king
himself without the pale of humanity, he was restrained by no scruples
and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination,
which he had received by way of compensation for his extraordinary
uglinesss, to prey upon his fellow-men. His reason for restoring the
forty-thousand francs, of his own accord, was that he no longer wanted
it. He had relinquished his marriage with Christine Daae. He had
relinquished everything above the surface of the earth."

According to the Persian's account, Erik was born in a small town not
far from Rouen. He was the son of a master-mason. He ran away at an
early age from his father's house, where his ugliness was a subject of
horror and terror to his parents. For a time, he frequented the fairs,
where a showman exhibited him as the "living corpse." He seems to have
crossed the whole of Europe, from fair to fair, and to have completed
his strange education as an artist and magician at the very
fountain-head of art and magic, among the Gipsies. A period of Erik's
life remained quite obscure. He was seen at the fair of
Nijni-Novgorod, where he displayed himself in all his hideous glory.
He already sang as nobody on this earth had ever sung before; he
practised ventriloquism and gave displays of legerdemain so
extraordinary that the caravans returning to Asia talked about it
during the whole length of their journey. In this way, his reputation
penetrated the walls of the palace at Mazenderan, where the little
sultana, the favorite of the Shah-in-Shah, was boring herself to death.
A dealer in furs, returning to Samarkand from Nijni-Novgorod, told of
the marvels which he had seen performed in Erik's tent. The trader was
summoned to the palace and the daroga of Mazenderan was told to
question him. Next the daroga was instructed to go and find Erik. He
brought him to Persia, where for some months Erik's will was law. He
was guilty of not a few horrors, for he seemed not to know the
difference between good and evil. He took part calmly in a number of
political assassinations; and he turned his diabolical inventive powers
against the Emir of Afghanistan, who was at war with the Persian
empire. The Shah took a liking to him.

This was the time of the rosy hours of Mazenderan, of which the
daroga's narrative has given us a glimpse. Erik had very original
ideas on the subject of architecture and thought out a palace much as a
conjuror contrives a trick-casket. The Sh