven of his Memoirs, says:

"When I think of this first evening, I can not separate the secret
confided to us by MM. Debienne and Poligny in their office from the
presence at our supper of that GHOSTLY person whom none of us knew."

What happened was this: Mm. Debienne and Poligny, 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 Buquet
is perhaps not so natural as people think."

Debienne and Poligny gave a start.

"Is Buquet 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 farm