The Phantom of the Opera: Chapter 7

Storytime for Grownups

Faith Moore continues her reading of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, focusing on the escalating chaos in Chapter 7. The episode be

Key takeaways

• Faith Moore's new novel, Wooing Jane, is scheduled for release on October 2nd.
• An in-person event with Faith and Spencer Klavan will be held at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, Tennessee.

Main topics

• Wooing Jane book release
• The Phantom of the Opera Chapter 7 reading

Notable quotes

It's like an audiobook with built-in notes.

Conclusion

The episode effectively blends literary analysis with dramatic storyte

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello, and welcome to Storytime for Grownups. I'm Faith Moore, and this season we're reading The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Each episode, I'll read a few chapters from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built-in notes. So brew a pot of tea, find a cozy chair, and settle in. It's storytime! Hi, welcome back. So I was just looking at my calendar and was very excited to realize that it's just a little under two weeks until my book comes out. My book, Wooing Jane, comes out on October 2nd, which is two weeks from this past Friday. So that was exciting, which means it's just about two weeks until I will be in Franklin, Tennessee at the Landmark Booksellers. talking about the book and signing the book and hanging out with my brother, Spencer Clavin, and with many of you because I've been getting all kinds of emails from people saying they're coming. So I'm just feeling really excited right now. I know that's not related to what we're Speaker 2 (1:20) going Speaker 1 (1:20) to be talking about today. It's not related to the Phantom of the Opera at all, but that's how I'm feeling as I come to this microphone today. And so I did want to just ask you, because it's on my mind, I would... ask you please to scroll into the show notes, which is the description of this episode, and find the link and pre-order a copy of Wooing Jane. It's a romantic comedy. It's really fun. Henry VIII is involved. I'm really, really hoping you're going to like it. And it's important to me. It means a lot to me. And it means a lot to me when you guys get a copy. It means a lot to me that you're telling me that you're going to come to Franklin and see me there. So In the description, there are two links related to this. One is the Amazon link to pre-order the book if you're not able to come to Tennessee, which I completely understand if you're not able to. I would love it if you would pre-order the book off of Amazon. And if you are able to come to Tennessee, then you should click the other link, which is the link to the landmark booksellers and the page about the event. You have to buy the book through there if you want to come to the event. It's like your ticket to the event. And it's a conversation. Some of you... have been asking, is it just a signing? What's going on? So no, it's going to be me and my brother, Spencer Claven, in conversation about wooing Jane. And then at the end, there will be time for signing. So I'll sign your books and I can write your name in it, write whatever you want and sign it and you can go home with a signed copy. So I really, really hope that you will either get the book or join me in Tennessee or do both. And... I really appreciate you giving me the chance to talk to you about it here, because I know that's not what this is about, but it's important to me. It means a lot to me. And so thank you for letting me do that. But we'll move on now. We are going to be reading chapter seven today of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Before we do that, the reminders are the same. We have tea time coming up over in our online community, The Drawing Room. That is on Wednesday, September 30th at 8 p.m. Eastern. If you're not yet a member of The Drawing Room or if you are but you're not yet landed gentry, you can scroll into the show notes again and... click the link that will help you to sign up or change your membership if you want to. And then you can join us on the 30th. I really hope that you will. It's going to be lots of fun. We can talk about this book. You can ask me any questions. If you have questions about wooing Jane or want to talk about that, we can do that too. So it's just a fun time to chat together and, you know, get to hang out a little bit, which I always love. So I hope that you'll join us for that. And then of course, please subscribe to the show. Please tap the five stars if you're enjoying it. Please leave a positive review in your podcast player. And... please tell everyone. Tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, strangers. Tell everyone you know about Storytime for Grownups and let's get more people reading and talking about classic books. Because, I mean, why not, right? It's the best ever. So... Let's get into it. Speaking of reading classic books, let's do that. So last time we read chapters five and six. As I say, today's going to be chapter seven. So let's review what we read last time. Then we'll talk for a bit and then we'll get into the chapter. So here is the recap. Okay, so where we left off, we learn that after Christine Daae's magnificent performance, she canceled all her other singing engagements and seemed to retreat from the limelight. People didn't know why and it was this great mystery. Raoul sent her many letters reminding her that they knew each other as children, but he didn't receive an answer until he finally does get a letter from Christine saying that she does remember him and that she's going to the town of Peros to honor the anniversary of her father's death. Raoul takes this as an invitation for him to join her there, and he rushes off to the train station. He misses the earlier train, but he gets a later one, and it gets him there in the evening. On the train, Raoul remembers what he knows about Christine and her family. So she's the daughter of Swedish peasants, but her father was an excellent violinist, and after her mother died, her father took her all over the place, and he would play his fiddle at fairs and things and earn money, and Christine would sometimes sing with him. Eventually, a wealthy man named Professor Valerius noticed them and took them to Paris. Christine got to go to music school, and Madame Valerius treated her like a daughter. But Christine's father was homesick, and he kind of shut himself up in his room, and he became very... depressed. The only thing that made him happy was when they all went to the town of Peros for a vacation because it reminded him of his home in Sweden. Sometimes he would take Christine out into the countryside and they would perform for people, but they would take no money in return. Once, when they were in Peros, they encountered Raoul, who was there with his nanny. He was enchanted by Christine's singing, and one day when her scarf was flung into the sea by the wind, he rushed into the sea after it and brought it back to her. Christine's father agreed to give Raoul violin lessons, and so they spent a lot of time together. They used to like to go around begging the locals to tell them legends and fairy tales, and there was one in particular about the Angel of Music that they liked to hear. The Angel of Music is like a supernatural spirit who could land on you and give you musical genius. Christine's father told her that when he was dead and in heaven, he would send her the Angel of Music, and she believed him. Three years later, they met again, and they clearly had romantic feelings for each other, but Raoul knew... that he could never marry her because she wasn't upper class. They parted and eventually Christine's father died and she became very depressed. All her musical talents seemed to leave her and though she did enter the Paris Conservatory, she didn't distinguish herself there. When Raoul discovered her at the opera house, he found her incredibly beautiful but was disappointed by her singing until the night when she surprised everyone with her beautiful voice. When he finally arrives at Peros, he goes to the inn and he finds Christine there. He tells her that he loves her, but she says that he's being silly. Raoul gets angry with her and they have a quarrel and Christine runs away. Later, Christine comes and finds him and explains that her father has in fact sent her the Angel of Music and that it was the angel's voice that Raoul heard in her dressing room that night. Raoul laughs and he doesn't believe her and Christine is upset because she feels he ought to know that she's not the sort of woman who would be alone in her dressing room with strange men. Raoul says he thinks someone was playing a trick on her. This makes her angry and she runs away from him again. Back at the inn, Christine locks herself in her room, but Raoul hears her going out in the middle of the night and he follows her. Later, he is brought back, faint and freezing, and we are given the transcript from his testimony at an investigation. He says that he followed her to the graveyard and to her father's grave. When the clock struck midnight, Christine lifted her arms to the sky and incredibly beautiful violin music began to float over the air. It was a song that Christine's father used to play, and Raoul thought again of what Christine said about the angel of music. Near the church, there is a wall of bones held back by netting, and suddenly many skulls start to tumble toward Raoul. He thinks someone was hiding behind them, and he runs into the church. He sees a man running away from him, and he grabs onto his cloak. The man turns around, and he seems to have a death's head. Raoul thinks of Satan, and he faints. That is all he can remember. After this, we return to the opera house where Montcharmain and Fermin have gone to inspect box five. They get a fright when they both think that they see a figure in the box, but then they realize that they saw different things, so it was probably nothing. They decide that they're going to watch that night's performance of Faust from box five themselves. All right, sorry that recap was so long, but a lot happened, so we had to go over it. But anyway, I have three comments that I want to read today. The first one comes from our online community, The Drawing Room. This person goes by the handle atphilv. He says, So, the plot thickens. Monsieur le Vicomte Raoul and Mademoiselle Christine Daae have this childhood backstory, beginning with the scarf blowing into the water by the wind, and old man Daae saying he will fetch the angel of music for Christine once he's in heaven. This next one comes from Cassie. She says, I'm really enjoying the book so far. I wanted to comment on the church made of skeletons, which provided such a creepy atmosphere for those scenes in chapter five. While this may seem insane to many of your readers, churches made of bones, also known as ossuaries, are quite common in Europe, especially France and Italy. While it may be shocking to many, for Catholics, these relics are reminders, deeply moving us to reflect on our mortality and the need for the salvation of our souls. I really liked that this church was included in the book. It definitely created a spooky air, but I also just enjoyed this part of church history. And the last one comes from John. He says, chapter five had kind of a different tone than the other chapters. It was spookier. I really liked it. And the fact that the ghost shows up outside the opera house felt like a neat little twist. So yes, I... totally agree with John here. Chapter five is almost like a little ghost story unto itself. And it lacks the thing that we've been talking about for a while now, which is the juxtaposition of the humor and the creepiness. It's just creepy. And it has much more of a traditional ghost story vibe, I think, than the rest of the book so far. It's almost like the book kind of starts off as a whodunit with ghost story elements. And then in chapter five, we get a ghost story with whodunit elements because we get this really very spooky sequence with the graveyard and the skulls and the music and everything. And I'm going to talk more about that in a moment. But we get this really spooky sequence. But we also get at the end this excerpt from the police interrogation of Raul. So we don't forget. that this is also a whodunit, but chapter five kind of flips it so that the ghost story elements take precedence. And the humor isn't really there in chapter five either. And I kind of like that. I mean, I love the humor in the book. It's wonderful. And I love that even some of the creepy elements, like the ghost himself, even those can also be funny. But it's also really fun sometimes to just go into full-on ghost mode. And that is what's happening here. And I think we're coming to kind of understand that there are certain characters that provide comic relief and certain characters who don't. And I think that's really cool in terms of the writing because it means that certain characters like Montcharmin and Richard, the two managers, and Madame Giry, they are written as if they're in some kind of farce or something. And other characters, like Raoul and Christine, they are written as if they're in a drama. And so it's really funny when those two kinds of characters meet up, because it can create all kinds of shenanigans and miscommunications and stuff. And it can give us those funny and spooky scenes that we've been talking about. But it's also great because if you take away the funny characters, we can get a purely spooky scene like we get in chapter five. And if you take away the dramatic characters, you can get a purely funny scene. Then there's the ghost himself, who's wonderfully both at the same time, funny and scary. And so when the ghost interacts with the managers, for example, the scene is funny with a kind of edge of creepy. But when the ghost interacts with Christine or with Raul, the scene is just spooky. So it's really cool, I think. But to John's point. Chapter 5 is the first chapter