A Visit to Box Five

I have said that they were distressed. At least, I presume so. M.
Moncharmin, in any case, admits that he was impressed. To quote his
own words, in his Memoirs: "This moonshine about the Opera ghost in which, since we first took
over the duties of MM. Poligny and Debienne, we had been so nicely
steeped"--Moncharmin's style is not always irreproachable--"had no
doubt ended by blinding my imaginative and also my visual faculties.
It may be that the exceptional surroundings in which we found
ourselves, in the midst of an incredible silence, impressed us to an
unusual extent. It may be that we were the sport of a kind of
hallucination brought about by the semi-darkness of the theater and the
partial gloom that filled Box Five. At any rate, I saw and Richard
also saw a shape in the box. Richard said nothing, nor I either. But
we spontaneously seized each other's hand. We stood like that for some
minutes, without moving, with our eyes fixed on the same point; but the
figure had disappeared. Then we went out and, in the lobby,
communicated our impressions to each other and talked about 'the
shape.' The misfortune was that my shape was not in the least like
Richard's. I had seen a thing like a death's head resting on the ledge
of the box, whereas Richard saw the shape of an old woman who looked
like Mme. Giry. We soon discovered that we had really been the victims
of an illusion, whereupon, without further delay and laughing like
madmen, we ran to Box Five on the grand tier, went inside and found no
shape of any kind."