That is the way the forty-thousand francs went! … And that also is the way by which, through some trick or other, they were returned.
Speaking about this to the Persian, I said:
“So we may take it, as the forty-thousand francs were returned, that Erik was simply amusing himself with that memorandum-book of his?”
“Don’t you believe it!” he replied.
“Erik wanted money. Thinking 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 ugliness, 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 Daaé. 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 fountainhead 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