I give you five minutes to spare your blushes. here is the little bronze key that opens the ebony caskets on the mantle piece in the Louise-Phillipe room. In one of the caskets you will find a scorpion, in the other, a grasshopper, both very cleverly imitated in Japanese bronze: they will say yes or no for you. If you turn the scorpion round, that will mean to me, when I return that you have said yes. The grasshopper will mean no... The grasshopper, be careful of the grass hopper! A grasshopper does not only turn: it hops! It hops! And it hops jolly high!

In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.

...the girl with the tip-tilted nose, the forget-me-not eyes, the rose red cheeks and the lily-white neck and shoulders who gave the explanation in a trembling voice: “It’s the ghost!

The opera ghost really existed

A ghost who, on the same evening, carries off an opera-singer and steals twenty-thousand francs is a ghost who must have his hands very full!

Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead." - Christine, from Gaston Leroux's: The Phantom of the Opera.

Sometimes, the Angel [of Music] leans over the cradle... and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men of fifty, which, you must admit is very wonderful. Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won't learn their lessons or practice their scales. And sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a wicked heart or a bad conscience.