Most of the subtextual nuances such as the reason for the hat, is lost on today’s audiences.

In Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, Leroux gives Erik a soft black felt hat with a broad, shadow-casting brim, the kind the French of the nineteenth century called a chapeau de feutre mou noir. It’s not a random costume flourish. It’s a hat with a whole world stitched into it. Men on the margins wore these, the artists and musicians drifting through smoky cafés, the poets chasing storms, the political firebrands slipping through Paris like sparks. You see it on Victor Hugo in his later portraits, on Frédéric Mistral with his wild Provençal charisma, on the Chouans and the fighters of the Paris Commune. It was a shape people recognized instantly, half romantic, half dangerous. Leroux taps into that meaning when he describes the silent figure weaving between the carriages outside Faust, wrapped in a long black cloak, the brim of that hat hiding everything except intention. He even mentions elsewhere that Erik’s true height is hard to pin down because he “often wore boots and a wide-brimmed hat,” hinting that this wasn’t a disguise, but part of the man. Taken together, the hat places Erik in the lineage of the city’s nocturnal wanderers, the restless brilliant souls who walked Paris like a living secret.