F de l'opera: missing scenes
18 August 2019 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodehttps://fdelopera.tumblr.com/post/102057039068/welcome-to-the-30th-installment-of-15-weeks-of
https://fdelopera.tumblr.com/post/102239328178/welcome-to-the-31st-installment-of-15-weeks-of
Raoul's proposal and Christine's declaration
http://fdelopera.tumblr.com/post/102241814378/as-those-of-you-know-who-have-been-following-my
As those of you know who have been following my posts about the Gaulois publication of Phantom, Leroux cut a large section out of Chapter 12 (“You Must Forget the Name of ‘the Man’s Voice’”) when he published his 1st Edition. For those of you who would like to see that omitted text in one place, here it is in its entirety:……..
Raoul spoke this “perhaps” with such love and despair that Christine was unable to hold back a sob; but the strength of her will quickly subdued her emotion, and she had the courage to question the young man without dwelling on her sorrow.
“Why have you asked me his name, since you know it?”
"To know that I was not dreaming! To know that I had really heard it!… … And now, Christine, you have nothing more to tell me!… Goodbye!…”
The young man bid farewell to Mama Valérius, who did not speak a word to detain him, since he had ceased to indulge her ward; then, more coldly still, he bowed before Christine, who did not return his farewell gesture, and “straight as an arrow,” but feebly, to the point where he thought he would faint as he took the third step that led him from Christine, he pushed open the chamber door and entered the sitting room.
The young woman’s hand, gentle upon his shoulder, stopped him there. They were alone, standing between the portraits of Professor Valérius and Daddy Daaé. Christine gestured toward them and said:
"If I swear to you, before them, that I love you, Raoul, will you believe me?”
“I will believe you, Christine,” assured the young man, who only asked to be consoled.
“Well, understand then, standing before them, Raoul, understand that if I have pitied Erik, it is because I love you!”
“Good Heavens!” breathed the Vicomte … and he sat down.
Needless to say, he wished to hear more, and the conversation was beginning to please him.
“Speak, Christine,” he begged… “Speak!… You have brought me back to life, for as I said farewell, I thought that I was going to die…”
She sat beside him, so close that he felt the movement of her gentle breath. He looked at her, unable to sate his gaze with this angel who loved him; but she did not look at him. And she spoke without seeing Raoul, or rather without looking in his direction. She saw him at first as a child, when he had collected her scarf from the sea, and she told him that from that day forward she had loved him, because he was courageous like a man; and then she reminded him of when he would sit by her side and listen to Daddy Daaé’s tales, and she loved him even more then because he was gentle like a girl; and then later, when he had returned, she had hated him, because he hadn’t dared to speak the words that her heart, unknowingly, was waiting to hear, and this was even further proof that she loved him. She had never stopped loving him with the most pure love, for as far back as she could remember.
Raoul, who was crying softly, took Christine’s hand and could not refrain from asking her why she had behaved in such an icy fashion with him when he had thrown himself at her feet in her dressing room, and why she had always attempted to rebuff him when he tried to meet with her.
She replied in a calm and serious voice:
“Because, rightly, I did not want to be compelled to tell you, my dear, what I am telling you today. It was my intention that you would always be unaware of the love that I have confessed to you.”
“And the reason for this?” implored Raoul anxiously.
“The reason was that I did not want to distract you from your duties, Raoul, and because I loved you enough to not want you to feel remorse. I live between these two images,” she added, gesturing to the portraits of her dear departed; “the day that I am no longer worthy of looking upon them, my dear, I shall die.”
“Christine, you shall be my wife!”
Raoul uttered these words while looking at the two witnesses who regarded him from their frames with exaggerated and stylized smiles. The young woman said to him calmly:
“I knew that you would be ready to commit such folly. And this is again why I have hidden from you the tenderness of my feelings, Raoul!”
"Where do you see folly in this?” protested the Vicomte naively. “Where is the folly in marrying you if I love you? And would you think me wise to marry someone that I didn’t love?”
“It is folly, my dear,” Christine persisted harshly, “it is folly for us to ‘get married at your age,’ you, the heir to the de Chagnys, and me, an actress and the daughter of a village fiddler, and this in spite of your family. I will never allow it! People would say that you had lost your mind, or that I had caused you to lose it, which would be worse!”
As harsh as the singer’s response had been, it had at least been tempered by the words, “at your age.” Raoul saw in this certain hope.
“I shall wait!” he cried, “I shall wait for as long as you wish, so that everyone shall know that my resolve is unshakable and that my heart is in agreement with my head.”
“Your brother will never consent to such a union!”
“I shall bring him round, Christine. When he sees me ready to die of despair, he will have to give in.”
“Your family will cast you out!”
“No, for you shall be with me, and when they see you, they will be unable to do without you. Oh, Christine, listen to me … if you wish it to be, nothing in the world can stop us from being happy!”
Christine had risen. She shook her head and a bitter smile passed across her pale lips.
“You must abandon this hope, my dear…”
“I swear to you that you shall be my wife!”
“And I,” cried Christine in an exclamation of peculiar sorrow… “and I, I have sworn that I shall never be!”
Raoul hesitated… He had no doubt misheard… He wanted to hear it again.
“You have sworn… You have sworn that you will never be my wife? Christine? And to whom, then, mademoiselle, have you made this fine oath, if not to the one whose gold ring you have accepted?”
Christine did not reply. Raoul pressed her to explain herself. The young man’s agitation was acute. The fire of jealousy was overcoming him anew. It frightened him.
“Take comfort!” she cried in a delirium where love and modesty engaged in the most seductive struggle… “I have sworn to myself that I would have no other husband but you.”
“Yes, but you will not marry me!” groaned Raoul. “This is a sorrowful remedy for my pain. What strange oaths, Christine! And how convoluted all of this is, even though I have esteemed you to be candor itself… What! You swear to yourself to have no other husband but me, and yet you make an oath to another that you will never marry me! To whom, then, Christine? I want to know… Wretch that I am, I already know! And you say that you love me and that you want me to believe you! You forget that I know the name of the man’s Voice!”
She took his hands then and looked at him with all of the pure affection of which she was capable, and the young man, beneath the gaze of those eyes, felt his pain already subsiding.
“Raoul,” she said, “I have given you the confession of my love to have the right to tell you: You must forget the man’s voice and never again even recall his name … and never again attempt to fathom the mystery of theman’s voice.”
“This mystery is so very terrible?”
She raised her lovely arms toward the two silent figures, witnesses half smiling, half saddened by these strange words; her eyes became gloomy, and her throat choked back a sob. She said:
“There is none more terrible on this earth!”
A silence separated the two youths. Raoul was overwhelmed. She continued to win him over…
http://fdelopera.tumblr.com/post/100951269418/welcome-to-the-20th-installment-of-15-weeks-of
Sorelli and the Count and Christine
Welcome to the 20th installment of 15 Weeks of Phantom, where I post all 68 installments of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, as they were first printed in Le Gaulois newspaper 105 yeas ago.
In today’s installment, we have Part IV of Chapter 8, “Où MM. Firmin Richard et Armand Moncharmin ont l’audace de faire représenter « Faust » dans une salle « maudite » et de l’effroyable événement qui en résulta” (“Where MM. Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin Have the Audacity to Have ‘Faust’ Performed in a ‘Cursed’ House and the Horrifying Event Which Thereby Ensued”).
This section was first printed on Sunday, 24 October, 1909.
For anyone following along in David Coward’s translation, the text starts in Chapter 8 at, “The two Directors left their box during the interval to find out more about the cabal the stage manager had talked about,” and goes to Chapter 8, “The garden act unfolded with the usual turns of the plot.” Please note, though, that a large portion of this section was omitted from Leroux’s 1st Edition.
There are some significant differences between the standard 1st Edition text and the Gaulois text. In this section, these include (highlighted in red above):
1) This section from the Gaulois was sadly cut from the 1st Edition. It was replaced with a brief, one sentence summary – “The Managers left the box during the entr'acte to inquire about the tale of the cabal of which the stage manager had told them, but they soon returned to their seats, shrugging their shoulders and treating the whole business as so much nonsense”:
“P. of the O.!… Always P. of the O.!” cried M. Richard, to the singer’s great astonishment, and he asked for the envelope that she held out to him. The letter had been sent from the post office on the Boulevard des Capucines, a stone’s throw from where the former Managers lived. Without saying another word, they left the dressing room; M. Richard was furious, convinced that MM. Debienne and Poligny had vowed to make a fool of him. That idea rooted itself conclusively in his mind when, after he had gone up to his office with Moncharmin, his personal secretary, M. Rémy, brought him an evening paper which ran an interview where M. Debienne implied that he would prefer to go bankrupt at the Opéra than to make his fortune there conducting himself “as a cheapskate.” M. Richard assumed – quite mistakenly, of course – that this unwelcome opinion was directed at him, finding a connection between this interview and an article which appeared two evenings before in the same paper, where the new Managers were admonished for not attempting to produce anything interesting, for confining themselves to the same old shows, and ultimately for conducting themselves with the utmost frugality.
Shaking with barely contained anger, Richard turned toward Moncharmin and told his colleague point-blank that he found his face strangely placid for having gone through an ordeal as upsetting as this which they were obliged to endure.
“What ordeal?” asked Moncharmin calmly. “Is it P. of the O. who has put you in such a state?”
“Ah! It is indeed a matter of your Phantom!” replied Richard, enraged. “Don’t you see that Debienne and Poligny are making a mockery of us? That they have organized a press campaign on the outside, a cabal on the inside, and that they are causing us a thousand different troubles!… I don’t care at all for your Phantom!”
As M. Moncharmin was about to protest his associate’s claim, which attributed to him the sole ownership of the Phantom, the door of the Managers’ office opened and La Sorelli entered.
Moncharmin straightaway put on his monocle, in honor of the young lady’s famous legs, clothed in pink silk; but Richard immediately brought him back to the mood of the situation, which, if La Sorelli was to be believed, was more serious than one could imagine.
She started off by asserting that the Comte de Chagny had henceforth lost interest in Christine Daaé. She made this statement with all the more haste, since she had not been unaware of the Comte’s enthusiasm for the talent of this little minx. But this enthusiasm had well and truly dried up. In short, the Comte had agreed to get momentarily involved only due to the entreaties of his brother, the young Vicomte, who had developed feelings for La Daaé which were truly ridiculous. The Comte now had a very dim view of the attentions that his brother paid the singer. As La Sorelli understood it, he had remarked about this to his brother, but the Vicomte would not be otherwise distracted, which must have greatly aggravated the Comte. As for the cabal, the Comte could not deny that La Daaé, whom he judged to be a little hypocrite and a trickster of the first degree, was capable of dragging his brother into such an affair, since he was a naive and kindhearted child. La Sorelli did not leave the managerial office without insisting that these gentlemen have the utmost discretion regarding the “terrible secret” that she had confided in them, given that, if the Comte ever learned that she had thus abused his trust in relating such things which should be forgotten as soon as they were heard, he would never forgive her for the rest of his life.
Having said this, she withdrew and returned to the dance foyer. Men from the financial sector, the nobility, academia, the popular newspapers, and the political scene, represented by a deputy from the left, two senators from the right, and the personal secretaries of several members of the ministry, were whispering, laughing, and chatting about the most beautiful legs in our National Academy of Music. Several soloists, after glancing at themselves in the mirror, lifted their tutus with one hand, went up en pointe, puckering their lips, and came down again, near to a cluster of young ladies where Meg Giry bitterly recounted the outrageous misadventure that had happened that very morning to her worthy mother in the managerial office. Naturally, as everyone had noted that MM. Richard and Moncharmin were attending the performance in Box 5, the primary cause of Mme Giry’s dishonor and her daughter’s despair, Meg’s confidences were a tremendous success and once again, it was only a question of the Phantom and his box, although the young ladies made mock of him.
Suddenly, there was a great commotion and loud bursts of laughter. It was little Jammes who, followed by her comrades, “Nez qui danse” and “Jambe d'acier”*, made her entrance into the foyer. All three of them were leaning on pitchforks that they had retrieved from their properties. Thusly armed, they defied the Phantom and his maledictions, for he was capable of anything, they said, and he’d had the audacity to steal César, the white horse of the Prophet, right under the nose of good M. Lachenal, who was worried sick because of it.
Upon hearing about this new exploit by the Phantom, the small army of terrified dancers tried to touch the wood of the pitchforks, and La Sorelli herself could not resist this superstitious temptation before going to rejoin the Comte de Chagny, who was standing nearby, alone and quite concerned. Did he already forsee that the amorous affinity that his brother had for La Daaé – an affinity that he had at first entertained – would descend into a formidable passion?
But where was the Vicomte? Leaning on an upright for a set piece that had just been put up, standing between an idling and melancholy walk-on actress, and a petit rat, who, far from her mother, was busy munching nuts, and letting herself be charmed by a gallant old man, he was waiting for Christine to pass by. She would not be long, since as she was singing the role of Siébel, she had to be ready to go on stage when the curtain went up on the third act.
Just then, she arrived and passed close by him without seeing him, or pretending not to see him. As she passed by, there were hostile whispers uttered by the friends of La Carlotta, but again it seemed that she had not heard them.
The Vicomte looked away, heaving a heavy sigh. He then saw the two Managers, who were looking at each other and whispering in each other’s ear. He imagined that they were mocking him for his love. He blushed and walked away. The Managers left the stage as well, and went back up to Box 5.
* There is a brief mention of similar figures of the Opéra’s ballet in Sept ans à l'Opéra. Souvenirs anecdotiques d'un secrétaire particulier, by Nérée-Desarbres (Paris: E. Dentu, 1864, page 64)
2) This sentence is slightly different in the 1st Edition:
But no one could tell them anything, so they came back to the armrest shelf; beside the box of English chocolates, they found a pair of opera glasses.
3) Compare the Gaulois text:
Compare the Gaulois text:
“Ils s'assirent en silence.” (“They sat in silence.”)
To the 1st Edition:
“Ils s'assirent en silence, réellement inpressionnés.” (“They sat in silence, genuinely unnerved.”)
4) This line of Marguerite’s was omitted from the 1st Edition, but was curiously added in by de Mattos in his translation:
“I wish I could but know who was he
That addressed me,
If he was noble, or, at least, what his name is…”
5) This sentence was omitted from the 1st Edition:
Nothing on the stage, in the house, or in the box occurred to disrupt the order of the performance.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-19 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-19 07:43 am (UTC)Somewhere in that "fifteen weeks of phantom" stuff there is a substantial missing passage concerning the Persian attending a performance at the Opera, as well, but I'm afraid I didn't put myself to the labour of finding it :-(