The underground 'lake' that he wrote about, in reality an enormous cistern, does exist beneath the opera house, and it is still used for training firefighters to swim in the dark. Using this accident paired with rumors of a ghost in that same opera house, Leroux wrote Le Fantôme de l'Opéra and published it in 1910, which was later published in English as The Phantom of the Opera.

Leroux had heard the rumours about the time the opera house was finished, and these rumours became closely linked with the novel: Act One of the opera Helle had just finished when a fire in the roof of the opera house melted through a wire holding a counterweight for the chandelier, causing a crash that injured several and killed one. The setting of The Phantom of the Opera is the actual Paris opera house, the Palais Garnier.

The novel was first published in newspapers before finally being published as a book. Because of his fascination with both Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he wrote a detective mystery entitled The Mystery of the Yellow Room in 1907, and four years later he published Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. With his job, he was able to travel frequently, but he returned to Paris where he became a writer. At the paper, he wrote about and critiqued dramas, as well as being a courtroom reporter. Leroux initially was going to be a lawyer, but after spending his inheritance gambling he became a reporter for L'Écho de Paris.

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