No one repeated the joke of the foyer, no one exclaimed: "There's the Opera ghost!" He himself did not speak a word and his very neighbors could not have stated at what precise moment he had sat down between them; but every one felt that if the dead did ever come and sit at the table of the living, they could not cut a more ghastly figure.

The friends of Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinny guest was an acquaintance of Debienne's or Poligny's, while Debienne's and Poligny's friends believed that the cadaverous individual belonged to Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin's party.
The result was that no request was made for an explanation; no unpleasant remark; no joke in bad taste, which might have offended this visitor from the tomb.

A few of those present who knew the story of the ghost and the description of him given by the chief scene-shifter--they did not know of Joseph Buquet's death--thought, in their own minds, that the man at the end of the table might easily have passed for him; and yet, according to the story, the ghost had no nose and the person in question had.

But M.Moncharmin declares, in his Memoirs, that the guest's nose was transparent: "long, thin and transparent" are his exact words.

I, for my part, will add that this might very well apply to a false nose.