Gaston Leroux, the author of "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra," the novel on which the musical is based, used Palais Garnier (an opera house in Paris, France) as the setting for the plot. French Emperor Napoleon III commissioned the famed opera house in Paris during the Second Empire. The novel was inspired by events that occurred at the venue in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Leroux first published it as a serial in the daily newspaper Le Gaulois in the early 1900s. The novel eventually inspired Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical "The Phantom of the Opera."

Source: CNN