letter, forbidding him to make any attempt to see her. But what he had seen at Perros,
what he had heard behind the dressing-room door, his conversation with Christine at the
edge of the moor made him suspect some machination which, devilish though it might be,
was none the less human. The girl's highly strung imagination, her affectionate and
credulous mind, the primitive education which had surrounded her childhood with a
circle of legends, the constant brooding over her dead father and, above all, the state of
sublime ecstasy into which music threw her from the moment that this art was made
manifest to her in certain exceptional conditions, as in the churchyard at Perros; all this
seemed to him to constitute a moral ground only too favorable for the malevolent designs
of some mysterious and unscrupulous person. Of whom was Christine Daae the victim?
This was the very reasonable question which Raoul put to himself as he hurried off to
Mamma Valerius.
He trembled as he rang at a little flat in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. The door was
opened by the maid whom he had seen coming out of Christine's dressing-room one
evening. He asked if he could speak to Mme. Valerius. He was told that she was ill in bed
and was not receiving visitors.
"Take in my card, please," he said.
The maid soon returned and showed him into a small and scantily furnished drawing-
room, in which portraits of Professor Valerius and old Daae hung on opposite walls.
"Madame begs Monsieur le Vicomte to excuse her," said the servant. "She can only see
him in her bedroom, because she can no longer stand on her poor legs."
Five minutes later, Raoul was ushered into an ill-lit room where he at once recognized the
good, kind face of Christine's benefactress in the semi-darkness of an alcove. Mamma
Valerius' hair was now quite white, but her eyes had grown no older; never, on the
contrary, had their expression been so bright, so pure, so child-like.
"M. de Chagny!" she cried gaily, putting out both her hands to her visitor. "Ah, it's
Heaven that sends you here!...We can talk of HER."
This last sentence sounded very gloomily in the young man's ears. He at once asked:
"Madame...where is Christine?"
And the old lady replied calmly:
"She is with her good genius!"
"What good genius?" exclaimed poor Raoul.
"Why, the Angel of Music!"
