It was an exciting life of global travel, for which he became a celebrity. Tremendously successful as a newspaper reporter, he stayed at Le Matin for nearly thirteen years. He preferred writing, however, and began covering trials for smaller papers, which led, in 1893, to a full-time position as a reporter for Le Matin. As head of the household, he returned to Paris, where he reluctantly finished studying to be a lawyer, passing the tests required for his license. In the meantime, his mother died, and his father died soon after Leroux turned twenty.

Gaston Leroux went away to school when he was twelve, graduating with honors at age eighteen. After Gaston was born, his parents went on to have two more sons and a daughter. His father was a public works contractor.

Gaston Leroux was born in Paris on May 6, 1868, a month before his parents, Dominique Alfred Leroux and Marie Bidault, were married. Set in one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe, this story of the love triangle between the phantom, the young peasant-born opera singer he loves, and the dashing viscount who she loves, was written as a thriller, and it continued to excite the imaginations of readers into the twenty-first century. Like other precursors of modern superheroes, such as the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Frankenstein's creature, Erik balances sympathy with horror, admiration with revulsion. He can hear things said in privacy and can create catastrophes that might or might not be the accidents that they seem to be. At the same time, he a dangerous, menacing figure, lurking in the hidden catacombs beneath the opera house and blackmailing those who will not bow to his whims.

He is a sensitive soul, an accomplished composer and musician whose great unfinished work, Don Juan Triumphant, is described as breathtakingly beautiful by the one person he allows to hear it he is an object of pity, whose face has been disfigured from birth, causing him to hide behind a silk mask and he is hopelessly in love with a young woman whom he can never seriously hope will love him back. Its main character, Erik, is a romantic figure whose appeal reaches across different cultures and times. It was adapted to several popular motion pictures and into one of the most successful stage musicals of all time. Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera, first published in 1910, remained a perennial favorite throughout the twentieth century and into the early 2000s.

Phantom of the opera 2004 box office