No Ordinary Skeleton

Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra is the origin of a world-famous modern myth that has perdured for over a century. Only recently, however, has it begun to receive serious critical attention, which thus far has overlooked one crucial source: the surviving manuscript of one of Leroux's earlier drafts, which differs considerably from the published text. This article reveals, for the first time, how the manuscript explicitly cites a hitherto unexamined inspiration for the novel, from which Leroux derived his central plot device of the eponymous Phantom's skeleton. This fictional cadaver has its roots in an apparently historical anecdote concerning the use of a real skeleton in performances of the Paris Opéra's 1841 production of Le Freischütz. Examining the veracity of this theatrical legend, however, this article concludes that it is apocryphal. As a fictionalization of an already falsified account, therefore, Le Fantôme is a paradigmatic example of the European Gothic

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