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Ooc: It's PROSTITUTE ANECDOTE TIME! No, this was specifically mentioned not to have happened in one of the backstories for "The Phantom of the Opera...." But it's fiction! I can write whatever I bloody want!

Bic: I don’t know what I was thinking that day.... Or, rather, I do not care to admit that I’ve constantly harboured such perverse thoughts.

It was during a time of horrible economic problems, in the Franco-Prussian war: Prussian troops moving closer to Paris by the day, old aristocracy slaughtering their prized horses for meat. I was so young, and incessantly restive.... And the fact that women of my age and below were working the oldest profession certainly did not assuage my feelings.

Again, I do not know what it was that caused me to go to such terrible lengths.... Perhaps over twenty years of repressing my loneliness had fired this atrocious powder keg. Whatever it was, that frigid morning in mid-January, I stepped from my Opera passageway with such intent that I could feel my hands shaking from something other than the cold. After walking in a fevered pace for a block, perhaps, I spotted her: A lovely child of seventeen, maybe slightly older, with rich, dark brown hair that curled down her pale shoulders, and a bright, corseted dress marking her trade.... The girl laughed gaily as she brushed around a light pole, as though she’d not a care in this despicable world, when her fierce hazel eyes found mine. Coming boldly towards me, she looked like many women in her position were in that time, the daughter of a land-rich aristocratic line fallen from grace. Her delicate face pulled into a biting smile, the child spoke to me in a less-than-refined voice.

“Bon-matin, Monsieur,” she spoke in a low tone, fluttering her heavy eyelids up at me. I remember feeling about to faint in that moment. “What is it you’ve come for?”

“I have money, Mademoiselle,” I had stuttered in my haste, producing a pile of bills with still-trembling hands, only showing them for long enough for the girl to understand my point. She flashed me another toothy smile and I shuddered from the feelings coursing through my horrible mind.

“You wealthy men seem to be growing less and less fond of your wives...” she laughed, pushing the hood of my cloak down, threading her lovely warm fingers into the long hair at my neck (the most of welcome physical contact I’d ever had with any living being,) and grinned at the sight of my mask. “But... I’ve had no work for weeks.... You might just be my salvation, good Sir. My name is Fauve.... And you’ve no reason to hide your face from me. I won’t tell anyone who you are....”

I tried to arrest the girl’s movement, as her thin, starved fingers took a hold of the sides of my mask, but it was already too late. With a scream of terror, her warm eyes turning to frenzied fear, Mademoiselle Fauve was gone in a second, and I, standing in the icy street unmasked and with still-shaking breaths, pulled on my hood again and ran back to my House of Music, losing the most hopeless tears in my remembrance from my hollow eyes.

And now, thirty years later, I remain a pitiful shadow of a man, with nothing more than my years of repressed feeling to tell me that I still live....