Christine, Raoul, and Erik: Who Does She Really Choose?

Calling this a love triangle flatters it. Christine is not choosing between two suitors for most of the book, because for most of the book she does not believe one of them is a man.

Everything below is quoted from the free Project Gutenberg text, and every pull quote carries its line reference. The same three people are waiting in the playable Phantom of the Opera, where you get to be the one deciding what Christine decides.

Spoilers below: the closing section states how the three-way relationship resolves.

The short answer

Erik does not court Christine. He impersonates a religious figure her father invented for her as a child, and he does it for months before she sees anything at all. The triangle is therefore lopsided from the start: Raoul is competing with a suitor, and Christine is being handled by a voice she has been raised to expect.

This is the piece the screen and stage versions compress hardest, because it plays badly as a duet and reads devastatingly as prose.

Why she cannot simply refuse him

Christine’s father was a Breton fiddler who told her stories. In every one of them there was an Angel of Music, who visits every great artist at least once in a life, who cannot be seen, and who is heard only by the people meant to hear him. He told her she would meet him eventually, and he told her when.

“You will hear him one day, my child! When I am in Heaven, I will send him to you!”

Her father then dies. Some time later a voice starts speaking to her through the wall of her dressing room, teaches her to sing better than she has ever sung, and never appears. From inside Christine’s experience this is not a stranger making an approach. It is a promise being kept by the dead.

Erik knows exactly what he is doing with it, and the novel shows him working the legend directly, asking her whether she remembers the story and then confirming she has been visited. Whatever else the relationship is, it begins as a man wearing a dead man’s word.

The Torn Mask is a doorway in the playable Phantom of the Opera: two weeks below, a voice you trusted for a year, and a face you have not seen. Pull it away or leave it, and the rest of the story reshapes around the choice. Role-play The Phantom of the Opera →

Raoul, as the novel actually draws him

Readers who meet Raoul through the stage musical tend to remember a bland alternative. Leroux’s Raoul is younger than that and worse at this. He is raised largely by an aunt and a sister, his manners are described as almost candid, and he acts on impulse repeatedly and badly: he follows Christine, he demands explanations he has no right to, and he walks into five levels of unfamiliar cellar with a pistol he is told to keep in his pocket.

What he has going for him is that he is legible. Christine can predict him. Every time the novel puts the two men in the same paragraph, the contrast runs deeper than handsome against ugly. A boy whose intentions are obvious stands against a voice whose intentions are structurally impossible to read.

The one person who talks to the ghost

Leroux gives the ghost exactly one routine contact on the Opera’s own payroll, and she is not a mentor figure with a secret history. Mme. Giry is the box-keeper for Box Five. She has spoken to him for years and thinks nothing of it. An entire chapter is given over to her account of the arrangement, and when the managers press her on what the ghost actually says, her answer is the funniest line in the novel.

“Well, he tells me to bring him a footstool!”

She never learns what he is. Nobody can see him in his box, she explains, but everybody can hear him, and she has often heard him, and she always speaks the truth. The stage musical’s Madame Giry, who knows where the Phantom came from and guides other characters to him, is a different character built for a different purpose; the essay here on the three versions covers that kind of redistribution. In Leroux she is an employee handling a difficult regular customer, and her complete lack of curiosity about him is one of the funniest and most plausible things in the novel.

How it resolves

Christine leaves with Raoul, and Erik is the one who makes it possible. By the final chapters the novel has stopped being about who she prefers. It is about whether Erik can be moved, and what moves him is not love or fear but being cried over. Whether that makes him a villain or a casualty is argued in its own essay here.

The mechanism is ugly to the end. He puts an ultimatum to her with a bomb under it, she turns the bronze scorpion that means yes, and then he lets both of them go anyway and asks only to be buried. Her last act toward him is her own, not his, and the novel hands it to her without a word of explanation. The essay here on the ending sets that scene out line by line.

Whether what Christine feels for Erik is love, pity, or something she never gets the chance to name, the text declines to say. It gives her tears and a kiss and no interior monologue at all, and readers have been arguing about the gap for a century. How much of the building they are arguing inside was real gets its own essay here. The whole novel is free at Project Gutenberg, and the dressing-room chapters repay a second reading once you know who is on the other side of the wall.