M.Moncharmin may have taken for transparency what was only shininess.

Everybody knows that orthopaedic science provides beautiful false noses for those who have lost their noses naturally or as the result of an operation.
Did the ghost really take a seat at the managers' supper-table that night, uninvited?
And can we be sure that the figure was that of the Opera ghost himself?
Who would venture to assert as much?
I mention the incident, not because I wish for a second to make the reader believe--or even to try to make him believe--that the ghost was capable of such a sublime piece of impudence; but because, after all, the thing is impossible.
M.Armand Moncharmin, in chapter eleven of his Memoirs, says: "When I think of this first evening, I can not separate the secret confided to us by MM.

Debienne and Poligny in their office from the presence at our supper of that GHOSTLY person whom none of us knew." What happened was this: Mm.

Debienne and Poligny, sitting at the center of the table, had not seen the man with the death's head.
Suddenly he began to speak.
"The ballet-girls are right," he said.

"The death of that poor Buquet is perhaps not so natural as people think." Debienne and Poligny gave a start.
"Is Buquet dead ?" they cried.
"Yes," replied the man, or the shadow of a man, quietly.