The Phantom of the Opera
The Paris Opera house, also known as the Palais Garnier after the architect, might be my favorite building we toured in Paris. It was extraordinary! And we wouldn’t have had time to see it if the Seine had not flooded and wrecked our other plans. This is the opera house Phantom of the Opera was based on. Turns out there really was an accident in this opera house that gave the author the idea for the novel. Just after it opened, a counterweight that held up the chandelier (not the chandelier itself) fell on some poor woman in the audience and killed her. And there were rumors back when it was being built that one of the workers asked to live underneath the Opera house and was never seen again. And there IS a lake under the opera house. When Garnier was digging the foundation he ran into an offshoot of the Seine and no matter how they tried to work around it, they couldn’t fill it in. So he finally decided to create a cistern type place down underneath that just held the water. There was also a young opera singer named Christine who was supposed to sing the night the opera house opened, but mysteriously canceled and never actually performed there.
There were a lot of people there the day we went and so I will use some pictures from the internet so you can see it without all the tourists in the way. Besides which, all of these buildings look better in the sun, which did not show its face on our trip until the very last few hours of the last day we were there.
Entryway
The Grand Staircase
Me!
The auditorium
While we were on our tour they had this mostly closed off because of a practice going on. But they let us peak through a small window to see a single ballerina dancing on the stage.
The Door to the Phantom’s Box
The Grand Foyer, where guests would gather for h’orderves at “intervals”.
Here’s a video of this amazing ceiling.
The lake underneath the opera
We didn’t get to see the lake on our tour because apparently you have to pay for a guided tour to see it. We didn’t find that out until after the fact.
View from the balcony
Ballet costumes from the Paris Ballet Company
A statue on the outside of the building
Phantom of the Opera has always been one of my favorite plays, but I’ve never read the book. I started it as soon as we got home. I’m hooked already.
Opening paragraph:
“The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.”
Stay tuned for our final day in Paris…..
Short n Sweet 
That's so cool! I didn't realize the story was based on so many facts.
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