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 transparcncy 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.