the first
part of my Memoirs, I will only say that he redeemed by one spontaneous
fine action all the worry which he had caused my dear friend and
partner and, I am bound to say, myself. He felt, no doubt, that there
are limits to a joke, especially when it is so expensive and when the
commissary of police has been informed, for, at the moment when we had
made an appointment in our office with M. Mifroid to tell him the whole
story, a few days after the disappearance of Christine Daae, we found,
on Richard's table, a large envelope, inscribed, in red ink, "WITH O.
G.'S COMPLIMENTS." It contained the large sum of money which he had
succeeded in playfully extracting, for the time being, from the
treasury. Richard was at once of the opinion that we must be content
with that and drop the business. I agreed with Richard. All's well
that ends well. What do you say, O. G.?"

Of course, Moncharmin, especially after the money had been restored,
continued to believe that he had, for a short while, been the butt of
Richard's sense of humor, whereas Richard, on his side, was convinced
that Moncharmin had amused himself by inventing the whole of the affair
of the Opera ghost, in order to revenge himself for a few jokes.

I asked the Persian to tell me by what trick the ghost had taken
twenty-thousand francs from Richard's pocket in spite of the
safety-pin. He replied that he had not gone into this little detail,
but that, if I myself cared to make an investigation on the spot, I
should certainly find the solution to the riddle in the managers'
office by remembering that Erik had not been nicknamed the trap-door
lover for nothing. I promised the Persian to do so as soon as I had
time, and I may as well tell the reader at once that the results of my
investigation were perfectly satisfactory; and I hardly believed that I
should ever discover so many undeniable proofs of the authenticity of
the feats ascribed to the ghost.

The Persian's manuscript, Christine Daae's papers, the statements made
to me by the people who used to work under MM. Richard and Moncharmin,
by little Meg herself (the worthy Madame Giry, I am sorry to say, is no
more) and by Sorelli, who is now living in retirement at Louveciennes:
all the documents relating to the existence of the ghost, which I
propose to deposit in the archives of the Opera, have been checked and
confirmed by a number of important discoveries of which I am justly
proud. I have not be