Complete and unabridged, with 99 full-page plates by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Béraud and Gustave Caillebotte. Beneath the Paris Opera lie five cellars, an underground lake, and a tenant whom the management pays not to think about. Leroux was a crime reporter first, and he built the novel as an investigation: witness statements, an inquest tone, and real machinery of the Palais Garnier, which does have a lake. The result is less a horror story than the strangest love triangle in French fiction. Ninety-nine plates of Paris backstage life by Renoir and Degas, from ballet rehearsals to the costume ball, run through the book like the opera house's own corridors.