All the girls pretended to have met this supernatural being more
or less often. And those 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.
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