Christine seized Raoul's hands and squeezed them with incredible
rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her
head. "Higher!" was all she said. "Higher still!" And she dragged him up toward the summit. He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very
roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses,
the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have
run from tree to tree in a forest. And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every
moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own
shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she
did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should. As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in
front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind. Chapter XII  Apollo's Lyre


On this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as
lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the
three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over
Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called
Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the
zinc streets, in the leaden avenues; they looked at their twin shapes
in the huge tanks, full of stagnant water, where, in the hot weather,
the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive. The shadow had followed behind them clinging to their steps; and the
two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down,
trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great
bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky. It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received
their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted
slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul:

"Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the
world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment
comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you--well you must
carry me off by force!" "Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?" "I don't know," she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. "He is a
demon!" And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. "I am
afraid now of going back to live with him ... in the ground!" "What compels you to go back, Christine?" "If I do not go back to him, terrible misfortunes may happen! ... But
I can't do it, I can't do it! ... I know one ought to be sorry for
people who live underground ... But he is too horrible! And yet the
time is at hand; I have only a day left; and, if I do not go, he will
come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him,
underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death's head. And
he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears,
Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death's head! I
can not see those tears flow again!" She wrung her hands in anguish, while Raoul pressed her to his heart. "No, no, you shall never again hear him tell you that he loves you! You shall not see his tears! Let us fly, Christine, let us fly at
once!" And he tried to drag her away, then and there. But she stopped him. "No, no," she said, shaking her head sadly. "Not now! ... It would be
too cruel ... let him hear me sing to-morrow evening ... and then we
will go away. You must come and fetch me in my dressing-room at
midnight exactly. He will then be waiting for me in the dining-room by
the lake ... we shall be free and you shall take me away ...  You must
promise me that, Raoul, even if I refuse; for I feel that, if I go back
this time, I shall perhaps never return." And she gave a sigh to which it seemed to her that another sigh, behind
her, replied. "Didn't you hear?" Her teeth chattered. "No," said Raoul, "I heard nothing." "It is too terrible," she confessed, "to be always trembling like this! ... And yet we run no danger here; we are at home, in the sky, in the
open air, in the light. The sun is flaming; and night-birds can not
bear to look at the sun. I have never seen him by daylight ... it must
be awful! ... Oh, the first time I saw him! ... I thought that he was
going to die." "Why?" asked Raoul, really frightened at the aspect which this strange
confidence was taking. "BECAUSE I HAD SEEN HIM!" This time, Raoul and Christine turned round at the same time:

"There is some one in pain," said Raoul. "Perhaps some one has been
hurt. Did you hear?" "I can't say," Christine confessed. "Even when he is not there, my
ears are full of his sighs. Still, if you heard ..."

They stood up and looked around them. They were quite alone on the
immense lead roof. They sat down again and Raoul said:

"Tell me how you saw him first." "I had heard him for three months without seeing him. The first time I
heard it, I thought, as you did, that that adorable voice was singing
in another room. I went out and looked everywhere; but, as you know,
Raoul, my dressing-room is very much by itself; and I could not find
the voice outside my room, whereas it went on steadily inside. And it
not only sang, but it spoke to me and answered my questions, like a
real man's voice, with this difference, that it was as beautiful as the
voice of an angel. I had never got the Angel of Music whom my poor
father had promised to send me as soon as he was dead. I really think
that Mamma Valerius was a little bit to blame. I told her about it;
and she at once said, 'It must be the Angel; at any rate, you can do no
harm by asking him.' I did so; and the man's voice replied that, yes,
it was the Angel's voice, the voice which I was expecting and which my
father had promised me. From that time onward, the voice and I became
great friends. It asked leave to give me lessons every day. I agreed
and never failed to keep the appointment which it gave me in my
dressing-room. You have no idea, though you have heard the voice, of
what those lessons were like." "No, I have no idea," said Raoul. "What was your accompaniment?" "We were accompanied by a music which I do not know:  it was behind the
wall and wonderfully accurate. The voice seemed to understand mine
exactly, to know precisely where my father had left off teaching me. In a few weeks' time, I hardly knew myself when I sang. I was even
frightened. I seemed to dread a sort of witchcraft behind it; but
Mamma Valerius reassured me. She said that she knew I was much too
simple a girl to give the devil a hold on me ...  My progress, by the
voice's own order, was kept a secret between the voice, Mamma Valerius
and myself. It was a curious thing, but, outside the dressing-room, I
sang with my ordinary, every-day voice and nobody noticed anything. I
did all that the voice asked. It said, 'Wait and see:  we shall
astonish Paris!' And I waited and lived on in a sort of ecstatic dream.