Gaston Leroux put a phantom in the cellars and a lake under the stage, and the novel has been eating the building's real history ever since. The remarkable thing is how much of it is nearly true. There is water down there. Something did fall from the ceiling and kill someone. Neither happened the way you have been told.
It exists because of a bomb
On 14 January 1858, Italian anarchists led by Felice Orsini threw bombs at Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie as their carriage arrived at the temporary opera house on the Rue Le Peletier.
The imperial couple survived. Eight bystanders were killed and more than a hundred injured.
The lesson the Emperor drew was architectural: the approach on Rue Le Peletier was narrow and impossible to secure. France needed an opera house on an open square, with room for carriages, space to deploy troops, and a fortified private entrance for the sovereign. Haussmann picked the site off the Boulevard des Capucines in March 1858, and an imperial decree fixed the 12,000-square-metre plot on 29 September 1860.
The most opulent building of the Second Empire is, at bottom, a security measure.
The competition that was rigged to be fair
Empress Eugénie wanted Viollet-le-Duc. The political pressure to simply hand him the commission was considerable.
The Minister of State, Count Alexandre Colonna-Walewski, ran a blind two-stage competition instead, specifically to keep the decision out of the palace's hands. 171 architects entered, and it was won by Charles Garnier, who was 35 and essentially unknown.
Eugénie is said to have asked him what style it was, since it was neither Greek nor Roman nor Louis anything. His reply — that it was Napoleon III's own style — is the sort of line that may have been improved in the retelling, but it describes the building accurately.
The water is real. The lake is not.
Garnier hit a high water table almost immediately, and it nearly stopped the project. Pumping ran for months and would not clear it.
His solution was to stop fighting: he built an enormous concrete cistern under the stage, letting the groundwater collect and be managed rather than excluded. It also holds the backup water reserve for the Paris fire brigade, which mattered enormously in a nineteenth-century theatre.
So there is a large body of still water, in the dark, five levels below the stage. What there is not is a subterranean river. The Grange-Batelière was buried and channelised elsewhere; what Garnier found was a localised seasonal aquifer.
The cistern is used. The Paris fire brigade trains in it, practising underwater search and rescue in total darkness. There are fish living in it, including a well-known white catfish, fed by the building's technical staff.
Leroux did not invent the lake. He exaggerated one.
What fell in 1896
On 20 May 1896, during a performance, something came through the auditorium ceiling and killed a woman.
It was not the chandelier. The six-ton bronze and crystal fixture stayed where it was, and is still there. An overheated electrical wire caused a single heavy iron counterweight to break loose, and it fell through the ceiling plaster, killing a concierge named Madame Chomette.
Police records, the forensic report and the newspapers of the day all agree. Leroux, writing a decade later, took the counterweight and dropped the whole chandelier onto a crowd.
The numbers
- 1,979 seats, and thirteen years of building — 1861 to 1874 — delayed by groundwater, the Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the Empire and the Commune. Inaugurated 5 January 1875.
- 56 metres from the ground to the top of the flytower; the facade is 32.
- 154.9 metres long, up to 101.2 metres wide at the end pavilions.
- The cistern floor sits 10.13 metres below street level.
- The stage is the largest in Europe, 52 metres wide and 62 high, and it is not flat: there is a deliberate 5% rake built in to sharpen the audience's perspective.
Four things almost everyone believes that aren't true
| Claim | Verdict | What is actually the case |
|---|---|---|
| An underground river runs beneath it | False | A seasonal local water table, held in a concrete cistern Garnier built. The Grange-Batelière was channelised elsewhere |
| The chandelier fell and killed dozens | False | A counterweight fell through the ceiling on 20 May 1896, killing one person. The chandelier never fell |
| Louis XIV commissioned it | False | He founded the Paris Opera company in 1669. This building was commissioned by Napoleon III in 1860 |
| It is still the main opera house | Not since 1989 | The Opéra Bastille took over opera; the Garnier is principally the home of the ballet |
Two things worth knowing before you go in
Chagall's ceiling. The auditorium ceiling was repainted by Marc Chagall in 1964, over Jules Eugène Lenepveu's original. It was extremely controversial, and the original still exists underneath, covered rather than destroyed.
The buried records. On 24 December 1907, Alfred Clark of the Gramophone Company sealed 24 shellac recordings — Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Enrico Caruso — into lead and iron urns in the basement vaults, with legal instructions that they not be disturbed for a hundred years.
The building was also, briefly, at the technological edge. From 1883 its basement held an isolated power station using dynamos supplied by Thomas Edison, making it the first theatre in Paris to do away entirely with the fire risk of gas lighting. The research rates that high confidence. Twelve years later, a wire from that system overheated and killed Madame Chomette.
Hear this one standing in front of it
Wanderlight's Paris guide covers 14 landmarks and runs 3 hr 55 min in total. It plays offline, keeps going with the screen off, and doesn't ask you to make an account.
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Written from Wanderlight's research dossier for Palais Garnier — the same one the narration is written from. Where the evidence is thin, this page says so rather than rounding the uncertainty up.