The Opera Garnier: An Eerie Tour of Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera

by Kathryn Yelinek

Like any good mystery writer, Gaston Leroux builds his novels in layers. On one layer, his The Phantom of the Opera is a tragic love story about the reclusive, deformed Erik's obsession for the opera singer Christine Daae. But on the other layer, the book is a celebration of a particular city, Paris, and a particular building, the Paris Opera House. When I visited Paris one hot week in June, I made a pilgrimage to many of the locales mentioned in the book. This journey through Paris took me from the cool, shadowed sidewalks of a medieval street to the haughty decadence of...