  Because the ground state has cooperative Jahn-Teller order, electronic
excitations in LaMnO$_3$ are predicted to self-trap by local rearrangement of
the lattice. The optical spectrum should show a Franck-Condon series, that is,
a Gaussian envelope of vibrational sidebands. Existing data are reinterpreted
in this way. The Raman spectrum is predicted to have strong multiphonon
features.
