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Updated: June 9, 2025
"What is it they really want? A box for to-night?" M. Firmin Richard told his secretary to send Box Five on the grand tier to Mm. Debienne and Poligny, if it was not sold. It was not. It was sent off to them. Debienne lived at the corner of the Rue Scribe and the Boulevard des Capucines; Poligny, in the Rue Auber.
Suddenly he began to speak. "The ballet-girls are right," he said. "The death of that poor Buquet is perhaps not so natural as people think." Debienne and Poligny gave a start. "Is Buquet dead?" they cried. "Yes," replied the man, or the shadow of a man, quietly. "He was found, this evening, hanging in the third cellar, between a farm-house and a scene from the Roi de Lahore."
The truth is that no one ever knew how Joseph Buquet met his death. The verdict at the inquest was "natural suicide." In his Memoirs of Manager, M. Moncharmin, one of the joint managers who succeeded MM. Debienne and Poligny, describes the incident as follows: "A grievous accident spoiled the little party which MM. Debienne and Poligny gave to celebrate their retirement.
We did not sell it once; and not only that, but we had to return the subscription: why, it's awful! We really can't work to keep ghosts! We prefer to go away! "'Yes, echoed M. Debienne, 'we prefer to go away. Let us go." "And he stood up. Richard said: 'But, after all all, it seems to me that you were much too kind to the ghost.
They could ask M. Debienne and M. Poligny, and anybody who knew her; and also M. Isidore Saack, who had had a leg broken by the ghost! "Indeed!" said Moncharmin, interrupting her. "Did the ghost break poor Isidore Saack's leg?" Mme. Giry opened her eyes with astonishment at such ignorance. However, she consented to enlighten those two poor innocents.
Lastly, I must pay a public tribute to the generosity of my friend and former collaborator, M. J. Le Croze, who allowed me to dip into his splendid theatrical library and to borrow the rarest editions of books by which he set great store. It was the evening on which MM. Debienne and Poligny, the managers of the Opera, were giving a last gala performance to mark their retirement.
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.
Debienne and Poligny: GENTLEMEN: We are much obliged for your kind thought of us, but you will easily understand that the prospect of again hearing Faust, pleasant though it is to ex-managers of the Opera, can not make us forget that we have no right to occupy Box Five on the grand tier, which is the exclusive property of HIM of whom we spoke to you when we went through the memorandum-book with you for the last time.
"I was just wanting to see you, sir, and talk to you about it, so that you mightn't have the same unpleasantness as M. Debienne and M. Poligny. They wouldn't listen to me either, at first." "I'm not asking you about all that. I'm asking what happened last night." Mme. Giry turned purple with indignation. Never had she been spoken to like that.
In Paris, our lives are one masked ball; and the foyer of the ballet is the last place in which two men so "knowing" as M. Debienne and M. Poligny would have made the mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be.
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