The Poe Shadow

7

I ARRIVED AT my first appointment in Paris by way of kidnapping.

In our American cities the stranger is left modestly to himself, with great cruelty and politeness; but in Paris a stranger has a constant sense of being shoved and directed by the citizens and officials; if you are lost, the Frenchman will run half a mile at great speed to point at your destination, and will accept no thanks. Perhaps kidnapping is the inevitable culmination of their aggressive kindness.

I made my voyage to Paris approximately a year and a half after I pulled that book out of the fire. My first shock upon arrival came at the railroad terminus, where screams of commissionnaires lure visitors to one or another hotel. I tried to avoid their outstretched hands.

I stopped where I met a man barking for the Hôtel Corneille, named after the great French playwright. I had read of the hotel in a novel of Balzac's (for I had brought some books of his and the novelist George Sand's for entertainment and study on my voyage) and it was reputed to be an establishment welcoming to those who indulge in the various branches of the humanities. I considered my own purposes as having a degree of literary character.

"You are for the Corneille, monsieur?"

At my assent he released a hoarse sigh, as if to thank heaven he could rest from shouting. "This way, if you please!" He brought me to his carriage, where he labored to secure my bags above, occasionally pausing to examine me with an air of exuberant happiness at having a New World visitor as a passenger.

"You have come on business, monsieur?"

I contemplated an answer. "I suppose not exactly. I am a lawyer back home, monsieur. But I have left my situation as of late. I am attending to a rather different type of affair-to say sooth, as I feel already I can hold your confidence, I am here to procure the help of someone who will attend to it."

"Ah!" he replied, not listening to a word. "You are friendly with Cooper, then?"

"What?"

"Cooper!"

After we repeated the exchange, it became clear he meant the author James Fenimore Cooper. I'd discover that the French thought America quite too intimate for any two people of the country not to know each other, even were one a backwoodsman and the other a Wall Street speculator. The adventure novels of Cooper were inexplicably popular in even the finest circles of Paris (bring an American copy and you shall be deemed a regular hero!), and we were all presumed to live among those stories' wild and noble Indians. I said I had not met Cooper.

"Well, the Corneille will fulfill every one of your needs, upon my honor! There are no wigwams there! Watch the step up, monsieur, and I'll retrieve the rest of your bags from the porter."

I had not misjudged my first choice of transportation in this city. The carriage was wider than the American kind and the interior fittings indeed very comfortable. It was the most enjoyable luxury I could imagine at that moment, to sink against the cushions of a carriage as we neared a well-appointed private chamber of my own. This ride, remember, had followed two weeks at sea, starting from the Baltimore harbor, stopping in Dover for a night before sailing again, and finally arriving in France, where I then began six hours on the train into Paris. Just the idea of sleeping in a bed enthralled me! I could not know I was about to be removed from my newfound comfort, and at the threat of a sword.

My tranquillity was jolted when the coach abruptly tilted at a sharp angle before coming to a jagged and rough stop. The commissionnaire cursed and stepped down from his box.

"Just a ditch!" he called to me with relief. "I thought a wheel had come loose! Then we'd be-"

From my window I could see the features of his face suddenly flatten as he fell into an overrespectful silence. This expression mingled with one of fear before he skulked away.

"Now see here, driver!" I shouted. "Monsieur, where are you going?" Leaning out the window, I observed a squat man, buttoned to the collar in a flowing great-coat of bright blue. He had a large mustache and an exquisitely sharpened beard. I thought to step down and ask the stranger if he had seen the path taken by the runaway commissionnaire. Instead, this man opened my door and climbed in with great suavity.

He was saying something in French, but I was too flustered to employ my improving knowledge of the language. My first thought was to slide myself out the other side; I shifted my position only to find, upon opening that door, the way blocked by another man in the same kind of single-breasted coat. He was pulling his coat back to reveal a saber falling perpendicularly from his shiny black belt. I felt mesmerized by the sight of the weapon glinting with sunlight. His hand casually found its hilt and tapped at it as he nodded to me. "Allons donc!"

"Police!" I exclaimed, feeling half relieved and half frightened. "You men are from the police, monsieur?"

"Yes," the one inside said, his hand reaching out. "Your passport now, if you please, monsieur?"

I complied and waited in confusion as he read it. "But who are you looking for, Officer?"

A brief smile. "You, monsieur."

It was explained to me at a later time that the watchful eye of the Parisian police fell on any American entering their city alone who was a young man-and especially an unmarried young man-as potential "radicals" who had arrived with intent to overthrow the government. Considering that the government had been overthrown quite recently, when King Louis-Philippe was replaced three years earlier by a popular republican government, this imminent fear of radicalism seemed mysterious to one not well versed in the politics of France. Did they worry that the mobs, having gotten their legislature and duly elected president, and now bored of republicanism, would be instigated to riot to have their kings back again?

The police officers who had intercepted my coach merely explained that the prefect of the police proposed for me to call on him before beginning my stay in the city. Mesmerized and strangely captivated by the sabers and elegant uniforms, I followed willingly. A different carriage, with a faster span of horses, brought us directly to the Rue de Jerusalem, where the prefecture was located.

The prefect, a jovial and distracted man named Delacourt, sat beside me in his chamber as had his functionary in the carriage and performed the same ritual of reading my passport. It had been properly made up by the French emissary in Washington City, Monsieur Montor, who had also provided a letter attesting to my respectable character. But the prefect seemed to have little interest in any written proof of my harmless intentions.

Was I here on "business," "touring," or "educational"? I responded in the negative on all counts.

"If not these, then how have you come to be in Paris this summer?"

"You see, Monsieur Prefect, I am to meet a citizen of your city regarding an important affair back in the United States."

"And," he replied, hiding his interest with a casual smile, "who is that?"

When I told him, he became quite still, then exchanged a glance with the officer sitting across the prefect's chambers. "Who?" the prefect then said, as though entirely moonstruck, after some moments had passed.

"Auguste Duponte," I repeated. "You do know him then, Monsieur Prefect? I have communicated with him by mail over the last months-"

"Duponte? Duponte has written you?" the other police officer, a small and fat old man, interrupted gruffly.

"No, of course not, Officer Gunner," said the prefect.

"No," I agreed, though irritated by the queer presumption of the prefect. "I have written Duponte, but he has not written in return. That is why I have come. I am here to explain myself in his private ear before it is too late."

"You shall have a hard time of that," mumbled Gunner.

"He is not…he is alive?" I inquired.

I think the prefect replied, "Almost," but he swallowed his word up whole and returned abruptly to his more jovial and freewheeling personality. (I had not noticed the reduction in his joviality, you see, until it was just then restored.) "Never mind this," he said of my passport, handing it to his colleague to be stamped with an apparently meaningful series of hieroglyphics. "A tool of the next Inquisition, no?"

He abruptly dropped the subject of Duponte, welcomed me to Paris, and assured me that I could call upon him if I should ever need assistance during my stay. On my way out, several sergents de ville regarded me with hard glares of suspicion or dislike, which provoked my great sense of relief upon reaching the anonymity of the busy street.

That same afternoon, I paid Madame Fouché, proprietress of the Hôtel Corneille, for a full week's stay, though in fact I anticipated a quicker end to my business.

I suppose there were signs, though, that I should have noted. For instance, the attitude of the concierge at the grand Paris mansion where I had addressed my letters to Duponte. This was my first stop the morning after arriving. When I inquired at the door, the concierge narrowed his eyes at me, shook his head, and spoke: "Duponte? Why would you want to see him?"

It did not seem inconceivable to me that the concierge for a person of this stature would dissuade casual callers. "I require his skills in a matter of moment," I replied, at which a strange hissing sound emanated from the man and revealed itself as laughter as he informed me that Duponte no longer lived here, had left no further information, and that Columbus probably couldn't find him now.

As I took my leave, I thought about the "Dupin" I had known well. I mean from Poe's tales-that liaison who had opened the portal into Poe by convincing me the inexplicable must yet be understood. "My French hero" was Poe's reference to the character in one of the letters he wrote to me. If only I had happened to inquire to Poe about the identity of the real Dupin; if only I had exhibited more curiosity-it would have saved me the last year and more that had been required to trace this singular man to Paris!

In his tales, Poe never physically described the character of Dupin. I realized this only after freshly reviewing this trio of particular tales of detection with that question in mind. Previously, if asked of this, I might have answered, as if talking to a perfect ass, "Of course Poe describes one of his most important characters, the character that embodies perfectly his writing, and in great detail, too!" But on the contrary, Dupin's form, you see, is strikingly imparted-but only to the careful and estimable reader who enters the tale with his full heart.

I mention here as illustration a rather frothy short tale by Poe called "The Man That Was Used Up." It features a celebrated army general whose sturdy physical appearance is widely admired. But the general has an unfortunate secret: each night he falls apart physically from his old war wounds and must have his body parts stitched back together by his Negro manservant before breakfast. I believe this was Poe's shove at those lesser writers, mere blots in the deep shadows of his genius, who thought physical description of features the key to enlivening their characters. Likewise, it was from the untellable soul of C. Auguste Dupin's character, not his choice of waistcoat, that he had long ago stepped into my consciousness.

When I had first received the newspaper cutting mentioning the real Dupin from the athenaeum clerk in Baltimore, I'd found fruitless all my attempts to secure the investigator's name from the New York newspaper where the column had appeared. However, a mere few weeks of research into French periodicals and directories produced a fairly impressive list of possible models for Poe's character.

All of their personal histories matched in some manner the two sources: the cutting's description as well as the traits of Poe's character. One possibility I turned up was a Parisian mathematical celebrity who wrote textbooks used to solve various scientific problems; and there was the lawyer, called sometimes the Baron, who acquitted persons accused of the most scandalous crimes, who had since gone to London; another, a former thief who acted as a secret agent of the Parisian police before operating a paper factory in Brussels. Each one of these and other possibilities were considered dispassionately and objectively and with the expectation that one would rise above the others as the clear source for Dupin.

And yet, another year and a half passed from the start of that research. Correspondence across the Atlantic proved slow and inconclusive. Promising candidates accumulated quickly before each one gradually dropped into a well of doubt after further inquires and exchanges.

Until one clear day in the spring of 1851. That's when I discovered in the French journal L'--the name Auguste Duponte. The name naturally caught my attention, but it was not the sound of the name only that struck a distinct harmony with Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. This fellow, Auguste Duponte, had gained prominence in France in the sensational case of Monsieur Lafarge, a gentleman of strong physical constitution and some local importance found mysteriously dead in his home. After some useless maneuvers by the Parisian police, one officer invited in his acquaintance, the young tutor Duponte, to translate the comments of a Spanish visitor who was a witness in the case (though that angle ultimately proved irrelevant).

Within the space of ten or twelve minutes after hearing the facts from the police officer, it was said Duponte conclusively showed the police that the dead man had been poisoned by Madame Lafarge at the end of a meal. Madame L. was convicted for the murder of her husband. She was later spared from death by sympathetic officials.

(Asked by the French newspaper La Presse what he thought about the murderess's sentence having been commuted, Duponte reportedly said, "Nothing at all. Punishment has little relation to the fact of a crime, and the least to do with the analysis of the crime.")

The news of Auguste Duponte's feat spread widely through France. The government officials, police, and citizens in Paris sought his analysis of other incidents. This swift introduction to the public eye-I discovered with immense satisfaction-occurred a few years before the appearance in an 1841 issue of an American journal of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Poe's description of Dupin's rise to fame in the second of the tales could be used with equal effect to describe the real history of Auguste Duponte: It thus happened that he found himself the cynosure of the policial eyes; and the cases were not few in which attempt was made to engage his services at the Prefecture.

My confidence that I had identified the right man was bolstered further when I happened to meet a knowledgeable Frenchman who had been living in America for the last few years, since the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe, as part of a diplomatic corps for the new French republic. This was Henri Montor. I was in Washington City researching Auguste Duponte in its libraries when he noticed with interest that I was struggling through some French newspapers. I explained my purpose and asked if he had known Duponte.

"Whenever there was a crime of great impact," Monsieur Montor said animatedly, "the people of Paris had always called for Duponte-and the criminal on the street would curse the year Duponte was born. A treasure of Paris is Duponte, Monsieur Clark."

During my subsequent visits, Henri Montor tutored me in French over supper and engaged me in long hours of conversation, comparing the French and American governments and people. He found Washington City rather desolate compared to Paris, the climate positively stifling and injurious to one's health.

By this time, when I met Monsieur Montor, I had already written to Duponte himself. I had outlined the events of Poe's death and described the urgent need to resolve the matter before Poe's sickly reputation worsened. After another week had passed, I had written Duponte two more letters, both marked "Immediate," with addendums and more details of the unwritten history of Poe.

Though our acquaintance was short, Montor invited me to join him at a dress ball that hosted several hundred guests at a lofty mansion near Washington City where I could meet numerous French ladies and gentlemen. Most had one title or another, and some, to my delight, humored my unpolished French, which I sought to perfect as much as possible. Jérôme Bonaparte was there-he was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, born to an American woman whom Napoleon's younger brother Jérôme the senior met nearly fifty years before while on excursion in the United States. This regal offspring was now standing before me dressed in a garish Turkish costume, with two curved swords hanging from his belt. After we had been introduced, I complimented his costume.

"No need for ‘monsieurs,' anyway, Mr. Clark; we are in America," Jérôme Bonaparte said, his dark eyes lit with good humor. Henri Montor fidgeted at this a bit. "As for this monstrosity," Bonaparte continued with a sigh, "it was my wife's pretty idea. She is in the next room somewhere."

"Oh, I believe she and I met. She is dressed as an ostrich?"

Bonaparte laughed. "There are feathers on her. Your guess of what animal is as good as mine!"

"Our American friend," Montor said, putting his arm through mine, "is trying to practice our native language for his private researches. Have you been back to Paris recently, my dear Bonaparte?"

"Father used to try to sway me to live there, you know. I cannot think for a moment of settling myself out of America, though, Montor, for I am too much attached and accustomed to it to find pleasure in Europe." He tapped an intricately detailed gold snuffbox and offered some to us.

A woman paraded toward us from where the host played his violin accompanied by an orchestra. She was calling out to Bonaparte by a nickname, and for a moment I thought it was his ostrich-feathered wife, until I saw that she wore the flowing robes and jewels of a queen. Montor whispered to me: "That is Elizabeth Patterson, Jérôme's mother." His whisper was so discreet it was clear I should pay attention.

"Dear Mother," said Jérôme formally, "this is Quentin Clark, a Baltimorean of some wit."

"How whimsical!" replied this costume-queen who, though not at all tall, seemed to tower over all of us.

"Mrs. Patterson." I bowed.

"Madame Bonaparte," she corrected me on both points and offered her hand. There was an irreducible beauty about her face and her pristine eyes that was almost tragic. One could not help but be in love with her, it seemed to me. She looked at me with sharp disapproval. "You are uncostumed, young man."

Montor, who was dressed fabulously as a Neapolitan fisherman, explained my lack of disguise by way of his last-minute invitation to me. "He is studying French customs, you see."

Madame Bonaparte's eyes flared at me. "Study hard."

I would realize once I arrived in Paris that this dress-ball queen was right about my grasp of French customs. Moreover, as I looked around at the extraordinary room of masked and obstructed faces, I understood that this was what both Peter and Auntie Blum wanted, in some way. There was something here, something beyond the liveried servants and banks of flowers glowing with lamps inside them, something powerful that had very little to do with money and that Baltimore desired to add to its commercial triumphs.

By that point in time after the occasion of the burning book, I had returned to our law office to complete certain unfinished work. Peter hardly acknowledged my presence. He would whistle whole staves of music up and down our stairs in frustrated displeasure. Sometimes I wished he would simply yell at me again; then in reply I could at least detail the progress I had made.

Hattie seemed to follow the example set by Peter, seeking me out less and less, but she did take much trouble to convince her aunt and family to be patient regarding our engagement and to give me time. I tried my best to reassure Hattie. But I had begun to feel wary at saying too much-begun to see even Hattie's pure devotion as part of their arsenal, another instrument to stifle the aims that commanded me. Even her face began to look to my eyes more like her busybody aunt's. She was part of a Baltimore that had failed to even notice that the truth behind a great man's death mattered. Hattie, why didn't I trust that you could see me, as usual, more clearly than a looking-glass could!

Weeks after the dress ball, there were still no letters from Duponte in reply to mine. I could not abide the slow exchange of mailable communications. Mail could be stolen, or destroyed by accident or mischief. Here I had found the identity of the Dupin of real life, the one person probably in all the known world able to decipher the blank spot of Poe's last days! I was still only serving Poe as I had promised him. I had reached this far, and should not cede my position through lack of action. I would not wait for this to be lost. In June 1851, I made my plans and set off for Paris.

Here I was in a different world. Even the houses seemed to be built from entirely different materials and colors, and to position themselves differently on the wide streets. There was a feeling of secretiveness to Paris, yet everything was open, and existence in Paris was entirely out of doors.

The latest city directories I found upon arriving had no listings for Duponte, and I realized that those I'd consulted in Washington City were a few years out of date. Nor did recent newspaper columns that had previously spoken breathlessly about him have a word to say.

In Paris, the post office delivered the mail directly to the houses of residents-a practice newly begun in some American cities by private arrangement; though in Paris, it was said, its convenience for citizens was less important than the surveillance it provided to the government. It was my hope that the postal officers would not have continued to carry Duponte's mail to an incorrect address. In another peculiarity of the Parisian rules, I was refused (rigidly and politely, as with everything French) any admittance to the administrators of the post office, where I wanted to ask about Duponte's present address. I would need to write for permission to the appropriate ministry. Guided in composing this letter by Madame Fouché, my hotel's proprietress, I sent it by post. (This was another rule, even though the ministry was hardly three streets away!) "You will certainly receive a letter of permission within a day or two. It could be quite longer, though," she added thoughtfully, "if there is an error by some functionary, which is awfully common."

As I waited for any sign of progress in my search for Duponte's address, I wrote to Hattie. Remembering the pain it had caused me whenever I'd seen her sad, I had been experiencing deep regret that the timing of this endeavor had caused her even the slightest grief. In my letters to Baltimore I promised her as little a delay as possible to our plans and entreated her in the meantime to come to Paris, however short a stay and dull a program my present venture might require. Hattie wrote that nothing would please her more than such a voyage, but she was needed to help care for the two new children recently added to her sisters' households.

Peter, for his part, wrote a farewell letter explaining that I had ruined my life, and nearly ruined his, by yielding to the decadence and indecency of Europe.

What he must have been imagining! If only he could see how different the reality here in my chambers!

The nightly gaieties of the Parisian summer drifted recklessly through my window, the open-air orchestras and gala dances, the theaters that seated happy audiences by the hundreds. I, by contrast, opened and closed my two chests of drawers and stared at the clock on my room's mantelpiece-waiting.

One day Madame Fouché came into my room and offered to tie a strip of black crêpe around my arm. Bothered by the interruption to my indolence, I assented.

"My deep condolences," she said.

"Appreciated. How so?" I asked, suddenly alarmed.

"Hasn't someone died?" she gasped importantly, as though her pity was in short supply and I had wasted it. "Why have you entered such a melancholy state, if not?"

I hesitated, frowning at the black cloth now wrapped on my coat.

"Yes, madame, some have died. But that is not the nearest cause of my agitation. It is the address, this blasted address! Pardon my language, Madame Fouché. I must find Monsieur Auguste Duponte's residence soon, or leave Paris empty-handed and my actions shall be declared even more fantastic by my friends. That is why I wish to visit the postal office."

The next day, Madame Fouché brought me breakfast herself in lieu of the regular waiter. She badly hid a smile and handed me a piece of paper with some writing on it.

"What is this, madame?"

"Why, it is the address of Auguste Duponte, of course."

"I thank you infinitely, madame! How marvelous!" I was at once up and out the door. I was too excited to even pause to satisfy my curiosity as to how she had come upon it.

The place, not fifteen minutes away, was a once-bright yellow structure connected to a scarlet-and-blue house around a courtyard, a good example of the fashion of Paris's gingerbread architecture and colors. The neighborhood was more removed from cafés and shops than the first residence I had visited-a tranquillity conducive to the demands of ratiocination, I supposed. The concierge, a thick man with a hideous double mustache, instructed me to go up to Duponte's rooms. I paused at the bottom of the stairs and then returned to the concierge's room.

"Beg your pardon, monsieur. Would it not be preferable to Monsieur Duponte's tastes if I were announced first?"

The concierge took offense-whether because the suggestion questioned his competence or because the notion of announcing a visitor demeaned his role to that of a house servant, I did not know. The concierge's wife shrugged and said, with a touch of sympathy that she directed with an upturned glance to God, or the floor above, "How many visitors does he have?"

The odd exchange no doubt contributed to my nervous rambling when I first met the man himself in the doorway to his lodging. The employment of his skills was even more exclusive and rare than I had imagined. Parisians, to judge from the comment of the concierge's wife, did not think it worthwhile even to attempt to secure his help!

When Duponte opened the door to his chambers, I poured out an introduction. "I wrote you some letters-three-sent from the United States, as well as a telegraph directed to your previous address. The letters spoke of the American writer Edgar A. Poe. It is crucial that the matter of his death is investigated. This is why I have come, monsieur."

"I see," said Duponte, screwing his face into a grimace and pointing behind me, "that this hall lamp is out. It has been replaced many times, yet the flame is out."

"What? The lamp?"

That is how it went with our conversation. Once inside, I repeated the chronicle narrated in my letters, urged that we strike at once, and expressed my hope that he would accompany me back to America at his earliest convenience.

The rooms were very ordinary and oddly devoid of all but a few unimportant books; it felt uncommonly cold in there, even though it was summer. Duponte leaned back in his armchair. Suddenly, as though only now realizing I was addressing him rather than the blank wall behind, he said, "Why have you told this to me, monsieur?"

"Monsieur Duponte," I said, thunderstruck, "you are a celebrated genius of ratiocination. You are the only person known to me, perhaps the only person in the known world, capable of resolving this mystery!"

"You are very far mistaken," he said. "You are mad," he suggested.

"I? You are Auguste Duponte?" I responded accusingly.

"You are thinking of many years ago. The police asked me to review their papers from time to time. I'm afraid the journals of Paris were excited with their own notions and, in some cases, assigned me certain attributes to meet the appetites of the public imagination. Such tales were told…" (Wasn't there a flicker of something like pride in his eyes when he said this?) Without a blink or a breath, he overthrew the topic altogether. "What you should know, might I say, are the many worthwhile outings in Paris in the summer. You will want to see a concert at the Luxembourg Gardens. I might tell you where to see the finest flowers. And have you been to the palace at Versailles? You will be pleased by it-"

"The palace at Versailles? Versailles, you say? Please, Duponte! This is monstrously important! I am no idle caller. Nearly half the world has passed by my eyes to find you!"

He nodded sympathetically and said, "You certainly should sleep, then."

The next morning I awoke after a deep, uncomfortable July sleep. I had returned to the Corneille the night before in a state of dull shock at my reception by Duponte. But in the morning my disappointment faded, eased by the thought that perhaps it was my own weariness that had clouded my first talk with Duponte. It had been unwise and unseemly to burst in on him like that, tired and anxious, disheveled in my appearance, without even a letter of introduction.

This time I took a leisurely breakfast, which in Paris looks just like dinner minus soup-even beginning with oysters (though Cuvier himself could not put these small, blue, watery objects in any class of true oyster for an appetite born of the Chesapeake Bay). Arriving at Duponte's lodgings, I lingered near the concierge's chambers, and was glad to find that the concierge was out on business. His more talkative wife and a plump daughter sat mending a rug.

The older woman offered me a chair. She blushed easily at my smile, and so I tried to smile liberally in the pauses between my words to induce her cooperation. "Yesterday, madame, you mentioned that Duponte does not receive very many callers. Are there not those who visit him professionally?"

"Not in all the years since he has lived here."

"Had you not heard of Auguste Duponte before?"

"Why certainly!" she answered, as if I had questioned her very sanity. "But I did not think it could have been the same one. They say that man was of importance to the police; our boarder is a harmless fellow, but quite in a stupor much of the time, a dead-alive sort of a man. I presumed it was a brother or some distant relation of his family. No, I suppose he hasn't many acquaintances to visit him."

"And no lady-friends," mumbled the bored daughter, and that was all you will hear the girl say for the whole two months in Paris.

"I see," I said, thanking both ladies before climbing to Duponte's door. They both blushed again as I bowed.

I had been thinking earlier that morning of Poe's tales about C. Auguste Dupin. In the first one, Dupin abruptly and unexpectedly announces that he will investigate the horrible murders that occurred in a house on the Rue Morgue. An inquiry will afford us amusement, he says to his surprised friend. Let us enter into some examinations for ourselves. He searched for amusement. Of all the details I had spilled out in almost a single breath the day before, I had not once presented an enticing reason for Duponte to direct his genius to the case of Poe's death! Perhaps, in the last few years, when Duponte seemed to have become inactive, no affair had come about worthy of his interest, and as a result he had settled into what seemed to most to be an aimless torpor.

Duponte did not turn me away when I knocked at his door. He invited me for a stroll. I walked alongside him through the crowded and warm Latin Quarter. I say "alongside" even though his steps were abnormally deliberate and slow, one foot hardly passing the other in each of his strides; this meant that in trying to remain at the same pace, I sometimes felt like I was dancing a half circle. As with the day before, he spoke of commonplace matters. This time I engaged him in idle topics before making my latest attempt at persuasion.

"Do you not find a desire to be occupied in more challenging dealings, though, Monsieur Duponte? While I have compiled all the particulars of Mr. Poe's death available, others have employed the confused public knowledge to spit upon his grave. I should think an inquiry into a difficult, timely matter such as this would offer you great amusement…" I repeated this once more, as a heavy truck had rumbled by the first time. In response to this there was not a stir in the man. He clearly did not think himself in need of greater amusements, and I again was obliged to retreat.

On a subsequent visit to Duponte's apartment, I found him smoking a cigar in his bed. It seemed he used his bed for smoking and for writing-he detested writing anything, he said, for with obnoxious consistency it stopped him from thinking. For this visit I had been rereading and reflecting on the "liberal proposition" offered to C. Auguste Dupin by the police in Poe's sequel tale, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," to penetrate the case of a young shopgirl found dead in the woods. Though agreeable compensation had certainly been implied in my own letters to Duponte, I now assured him expressly, in homage to Poe's own words from the tale, that I would provide him "a liberal fee for your undivided attention to Poe's death, beginning immediately." I removed a check. I suggested an amount of considerable value, and then a few numbers even higher.

With no resulting success. It seemed he was not moved at all by money, despite his less than luxurious circumstances. To this, as to other attempts to direct his attention to my own agenda, he would take my elbow as he pointed out an architectural oddity; or praise the Parisian summers extensively for their loveliness; or remove any need for a reply by letting his eyes linger shut in a ruined blink. Sometimes, Duponte seemed almost an imbecile in his placid stare as we passed shops and the blooming flowers and trees of the garden-"the horse-chestnuts!" he would say suddenly-or maybe it was a stare of sadness.

One evening after leaving another interview with Duponte, I passed a group of police officers sitting at tables outside a crowded café eating ices. They were a formidable blur of single-breasted blue coats, mustaches, and small, pointed beards.

"Monsieur! Monsieur Clark, bonjour!"

It was the squat young policeman who had commandeered my carriage upon my arrival in Paris. I attributed his enthusiasm at seeing me to the congenial spirits of their party.

Each of the officers rose to greet me.

"This is a gentleman and a scholar who has come from America to see Auguste Duponte!" After a moment of interesting silence, the policemen all burst into laughter.

I was confused by this reaction to Duponte's name. I sat down as the first one continued: "There are many stories to hear of Duponte. He was a great genius. Duponte, they say, would know a thief was going to take your jewels before the thief did."

"He was a great genius, you say?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Long ago."

"My father was in the police when the prefects would engage Monsieur Duponte," said another policeman, who displayed a scowl that may have been permanent. "He said Duponte was a clever young man who merely created difficulties so he could seem to surmount them."

"In what manner?" I asked with alarm.

He scratched his neck viciously with his overgrown fingernails; the side of his neck looked red and inflamed from this habit. "It is what he heard," the Scratcher muttered.

"It is said that Duponte," continued the more amiable officer, "could judge the morals of all men with precision just by their looks. He once offered to walk through the streets on the day of a public fête and point out to the police all the dangerous people who should be removed from society."

"Did he?" asked another.

"No-the police would have had no business to attend to if he had."

"But what happened to him?" I asked. "What of the investigations he performs today?"

One of the officers who looked thoughtful and quieter than the others spoke up. "They say Monsieur Duponte failed-that the woman he loved was hanged for murder, and his powers of analysis could not rescue her. That he could do no more investigations-"

"Investigations!" balked the Scratcher. "Of course there can be no more. Unless he manages to carry them out as a ghost. He was killed by a prisoner who had vowed that he would avenge himself on Duponte for arresting him."

I opened my mouth to correct him, but thought better of it-there was a deep venom in that man's voice that seemed better not to rouse.

"No, no," one of the others disagreed. "Duponte is not dead. Some say he lives in Vienna now. He grew tired of the ingratitude. What stories I could tell you! There is no living soul like that in Paris in this age, in all events."

"Prefect Delacourt would not hear of it," added the squat officer, and the others cackled raucously.

Here was one of the officers' anecdotes.

Years earlier, Duponte one evening had found himself in a cabinet, or private chamber, of a tavern in Paris, sitting across from a convict who had only three days earlier sliced the throat of a prison guard from one side to the other. Every agent of the Paris police had been on watch for him since he'd escaped, including several who sat with me at the café. Duponte, employing his varied skills, had deduced where in the city the rogue would most likely think it safest to conceal himself. So there they sat together in the cabinet.

"I will be safe from capture from the police," the villain confided. "I can outrun any one of them-and could beat any one of them in a pistol fight if I had to. I'm safe, as long as I do not meet with that wretch Duponte. He is the true criminal of Paris."

"I should think you would know him when you see him," Duponte commented.

The scoundrel laughed at Duponte. "Know him…?God bless!" He now emptied his wine bottle at a breath. "You have never dealt with this knave Duponte, have you? He's not to be seen twice in the same dress. In the morning, he appears to be just another person, like yourself. Then, an hour later, so changed that his own mother would never recognize him and, by evening, no man or demon would ever remember having seen him before! He knows where you are, and can auspicate where you go next!"

When this bad fellow had drunk more than he'd intended, Duponte went downstairs for another bottle of wine and then returned to the cabinet with perfect calmness. Duponte reported to the convict that the barmaid had said she'd seen Auguste Duponte there, looking in on the private rooms. The villain was thrown into a wild fury at the news, and Duponte suggested that the fellow hide in the closet so he might come out and kill the investigator when he entered. When the villain stepped into the closet, Duponte locked it and fetched the police.

That had once been Duponte. It was that Duponte I had to bring to America. Nor had my limited communion with him proved totally void of his talents. One afternoon, during one of Duponte's walks, the heat was strong and I convinced him to share a coach with me. After some time driving through Paris in silence, he pointed out the window of our coach to a cemetery. "That," he said, "upon the other side of the wall, is the small burial place of your people, Monsieur Clark."

I saw a sign in French for the Jewish cemetery. "Yes, it is quite small…" I paused, leaving my statement in the air. Thinking of what had just been said to me, I turned in astonishment. "Monsieur Duponte!"

"Yes?"

"What did you say a moment ago? Of that burial place?"

"That in it are the people of your faith, or perhaps partially of your faith."

"But, monsieur, whatever leads you to believe I am Jewish? I have never said so to you."

"You are not?" Duponte asked in surprise.

"Well," I answered breathlessly, "my mother was Jewish. My father, Protestant; he has died too. But however did you think of that?"

Duponte, seeing I would press the question, explained. "When we neared a particular lodging house in Montmartre some days ago, you realized from the newspaper accounts that it was the place where a young girl was brutally murdered." Articles about the gruesome case, indeed, had daily pervaded the Paris newspapers I had been reading to improve my French. Duponte continued: "Feeling it was something of a sacred place, a place of recent death, you reached for your hat. However, rather than taking off your hat-as the Christian does automatically upon entering a church-you secured it tighter on your head-like the Jew in his synagogue. Then you fumbled with it for another moment, showing your uncertain instincts in the matter to remove or tighten it. This made me consider that you had worshipped, at times, in church and in synagogue."

He was correct. My mother had not yielded her Jewish heritage upon entering wedlock, despite the collective urgings of my father's family, and once the Lloyd Street Synagogue was completed in Baltimore she had brought me with her.

Duponte returned to his usual silence. I kept my excitement to myself. I had begun to break down Duponte's walls.

I tried delicately to solicit Duponte for more facts about his past, but his face would stiffen each time. We developed a friendly routine. Each morning I would knock at his door. If he was stretched on his bed with the newspaper, he would invite me inside for coffee. Usually, Duponte would announce his departure for a walk and I would ask permission to accompany him, to which he would assent by ignoring my question.

He had an impenetrability, a moral invisibility that made me want to see how he would be in all the possible variations of life: to see him in love, in a duel, to see what meal he would select at a certain establishment. I burned to know his thoughts and wished him to desire to know more of me.

Sometimes I would bring him an item related to my original purpose that I hoped might strike his interest. For example, I found a guidebook of Baltimore in one of the Paris bookstalls and showed it to him.

"You see, inside there is a folded map-and this part of town is where Edgar Poe lived in Baltimore when he won his first newspaper prize for a tale called ‘Ms. Found in a Bottle.' Here is where he was discovered in an insensible state in Baltimore. Look here, monsieur; that is his burial place!"

"Monsieur Clark," he said, "I am afraid such things are of as little interest to me as you can imagine."

You see how it was. I tried every approach to uplift him from his inactive trance. For example, one hot day when Duponte and I were walking across a bridge over the Seine, we decided to pay twelve sous each to one of the floating establishments on the river to take a bath under a canvas roofing. We plunged into the cooling water opposite each other. Duponte closed his eyes and leaned back, and I followed his example. Our bodies were rocked up and down by the happy splashing of children and young men.

Quentin: "Monsieur, surely you know the importance of Poe's tales of C. Auguste Dupin. You have heard of them. They were published in the French journals."

Duponte (inattentively, a question or statement?): "They were."

Q: "Your own achievements in analysis provide the character of the main figure with his abilities. That must mean something to you! The exploits involve the most intricate, seemingly impossible, and miraculous triumphs of reason."

D: "I have not read them, I believe."

Q: "Not read the literature of your own life? That which will make you immortal? How could this be?"

D: "It is of as little interest to me as I could imagine, monsieur."

Should that last comment have an exclamation mark? Perhaps a grammarian could answer; it was quite sharply enunciated but without any greater volume than a waiter at a restaurant repeating an order back to his customer.

It was just a few days later when there came an important turn in my companionship with Duponte. I had walked with Duponte through the Jardin des Plantes, where not only the finest plants and trees were enjoyed in the summer but one of Paris's best scientific zoological collections. After a tunnel of clouds had darkened above the trees, we had begun walking for the exit when a man rushed up behind us. He spoke with great consternation.

"Kind monsieurs," he said, panting out the words, "have you seen somebody with my cake?"

"Cake?" I repeated. "What do you mean, monsieur?"

He explained that he had walked to the street-vendors and purchased a seedcake, a rare indulgence for him, to enjoy on what had been a beautiful sunny day before the rain began. This fellow had placed his treat lovingly on the bench beside his person until such a time as he would feel his earlier dinner properly digested. He had turned his back only for a brief moment to secure his umbrella from the ground upon noticing the storm gathering overhead. However, when he turned back finally ready to savor his sweet luxury, it had vanished completely, and there was not a man around!

"Perhaps a bird picked it up, monsieur," I suggested. I tugged at Duponte's arm. "Come along. It is beginning to rain, Monsieur Duponte, and we haven't any umbrellas."

We parted from our cakeless friend, but after a few steps Duponte turned around. He called back this despondent man.

"Monsieur," said Duponte, "stand where I am now and likely your cake shall return in two to seven minutes. Approximately speaking." Duponte's voice exhibited neither joy nor particular interest in the matter.

"Indeed?" the man cried.

"Yes. I should think so," said Duponte, and he began walking away again.

"But-how?" the man now thought to ask.

I, too, was held dumbstruck by Duponte's proposition, and Duponte saw this.

"Imbeciles!" said Duponte to himself.

"What?" the man asked with offense.

"Pardon, Monsieur Duponte!" I said, also protesting the insult.

Duponte ignored this. "I shall demonstrate the conclusion," he said. We two waited at the very edge of anticipation. But Duponte simply stood there. After a space of three and a half minutes, roughly, a regular stampede of hurried noises was heard nearby and there-I must reveal-came a piece of cake from around the corner, floating in the air, right near the nose of its rightful owner!

"The cake!" I pointed.

The confection was attached to a short string of some sort, and followed behind two small boys running headlong through the gardens. The man chased down the boy and untied his cake from its thief. He then ran back to us.

"Why, remarkable monsieur, you were entirely right! But how have you recovered my cake?" For a moment the man looked at Duponte suspiciously, as though he had been involved in some scheme. Duponte, seeing he would have no peace without explaining, offered this simple description of what had transpired.

Among the most popular attractions in the natural collections of the Jardin des Plantes was the exhibition of bears. Before being accosted by the cake-widower, Duponte had casually noticed that it was near the time in which the bears usually stirred from their sleep. This was also known by the many local devotees to these animals, and it was a daily occupation to try to make the waking bears perform various antics and climb the pole provided for them, an effort that often involved dangling some item of food into their pit by twine or string. Indeed, the vendors at the gates to the gardens sold as much of their wares for these purposes as for human nourishment. But since among the lovers of the bears who would come from miles away for this sport were many young boys, and since most of these gamins had no spare sous in their pockets for such delicacies, Duponte reasoned that as the man had turned to secure his umbrella at the sign of rain, one of these boys had snatched the cake on his way to the bears. Because the bench was quite high, and the boy short, the man, on turning around again, saw no one nearby and thought the source of the theft fantastic.

"Very well. But how did you know the cake would return, and at this very spot?" the man asked.

"You may have noticed," continued Duponte, seeming to talk more to himself than to either of us, "that upon entering the grounds of the gardens, there was a larger group of officers of the garden in the vicinity of the zoological attractions than usual. Perhaps you remember reading of one of the bears, ‘Martin,' having recently devoured a soldier who leaned over too far and fell into their domain."

"Indeed! I remember," said the man.

"No doubt these guards were stationed to prevent young men and boys from any longer climbing the parapets to get close to the monsters."

"Yes! You are likely right, monsieur!" The man stood open-mouthed.

"It might have been further essayed, then, that if a boy had in fact taken possession of your cake, the same lad would be turned away from his plan by these vigilant guardians within the first few minutes of the bears' stirring, and the bandit would return by the most direct path-a path which crosses the grounds where we now stand-to the attraction second in popularity only to the wells of the bears for this sort of spectator: I mean the wire house of the monkeys, who, at the delivery of a bright piece of cloth or item of food, could be made to chase one another in, presumably, a manner almost as enchanting as the bears' climbing of the pole. None of the other popular holdings, the wolves or the parrots, will make such an exhibition over one's cake."

As delighted by this explanation as if it had been his own, the grateful man, with a magnanimous air, invited us to share in his cake, even though it had been in the grubby hands of the boy and had since been made flat by the rain. I politely declined, but Duponte, after a moment of thought, accepted and sat with him upon a bench. They ate with great relish as I held the man's umbrella over them.

That evening, I met the same man at a crowded café near my hotel. The bright lights of the interior presented a dazzling effect. He was playing a game of dominoes with a friend, whom he dismissed when he saw me come in.

"Monsieur, bravely done," I said joyfully. "Quite well done!"

I had met this man the day before in the same Jardin des Plantes. He was one of the chiffonniers of Paris, men whose occupation was to search through the rubbish heaps put out from the houses of Paris. They would use sticks and baskets with great expertise to collect anything of remote value. "Bones, scraps of paper, linen, cloth, bits of iron, broken glass, broken china, corks of wine bottles…" he explained. These men were not vagrants; rather, they were registered for this activity with the police.

I had inquired of the fellow how much he collected each day.

"Under King Philippe," he said of the former monarch, "thirty sous'worth a day! But now, under the Republic, only fifteen." He explained, with a sad tone of nostalgia for the monarchy, "People throw away less bones and paper now! When there is no luxury we who are poor can do nothing."

I would remember his words strongly in the months to come.

Because he could legally ply his trade only between five and ten in the morning, and was bent on earning money, I thought he would be agreeable to the scheme I had conceived. I had instructed him that when he saw me walking with my companion the following afternoon, he should exclaim in our hearing over the loss of some object of value and beg Duponte for assistance. In this way, Duponte might be jolted into some small undertaking.

Now, at the café where we had agreed to meet, as my part of the bargain I informed the waiter that I would pay for the meal of my accomplice's choice. And what a meal! He called for the tout ensemble of the place: poulet en fricassée, ragout, cauliflower, bonbons, melons, cream cheese! As was the practice in France, each new item of food came with a new plate, for the French abhorred the American practice of mixing tastes-for instance, vegetables and the sauces of meat-on one plate. I watched his feast happily, for his performance at the gardens had pleased me greatly.

"I did not think, at first, cake would work," I admitted to him. "I thought it a strange choice! Yet you managed quite well with that boy."

"No, no, monsieur!" he said. "I had nothing to do with that boy. The cake was truly stolen from me!"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

The chiffonnier said that he had planned to position his umbrella in some concealed spot and report the missing umbrella to Duponte to fulfill our agreement. It had been during the time he searched for a hiding place for the umbrella near the bench that his cake had vanished.

"How did he know what happened to it?" he asked. "Had you told your friend to watch me that whole time?"

"Of course not!" I shook my head. "I wanted to see if he would solve the mystery, and that would spoil the experiment, wouldn't it!"

The incident had clearly weighed on his mind. "He is an odd stick. Yet I suppose when a body is hungry, he shall do what he must."

I reflected on this axiom after parting from the man. I had been too excited about Duponte's promising behavior to consider why Duponte had performed his task of analysis. Perhaps Duponte, who had skipped dinner, had just been hungry for the cake, his share of the spoils, all along.

This was hardly the end of that line of attempts on my part to provoke Duponte into renewing his abilities. I had brought from America the pamphlet of The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. I marked the first page of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and left it for Duponte, hoping that his interests would be captured. I rejoiced when it seemed that all my tactics were having an impact. The first true indication that Duponte was changing in some extraordinary way came one evening when I followed him to Café Belge. Two or three times a week he would sit on a bench, ignoring the billiards games and the chatter, comfortably lost in the ugly bustle and brawls around him. I had followed him here before. Something seemed different as soon as I saw him this time. His glance had already become less vacant.

I lost sight of him after he turned into the small, narrow café. Mirrors lining the walls exaggerated the confusion of people inside. This was where the best billiards players in the city congregated to play. There was one roguish fellow who was said to be the best of all the players. He was wildly red all over-his hair, his brow, his irritated, picked skin. He almost always played his game alone, I suppose because he was too good for the others who came only for leisure and gaiety. He shouted encouragement to himself on a good shot, and cursed himself mercilessly when he fell short.

Café Belge was the only billiards café in the city to allow women to play-though, it will surprise many who have not visited Paris, it was not the only café to permit the smoking of cigarettes by ladies. True, the unsuspecting American might blanch just by walking past many of the illustrations displayed in the windows of print-shops, or after witnessing scenes of maternal activities, usually confined to the nursery, displayed for all the world to see in the middle of the Tuileries gardens.

As I searched for Duponte, a young lady threw her hand on top of mine.

"Monsieur, you wish to play a game with us?"

"Mademoiselle?"

She pointed to the three other nymphs at her table. "You wish to play billiards, I suppose. Come, here is a stick. You are an Englishman?"

She propelled me in front of the table. "Do not fret. Nobody plays for money in Paris, only for drinks!"

"You see"-I leaned in to speak as quietly as possible-"I am not married." I had learned that in France unmarried women were to be seen with single men at great risk to their reputation; the compensation was that married women could freely be seen doing all manner of things.

"Ah, that is all very well," the damsel reassured me in a loud, smoked whisper. "I am." She and her companions laughed, and their French grew too rapid for me to follow. I struggled to cross the room, colliding with the elbows of a few of the men surrounding the billiards tables.

After a few moments, I noticed another young woman in the room, standing apart from the others. Although she looked to be of the same modest class, she held herself up with elegance unknown to her peers in the café. And unknown, for that matter, to the "unrivaled beauties" that paraded themselves along Baltimore Street. She was shorter than me, and her deep-set eyes seemed almost to anticipate my path through the crowd. She carried a basket with blooming flowers and stood quietly. A man would raise his hand and she would walk close, where the man would toss a copper coin or two into the basket.

As I searched my own pockets for a coin to contribute to this lovely vision, I bumped into the next table, knocking a player as he shot at a ball.

"What in hell?" It was the roguish red-haired fellow. The best player in the arrondissement. Standing near him was a beautiful, but pale woman, with dark hair, who consoled him by stroking his arm.

The other nymphs I had encountered pointed and giggled at me from across the room. "Monsieur Englishman!" they kept repeating.

"You've ruined my game," he said. "I'll crack your skull into two! Get back to England."

"Actually, monsieur, I come from America. Accept my apologies."

"A ‘Yankee Doodle,' are you? Maybe you think you're back with the Indians then? What do you want here, stirring trouble?"

He shoved me hard several times. I nearly fell backward, barely regaining my balance. Somewhere during this ordeal-whether here or in the more dire later stages-my hat disappeared. With the next shove, I lost my balance, falling against a table, and watched myself sink to the floor in the café's mirrors.

In my next bit of memory, I was flat on my back. I thought it best to remain low, looking up to the ceiling where the old cigarette smoke of the place peacefully collected and continued forever in the mirrors like a fog rolling over the ocean.

A pair of arms broke through the cover of smoke and yanked me to my feet. The room seemed hotter, louder, smaller. Shouts and laughter floated in the background-though part of the raucousness was directed to one of the nymphs, who was now on top of a table and tripping the light fantastic with a dance. These shouts emboldened the Red Rogue. His sloppy mouth formed a sickly grin right against my face.

His breath was painfully sharp. "My best game ever," he said threateningly. Or at least whatever it was he was saying, it had a threatening ring, as I cannot be sure of the words-he was, naturally, speaking French and, for the moment, that language was all but lost to me. I hoped the elegant girl with the flower basket was not watching.

Then a voice came from behind me. "Monsieur, if you please!"

The rogue looked over my shoulder.

"I challenge you in a game of billiards, monsieur," said the same voice behind me. "And we shall wager whatever amount you choose."

Red Rogue seemed to forget me altogether, and pushed aside his girl, who wheeled around anxiously at the scene and pulled at his elbow.

"At my table?" said the rogue, pointing to the billiards table where we had collided.

"None other would be as suitable," replied Duponte, bowing precisely.

An amount of money was called out. This scene quickly attracted an audience, not only because an unknown player had dared to take on the champion, but because there was money-rather than the customary drinks-at stake, and significant money.

As though this might be a second Duponte, I looked around the café to make sure he was not somewhere else. Though overwhelmed with relief at my escape from harm, I instantly felt Duponte's mistake. In the first place, I knew from my observations of Duponte that he had no money should he lose. Secondly, there was the matter of this fellow's talent for the game of billiards. As if to remind me of this, one of the bystanders behind me whispered to his friend, "Red Rogue is one of the best players in Paris." Except he used the fellow's real name, which, from the mayhem of events, I no longer remember.

Red Rogue slapped his money on a chair. Duponte was busy selecting his stick.

"Monsieur?" the rogue demanded, banging three times on the chair.

"The money is my reward," explained Duponte. "Not yours."

"And what if I win?!" shouted his opponent, the red in his face turning purple.

Duponte motioned a hand at me. "If you are the winner of our game without forfeit," replied Duponte, "then you may resume your business with this gentleman unhindered."

Much to my despair, the rogue turned to me and seemed to savor the barbaric license that would be afforded by a victory. He even offered Duponte the honor of beginning the game. I tried desperately to think if Poe's stories had ever mentioned skill in billiards on the part of the analyst hero; on the contrary, Dupin professed a dislike for mathematical games like chess and pronounced the superiority of simple matches of whist in showing the real skills of ratiocination.

Duponte opened with a shot so terrible that several onlookers laughed.

Red Rogue became perfectly serious, even graceful, as he struck the ball with ease turn after turn. If I had ruined his best game ever, surely this was his second best. I held on to the hope that Duponte would suddenly grow skilled, or reveal that his ineptness was but an act of trickery. Not so; he became worse. And then there were only three or maybe four turns left on the part of Red Rogue before the game would be finished to his advantage. I was searching my pockets, with the thought of replacing my part in the wager with silver, but I hadn't brought more than a few francs with me.

This was most remarkable: through all of this, Duponte remained utterly composed. With each awful turn, his expression stayed perfectly untroubled and confident. This was increasingly upsetting to his opponent, though it did not in the least affect his excellent play. One reward of triumph is to watch the loser deflate. And Duponte was refusing to comply with this. I believe Red Rogue even slowed his victory in order to attempt to induce the proper degradation.

Finally, the villain turned to the table with renewed speed and a flash of anger at Duponte. "Here we finish," he said, then directed a boiling gaze of hatred at me.

"Yes? Very well then." Duponte, to my horror, shrugged.

In my state of fear, I did not at first even hear the commotion at the street door. In fact, it did not gain my attention until there were several people pointing in our direction. Then there burst in a man with a bushy orange beard who, other than the beard and a much larger frame, looked similar to Red Rogue. I saw Red Rogue's greedy, flushed face whiten pathetically and I knew something was wrong. My French had returned enough to make out the fact that Red Rogue had, according to this enraged newcomer, directed his romantic passion toward this man's lover, the girl standing nervously near the table. She now screamed at the larger man to forgive her, and Red Rogue fled into the streets.

Duponte had already collected the money from the chair and was departing by the time I regained my bearings.

If you are the winner without forfeit… The words circled my head. Forfeit. He had known-from the beginning-how this would turn out. I followed Duponte into the street.

"Monsieur, I might have been killed! You could have never won the game!"

"Certainly not!"

"How did you know that man would come?"

"I didn't. The girl on Red Rogue's arm had earlier been peering out the window every few moments but, if you observed, always keeping herself away from view of someone outside the window. Moreover, she did not merely hold Red's arm; she squeezed it, as though to protect him, and upon my challenge pleaded with him to leave-certainly not because she thought anyone could defeat him at this child's game. She knew-from having encountered him earlier in a state of anger, or having carelessly left one of Red Rogue's letters on her dresser, perhaps-that her other lover was looking for her. I merely observed her, and counted on the fact that he would soon enough come. When someone else knows something, it is usually unnecessary to discover it for yourself. There was nothing to worry about."

"But what if he had come only after you had lost the game?"

"I see you are of a very sensitive constitution."

"Would he not have committed some monstrous violence against me?"

"Agreed," Duponte admitted after a moment, "that would have been quite troublesome for you, monsieur. We should be grateful it was avoided."

One morning soon after, my knocking at Duponte's door met with no reply. I tried the handle and found it open. I entered, thinking he had not heard me, and called out.

"A walk today, monsieur?" I paused and glanced around.

Duponte was hunched over his bed as though in prayer, his hand gripping his forehead like a vise. Stepping closer, I could see he was reading in a troubling state of intensity.

"What have you done?" he demanded.

I stumbled back and said, "Only come to look for you, monsieur. I thought perhaps a walk by the Seine today would be pleasant. Or to the Tuileries to see the horse-chestnuts!"

His eyes locked straight on mine, the effect unsettling.

"I explained to you, Monsieur Clark, that I do not engage in these avocations you imagine. You have not seemed to comprehend this simplest of statements regarding this matter. You insist on confusing your literature and my reality. Now you shall do me a good turn by leaving me alone."

"But Monsieur Duponte…please…"

It was only then that I could see what he had been reading so attentively: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The pamphlet I had left for him. Then he pushed me by the arm into the hall and closed the door. My heart sank fast.

In the hall, I pressed my eye against the space between the door and the frame. Duponte was sitting up on the bed. His silhouette was surprisingly expressive as he continued to read. With each page he turned, it seemed his posture improved by just that much, and the shadow of his figure seemed to swell.

I waited a few moments in bewildered silence. Then I knocked lightly and tried to appeal to his reason.

I knocked harder until I was pounding; then I pulled on the handle until the concierge appeared and pried me from the door while threatening to call for the police. Monsieur Montor, back in Washington, had warned that under no circumstances should I allow the police to find me in some act of disturbance. "They are by no means like the police here in America," he said. "When they set themselves against someone…Well!"

I surrendered for the moment and allowed myself to be removed down the stairs.

Speaking through keyholes and windows, rapping the door, pushing notes into the apartment…these were activities in the long painful days after this. I trailed Duponte when he took walks through Paris, but he ignored me. Once, when I followed in Duponte's steps to the door of his lodging house, he stopped in the doorway and said, "Do not allow entrance to this impertinent young gentlemen again."

Though he was looking at me, he was speaking to his concierge. Duponte turned away and continued upstairs.

I learned when the concierge tended to be out, and that his wife was content to let me through with no questions for a few sous. There is no time to lose, I wrote to Duponte in one of my unread notes to his door that would invariably be slipped back into the hall.

During this time, another letter arrived from Peter back home. His tone had noticeably improved, and he urged that I should return immediately to Baltimore and that I would be welcomed back having finished with my wild oats. He even sent a letter of credit for a generous amount of money at the French bank so I could arrange my trip back without delay. I returned this directly to him, of course, and I wrote back that I would accomplish what I had come to do. I would, at length, successfully deliver Poe from those who would destroy him, and I would do all credit to the name of our legal practice by achieving this promised goal.

Peter wrote subsequently that he was now very seriously considering coming to Paris to find me and bring me back, even if he had to drag me home with his two hands.

I still collected articles on Poe's death from the reading rooms that carried American papers. Generally speaking, newspaper descriptions of Poe had worsened. Moralists used his example to compensate for the lenience shown in the past toward men of genius who had been praised after death despite "dissolute lives." A new low came when a merciless scribbler, one Rufus Griswold, in order to make a penny off this public sentiment, published a biography malevolently brimming with libel and hate toward the poet. Poe's reputation sank further until it was entirely coated in mud.

Occasionally amid this mad fumble to dissect Poe, a new and important detail arose illuminating his final weeks. It had been shown, for instance, that Poe had planned to go to Philadelphia shortly before the time he was discovered in Ryan's hotel in Baltimore. He was to receive one hundred dollars to edit a book of poems for a Mrs. St. Leon Loud. This information, however, was met with the usual mystification of the press, as it was not known whether Poe did go to Philadelphia or not.

Stranger still was the letter shown to the press by Maria Clemm, Poe's former mother-in-law, which she had received from him directly before he left Richmond, telling her of his plans regarding Philadelphia. It was Poe's last letter to his beloved protector. "I am still unable to send you even one dollar-but keep up heart-I hope that our troubles are nearly over," read Poe's tenderhearted letter to her. "Write immediately in reply amp; direct to Philadelphia." Then he went on: "For fear I should not get the letter, sign no name amp; address it to E. S. T. Grey Esqre. God bless amp; protect you my own darling Muddy." It was signed "Your own Eddy."

E. S. T. Grey Esqre? Why would Poe be using a false name in the weeks before his death? Why did he have such fear that Muddy's letter would not reach him in Philadelphia? E. S. T. Grey! The papers that reported this seemed almost to be grinning at the apparent madness of it.

My investigations seemed more urgent than ever, yet here I was in Paris, and Duponte would not even speak with me.

8

HAD THIS ALL been a tremendous mistake, a product of some delirious compulsion to be involved in something outside my usual scope and responsibility? If only I had been content with the warmth and reliability of Hattie and Peter! Hadn't there been a time in childhood when I needed no more than the swirling hearth of Glen Eliza and my trusted playmates? Why turn my heart and my plans over to a man like Duponte, encased alone in a moral prison so far from my own home?

I determined to combat my gloominess and occupy myself by visiting the places that, according to the advice of my Paris guidebook, "must be seen by the stranger."

First, I toured the palace at the Champs-Élysées, where Louis-Napoleon, president of the Republic, lived in rich splendor. At the great hall of the Champs-Élysées, a stout servant in laced livery accepted my hat and offered a wooden counter in its place.

In one of the first suites of rooms in which the public is permitted, there was the chance to see Louis-Napoleon himself-Prince Napoleon. This was not the first time I had glimpsed the president of the Republic and nephew of the once-great Emperor Napoleon, who was still the people's favorite symbol of France. A few weeks earlier, Louis-Napoleon was riding through the streets down Avenue de Marigny, reviewing his scarlet-and-blue-clad soldiers. Duponte had watched with interest, and (as he had still tolerated my companionship then) I had accompanied him.

Crowds on the street cheered, and those dressed most expensively yelled out with passion, "Vive Napoleon!" At these moments, when the president was but an indistinct figure on his horse surrounded by guards, it was easy to see a resemblance, though faint, to the other sovereign Napoleon parading through the cheers of forty years earlier. Some said it was Louis-Napoleon's name alone that had recently elected the president-prince. It was reported that illiterate laborers in the poorer countryside of France thought they were voting for the original Napoleon Bonaparte (by now dead some three decades)!

But there were also twenty or so men, with faces, hands, and throats stained in black soot, repeating, in frightful chants, "Vive la République!" One of my neighbors in the crowd said they were sent by the "Red party" to protest. How shouting "Long live the Republic" was considered a protest or insult in an official Republic was beyond my understanding of the current political state. I suppose it was their tone that made the words threatening, and that made the term "Republic" fearful to the followers of this president, as if they were saying instead, "This is no Republic, for with this man it is a sham, but one day we shall overthrow it and have a true Republic without him!"

Here at his palace he seemed a more contemplative man, quite pale, mild, and thoroughly a gentleman. Napoleon was flushed with satisfaction at the crowd of mostly uniformed people around him, many of whose breasts sparkled with impressively gilded decorations. Yet, I observed, too, a painful sense of awkwardness elicited by the reverence with which the president-prince was treated-one moment a monarch, the next an elected president.

Just then, Prefect of Police Delacourt came in from the next chamber and conferred quietly with President Napoleon. I was surprised to notice the prefect glaring quite impolitely in the direction in which I stood.

That unwanted attention expedited my departure from the Champs-Élysées. There was still the palace of Versailles to see, and my guidebook advised leaving first thing in the morning when traveling there, but I decided that it was not too late in the day to enjoy a full visit to the suburbs of the city. Besides, Duponte had advised me to visit Versailles-perhaps if he knew I had he would be more inclined to speak to me.

Once the railroad tracks exit Paris, the metropolis abruptly disappears, giving itself over to continuous vast open country. Women of all ages, wearing carnation-colored bonnets and laboring in the fields, briefly met my gaze as our train rattled by them.

We stopped at the Versailles railway station. The crowd nearly picked me up and carried me into a stream of hats and trimmed bonnets that ended under the iron gates of the great palace of Versailles, where the running water of the fountains could be heard at play.

Thinking back, I suppose it must have begun while I was touring the palace's suites. I felt the sting of general discomfort, as when wearing a coat a bit too thin for the first winter day. I attributed my uneasiness to the crowds. The mob that had driven away the Duchess d'Angoulême from these walls was surely not as boisterous as this one. As my guide pointed out which battles were depicted in the various paintings, I was distracted by feeling so many sets of eyes on me.

"In this gallery," said my guide, "Louis the Fourteenth displayed all the grandeur of royalty. The court was so splendid that even in this enormous chamber the king would be pressed round by the courtiers of the day." We were in the grand gallery of Louis XIV, where seventeen arched windows overlooking the gardens faced seventeen mirrors across from them. I wondered whether the notion of a monarch was more attractive now that the late revolution had vanquished it.

I think my guide, whom I had hired at a franc an hour, had become tired of my distractedness over the course of the afternoon. I fear he thought I was ignorant of the finer qualities of history and art. The truth was, my distinct sense of being observed had been growing steadily-and in that hall of mirrors prodigal gazes were everywhere.

I began to take note of those people who recurred in the different suites. I had convinced my guide to modify our path through the palace-an alien idea to him, clearly. Meanwhile, he did not help my mental state when he turned to the topic of foreigners in Paris.

"They would know much about how you're spending your time here-you being a young energetic man," he mused, perhaps looking for a way to vex me.

"Who would know about me, monsieur?"

"The police and the government, of course. There is nothing that happens in Paris that is not known to someone."

"But, monsieur, I fear there is nothing so interesting enough about me."

"They would hear all from the masters of your hotel, from the commissionnaires who watch you leave and return, from fiacre drivers, sellers of vegetables, wine-shop masters. Yes, monsieur, I suppose there is nothing you can do that they cannot discover."

In my current state of nervousness, this commentary did not endear me. I paid him what I owed and dismissed him from his service. Without my guide I could now move faster, weaving through the slow gatherings of mobs in each chamber. I noticed behind me some commotion, men huffing and women exclaiming over some disturbance. It seemed some of the tourists were complaining about someone who was rudely pushing through the crowd. I turned into the next chamber, not waiting to see who had been the culprit of the strife. Meanwhile, I dodged every figure and expensive furnishing in my path until I reached the palace's immense gardens.

"Here he is! He's the one plowing through the place!"

As I heard this voice, a hand caught my arm. It was a guard.

"I?" I protested. "Why, I was not pushing anyone!"

After it was reported to the guard that the man rudely pushing through was spotted behind us, I was released into the gardens and quickly created distance between the guard and myself in the event he changed his mind. I would soon wish I had not left the safety of being at his side.

I thought back to Madame Fouché warning me about the dangerous areas of Paris. "There are men and women who will rob you and then throw you over the bridge into the Seine," she had said. It was from this population that the revolutionaries in March 1848 drew most of their "soldiers" to force out King Louis-Philippe and establish the Republic in the name of the people. A hackney cab driver told me that during that uprising he saw one of these villains, surrounded by police and about to be shot, yell, "Je suis bien vengé!" and remove fifteen or sixteen human tongues from his pockets. He tossed them into the air before dying, and they landed on the shoulders and hats of the police, and even in one policeman's mouth, which had dropped open in disbelief at the disgusting sight.

I was in the plush sanctuary of Versailles's immaculate gardens, not in one of these neighborhoods of tongue-cutters. Still, I had the sensation that each step I made was being marked. The sharp hedges and trees of the gardens revealed fragments of faces. Passing rows of statues, vases, and fountains, I came to a standstill at the God of Day, a hideous deity rising up from a splashing fountain of dolphins and sea-monsters. How much more secure I might have been inside the suites of the palace, surrounded by hordes of visitors and my busybody guide! It was then that a man appeared in front and snatched my arm.

Here is what I remember after that. I was inside a rickety carriage riding over loose stones. Next to me was the face I last saw before losing consciousness in the gardens of Versailles-a thick, rigid face carved below an emotionless frown. A face I had also noticed in several of the suites of the palace at Versailles. This had been my shadow! I licked my teeth and gums and found it was still present; my tongue, I mean.

Did I think before I reached for the door of the carriage? I cannot recall. I threw myself onto it and tumbled to the road. When I pushed myself to my feet, another coach was barreling at me. It swerved and narrowly squeezed between me and the vehicle that had been carrying me. "Gare!" growled its driver, who seemed to me only a large set of yellow teeth, a slouched hat, and a floppy collar. A lean dog howled from that carriage's window.

I ran for the fields that sloped down from the road. Beyond that was open country.

Then my captor was out of the coach and starting toward me, terribly fast for so bulky a man. I felt a quick, decisive blow to my head.

My hands were stiff behind my back. I was looking around-or should I say up. Upon waking, I found myself in a wide trench indented some twenty feet into the earth. Above that were towering walls; they were nothing like the petite rows of buildings and homes on every Paris street. It was as though I had been brought to another world, and a monstrous silence stretched around us as in the widest desert.

"Where am I? I demand to know!" I shouted, though I could see no one to shout to.

I heard a voice mutter something in French. I craned my head but could not move enough to see behind me. Only a shadow fell over me, and I believed it was that of my captor.

"Where are we, you blackguard?" I demanded. He made no indication of hearing. He just stood, waiting. Only when the villain in question came from the other side did I realize that this shadow belonged to someone else.

Finally, the shadow moved and he came around to face me. But it was no man.

Here she was, wearing a fresh white bonnet and a plain dress, she who could have been in one of the Parisian gardens. She stopped in front of my chair and leaned over me with what seemed to be caring protectiveness, looking at me with deep-set eyes-in fact, eyes so deep they seemed to reach to the back of her head. She seemed no older than a girl.

"Stop squeaking."

"Who are you?" I whispered, hoarse from hollering.

"Bonjour," said the girl, who then turned her back and walked away.

I returned the greeting, though thinking any attempt at cordialness odd under the circumstances.

"You fool," admonished my first captor, seeming to wish she not hear, as though he would be blamed for my error. "That is her name. Bonjour!"

"Bonjour?" I repeated. Then I realized I had seen her before, another time I was in jeopardy. "At Café Belge! I saw you there, holding a basket! Why were you there?"

"Here we are!" a new voice boomed in English, tinged with a French accent but otherwise perfectly fluent. "Is it very necessary to have our welcomed guest from the great United States so restrained?"

The answer was demure enough to identify the latest arrival as the leader. My captor moved closer to him and spoke confidentially, as though I had suddenly lost the power to hear. "He swooned at Versailles, and then he ran from the coach, leaping out the door like a madman. He nearly killed himself-"

"No matter. Here we are all safe. Bonjour, please?" The girl agilely untied the ropes and released my wrists.

I had not up to this point been able to see this new arrival, only glimpses of a long white cloak and light pantaloons. With my hands free, I stood and faced him.

"My apologies for going to such lengths, Monsieur Clark," he said, waving his bejeweled hand at our surroundings as though the whole thing was an accident. "But I am afraid these unfortunate fortresses are among the few places within the environs of Paris where I can still travel with some tranquillity. Most importantly-"

I interrupted. "Now see here! Your rogue has ill-treated me and now-But in the first place, I would like to know where exactly you have had me taken and why…!" I choked on my words, staring at him through a spark of sudden recognition.

"Most importantly, as I say," he continued warmly, a grin pressing out the olive skin of his face, "we finally meet in person."

He took my hand, which fell limp when the truth struck me.

"Dupin!" I cried out in disbelief.

9

YOU WILL RECALL that there were five or six other men that I seriously examined as potential inspirations for the Dupin character before eliminating them in favor of Duponte.

A Baron Claude Dupin was one of these-a French attorney who, it was said, had never lost a single case, and who boasted distant royal lineage, wherein derived the dubious title of "Baron." He had been among the most prominent jurists of Paris for many years, thought of as a hero for successfully advocating in favor of many accused but sympathetic wrongdoers. He was even a candidate for advocate-general at one time, and almost sent to the chamber of representatives by his district during one of the upheavals in French government. He was alleged by some to employ unsavory tactics and, soon, relinquished his work altogether in favor of biding his time with other enterprises in London. While there, he was sworn in as a special constable during a period of fear of an uprising, and acted bravely enough in that capacity to continue with that title in an honorary capacity.

All of this information had been collected piecemeal during my careful searches of French periodicals. There was a time before I went to Paris when I was quite certain that Claude Dupin was the basis for C. Auguste Dupin, and I had sent several letters to Baron Dupin inquiring into further details of his history and describing the pressing situation at hand in Baltimore. Soon enough, however, I had stumbled upon the articles concerning Auguste Duponte and altered my theory. When Claude Dupin had replied to me, I had mailed him an apologetic letter explaining my mistake.

One of the French periodicals I had seen included an illustrated portrait of Baron Dupin, which I had studied closely. Thus, I knew the man who was pressing my hand as though we were old friends. That's when I yelled in alarm and astonishment: "Dupin!…You're Claude Dupin!"

"Please," said he magnanimously, "call me Baron!"

I yanked my hand away. I looked for my best chance at immediate escape. The carriage that had brought me there was now waiting in a temporary passage in the masonry, but I had no thought of being able to commandeer it, as my first captor had returned to the vehicle and was waiting there.

The trench around Paris was part of the impenetrable fortification built to provide against future assaults on the city. A continuous enclosure surrounded the outskirts of Paris, with embankments for artillery, surrounded by ditches and trenches.

In these daunting surroundings, Dupin now assured me of my complete safety and began explaining that his colleague Hartwick-that was the name of my captor, who'd nabbed me at Versailles and put me in his carriage-had merely wished to ensure my safe presence for this interview.

"Hartwick can outswear Satan, and he has almost bitten a man's arm clean off once, but taken together he's not badly made up. Do forgive him."

"Forgive? Forgive this assault? I'm afraid, Dupin, I shall not do that!" I cried.

"You see, it is already a great relief to know you," said Claude Dupin. "After so much time living in London, I'm afraid it's been a while since a soul has pronounced my name correctly, like a Frenchman!"

"Listen, monsieur," I reprimanded, though I liked the rare compliment to my French. "Do not butter me up. If you wished to speak with me, why not choose some civilized place in the city?"

"It would have been my pleasure to share a demi-tasse of coffee, Monsieur Clark, I assure you. But shall I call you Quentin?" He had a dashing way of talking that conveyed a high degree of ardor.

"No!"

"Be easy, be easy. Let me explain myself more, good Quentin. You see, there are two types of friends in this world: friends and enemies. In Paris, I possess both. I am afraid one of those groups would like to see me a head shorter. I may have been involved with the wrong sort some years ago, and promised certain amounts of money that, at the end of a thorough and unforgiving mathematical evaluation, I failed to possess. I was as poor as Job's turkey. Fortunately, though I was in a bad box, I have enough protection in London to prevent too much worry when I am there. You see where I am reduced to meeting when I wish to visit Paris," he added, waving his hand around at the fortifications. "You have luck enough to have some fortune of your own, I believe, Brother Quentin. Business? Or born with a silver spoon? No matter, I guess."

It was surprising, and a bit troubling, to see Dupin remove my letters from his coat. Should I describe the physical appearance of the Baron here, you would see how difficult it was to deny him conversation despite the inexcusable treatment for which he had been responsible. He was expensively dressed, in a gaudy, almost dandyish white suit and gloves of the flash order, with a flower out of his button-hole, and very well groomed, wearing an orderly mustache. There were brilliant studs in his shirt-bosom and some glittering jewels on his watch-guard and on two or three rings on his fingers, but to his credit he seemed to take no pains to show them. His boots were polished so voluptuously they seemed to absorb all the warmth of the sun. He was dramatic and inviting; he was, in short, magazinish.

Most of all, his mannerisms exuded an excess of civility and philanthropy-I mean by philanthropy the sort that would rescue prostitutes off the street by bringing one or two home with him. Although he had abducted me to a deserted fortress, I found myself worrying that I not appear rude in his presence. I calmly asked how he had found me in Paris.

"Among those I still count as friends in Paris are several members of the police who survey visitors from abroad quite closely. Your final letter mentioned you would be searching for Auguste Duponte-and I only supposed you might look for him here. Bonjour confirmed you were indeed in the area." He smiled at the beautiful nymph, now smoking a cigarette; she had previously followed me to Café Belge the evening of Duponte's risky billiards game.

"How is it she is called Bonjour?" I asked quietly, as though to avoid her hearing. I confess that even in the midst of all this, the question distracted me. I was presently ignored, however.

I wonder if it was just the name that fascinated me. No, I do not think so. She was quite beautiful in the expressiveness of her small mouth and large eyes. She showed no particular interest either in me or in our proceedings, but this did not lessen my own fascination.

"I am quite confident we can now complete our arrangement, Brother Quentin," the Baron said, knocking me from my trance. He unfolded my letters and showed them to me.

"Arrangement?"

He rebuked me with a frown of disappointment. "Monsieur. The arrangement by which we shall together solve Edgar Poe's death!"

The forcefulness of his announcement almost made me forget why this was not possible. "There is a mistake here," I said. "I am afraid you are not, in fact, the model for Poe's tales of Dupin as I had once speculated. I have found the true one-Auguste Duponte. You did read that in my last letter?"

"Was that what it meant to say? I only thought it was a jest for you to speak of Duponte. Monsieur Duponte has begun his analysis of the beloved Poe's shocking and wrongful demise then, I suppose? He is determined to sift it to the utmost?"

"Well…we have entered rather deeply into secret examinations. More I cannot say." I spun around with renewed restlessness, but there was still nowhere to go. I admit that, perversely, I did not entirely want to escape from the predicament. It was thrilling to hear someone speak impassionedly of Poe's death. It had been a long time of me talking of it to Duponte, with nothing granted in return.

"I can tell, Monsieur Quentin, you have got yourself in an awkward position," Dupin said. He pressed his hands together as though in prayer, then let them curl into a double fist. "But I am the real Dupin-I am the one you have sought all along."

"What a claim!"

"Is it? I am a special constable for the English. What is that but the preserver of truth? I never lost a single case as an attorney-that record is as unbendable as iron. What is an attorney but an announcer of truth? Who is the real Dupin but truth's protector? You and I are attorneys, Monsieur Clark; the whole world of justice is our territory. If we lived at the time when Aeneas descended into hell, we would have gone underneath the earth with him just to be present at an audience of Minos, wouldn't we?"

"I suppose," I said. "Though I usually tend to mortgages and the like."

"It is time to enter the financial arrangements you suggest in your letter for my service and begin. We all will profit in this together."

"I will do nothing of the sort. I have told you: I am loyal to Auguste Duponte. It is him in whom I believe."

Bonjour directed a quick warning glance at me.

Dupin sighed and crossed his arms. "Duponte has flattened out long ago. He has the acute disease we may call precision, and throws a dead weight on all he does. Why, he is like the old, dying painter who can only pretend in his mind that he is the artist he once was. A puppet of his own brain."

"I suppose you are interested in this for the money so you may pay the debts," I said indignantly. "Auguste Duponte is the original ‘Dupin,' Monsieur Baron, however much you dare to use him up with insults. You are fortunate he is not present here."

The Baron stepped closer to me, and his next words dripped out slowly. "And what would your Duponte do if he were here now?"

I wanted to tell him Duponte would crack his skull into two, but I could neither remember the French for it, nor convince myself it was true. Claude Dupin, mustache and jewels equally shining, grinned as he instructed Bonjour to bring me up to the carriage.

She took my arm with a grip as surprisingly hard as Hartwick's and led me ahead through the trench. In Paris, men are hardly needed at all for the operation of society. I had by this point seen women, unattended by any men, as hatters, drivers of huge carts, butchers, milkmen (or "milkwomen"), intriguers, and money-changers, even waiters at the baths. I had once heard a female-rights orator in Baltimore argue that if women held the occupations of men they would be more virtuous. Here was a young woman who might be happy to disagree.

We had walked out of the hearing range of the Baron. I turned to Bonjour. "Why do you serve his wishes?"

"You were told to speak?"

I marveled to hear this from a lady who seemed a few years younger than Hattie, and with a voice as raspy as a decayed old man's and oddly mesmerizing. "I suppose I wasn't, but Bonjour-miss-mademoiselle. Mademoiselle Bonjour, you should ensure your safety from this man."

"You wish only to save your own bacon."

That would have been most wise, I suppose-but self-preservation had not been first on my mind. There had been in the gleam of her eyes a visible independence of spirit, to which I found myself instantly attached. The only blemish on the smooth skin of her face was a scar-or, properly speaking, more of a dent-that ran vertically over her lips, stretching above and below them and forming a rather enchanting cross with her smile.

"They are coming fast!" a voice shouted in French from above. Hartwick was running toward his master with an elongated spyglass in his hand.

"They've found us!" Dupin yelled. "Get to the carriage!"

Apparently, some of the Baron's less welcoming friends had come looking for him. All of my company began to run toward the carriage.

"Make haste, you ass, cut dirt!" Dupin said as he ran past me.

I saw Hartwick, standing closer to the carriage, fall at the sound of a shot, clumsily stumbling on the rocks. He had started to yell, "Dupin," but the word was lost. When he was rolled lifelessly upon his side by one of the others, it could be seen that his ear was gone, replaced by a circle of dark red.

As my eye caught the horror of this and the path to the carriage became steeper, I tripped and fell back down the side of the trench. I suppose this might have also been seen as strategic, so I could separate from my captors. In fact, it was the sight of the pistol drawn by the Baron Dupin that left my feet unbalanced. Bonjour swerved back for me.

"Leave him!" ordered Dupin. Then, to me: "Next time, perhaps, we shall meet somewhere more congenial to our mutual interests, without such flusterations! In the meantime, go and seek glory, Brother Quentin!"

Yes. I am aware it will seem fantastic to readers that these were Dupin's words even while he was presently being fired upon and his chief henchman had just now been killed and he was climbing up this ditch, but I report it only as it happened.

I raised my head to watch. All at once, I felt myself tackled and pulled down hard. My body crumpled to a heap, and I looked up to see that Bonjour had thrown herself over me. She held one of my arms down with her hand. Imagining Hattie watching me, and feeling a pang of guilt and temptation, I tried to wriggle away from under her but could not. I could not help shudder at the lightness but immovability of her body.

"Stay down," she said in English. "Even once I leave. Understand?"

I nodded.

She then pushed herself up and followed the Baron into their carriage without looking at me again. Their horses burst onto the path through the fortifications. After a few minutes, the trampling hoof-falls and rolling wheels of another carriage boomed along the fortifications. There followed more blasts of gunfire in the direction of the Baron's escaping carriage. I covered my head with my arms and did not stir as splinters of rock rained down from all directions.

My deliverance appeared in the form of a hired coach of German visitors who had come to see the fortifications; they kindly permitted me to ride back with them to Paris.

Of course, part of me wanted to run straight to Duponte and tell him all about what had happened. But it would be of no use. If my encounter with Claude Dupin made me realize something, it was that all had become jumbled. The true analyst would not help for any price, and a charlatan like this "Baron" was too willing to pretend to help for a little money. I would do just as well never to see Auguste Duponte again.

It turned out that the guide from Versailles had been correct about the police agents' monitoring my residence in Paris. Shortly after that episode, my supply of cash dwindled and I moved to a less expensive lodging house. Upon arriving, I found two police officers waiting very politely to record my new address.

It was only two days later that my decision to avoid Duponte changed, while I was sitting and having my boots blacked. With that distinct French politeness, the owner of the blacking shop had bowed slightly, alerting me to the fact that my boots were dusty. I had picked up a newspaper. There was a large looking-glass situated right behind the bench so the owner could see the paper as he blacked his customer's shoes. I had heard it said that a certain species of boot-blacker in Paris had over the years learned to read newsprint backward to keep away boredom. I did not believe that anyone could develop such a skill of understanding words so twisted around. Not until that day.

I hurried through the pages quickly but was interrupted by the boot-blacker.

"Turn back a page, kind monsieur? Is it Claude Dupin in Paris again? He is dogged more fiercely in Paris than any animal in the forest. That is what they say."

On this word, I turned the pages back to an astounding item, a paid notice:

Renowned attorney and solicitor Claude Dupin, having never lost a law case in his career, has been enlisted by some of the first citizens of America [I suppose that meant me] to solve the mystery surrounding the death of that country's most beloved and brilliant genius of many literary treats-Edgar A. Poe. Claude Dupin was the basis and namesake, furthermore, for the famous character of "Dupin" from the tales of Mr. Poe, including "Les Crimes de la Rue Morgue," a story known widely in both English and French tongues. Obligated to honor this connection, Claude Dupin has left for the United States and in exactly two months from this day in the year 1851, he will have resolved the enigmatic circumstances of Poe's death completely and with all finality. Monsieur Dupin will return to Paris, the city of his birth, after being lavishly heralded and rewarded as a new hero of the New World…

I felt a lump rise in my throat. I had to get back to Duponte immediately.

I could not leave the continent with Duponte believing I had betrayed him by enlisting Claude Dupin, as he would surely think if he read that notice. Indeed, he could not fail to connect the matter with me. Even some of the language in the paper was my own, having been purloined by the Baron directly from my letters. I only hoped he had not seen it. I directed my carriage driver to Duponte's lodgings and rushed through the gates and past the concierge's chamber.

"Hold there! You!" The concierge swiped his hand at me but missed. I took the stairs two at a time. I found Duponte's door open but nobody inside.

The gaslight over his bed smelled as though it had just been lately lighted, and there in the center of his bed was a newspaper. It was La Presse -a different newspaper than the one I had read at the boot-blacker's stand-but it was opened to the very same notice. Other objects, papers and articles, had been pushed to the bottom of the bed. I imagined Duponte had sat down slowly, clearing the always-crowded surface of his quilt with one hand and clenching the article in his other, his eyes filling with-what would it have been to see this? Rage? Bitterness?-as he read about the recruitment of Baron Dupin. He had already convicted me of betrayal.

"Monsieur!" The concierge had appeared at the door.

"You! I will hear nothing from you!" I shouted, prodded by the anger I felt at Baron Dupin. "I am leaving Paris today, but I must and shall find Auguste Duponte first. You will tell me where he has gone at once, or you shall have me to face!"

He shook his head no, and I almost flung my fist into his chin before he explained. "He is not here," he panted. "Inside, I mean! Monsieur Duponte has left, with his baggage."

After further questioning, I learned that the concierge had assisted Duponte only minutes before with bringing his baggage into the courtyard. This after Duponte had studied the poisonous newspaper notice of the devious Baron. The treachery Duponte surely imagined from me had driven him to a melancholy so overwhelming that he could no longer remain in his place. I looked from the apartment's windows for any sign of him before descending.

Driving away from the boardinghouse was a carriage that I could see was loaded above with baggage. I cried out without success for the coach to return but could only throw up my hands limply as it passed into the street. What a surprise when I found no sign of my own coach and driver-whom I had ordered to wait. Stewing over this final insult, I was jarred by seeing that Duponte's coach was driving back-and that it was not Duponte's coach at all; well, he sat inside and his baggage wobbled on top, so now it was his, but it had been my driver and my carriage.

The horses stomped to a halt in front of me.

"Just wanted to turn the horses around to pull away easier, monsieur," the driver said to me, "so we'd not lose time."

He climbed down and opened the door opposite Duponte's, but first I had to see him. I walked to Duponte's side and opened his door. The analyst sat with a fixed gaze. Had the Baron Dupin's deceitful claims on C. Auguste Dupin's character finally affected him in a way none of my enticements or rewards could?

"Monsieur Duponte, does this mean…are you…?"

"You'll be late," shouted the driver, "for the train to your ship, monsieurs. You'll lose your passage. Come in, come in!"

Duponte nodded to me. "Now it is time," he said.

10

THE CUNARD STEAMER Humboldt to America had seventy-eight officers and seamen aboard and a sufficient number of accommodations-narrow staterooms entered from the sides of the richly carpeted main saloon-for more than one hundred passengers. There was also a labyrinth of ancillary chambers-the library, the smoking rooms, and the sitting rooms, as well as the sheltered pens for cattle.

Duponte and I had been among the earliest passengers to arrive at this floating palace, and I brimmed with anticipation, gazing upon the ark that would carry us to the New World. Duponte remained standing in place as soon as he reached the upper deck. I froze too. I imagined he was experiencing some sudden doubt, a premonition, and would back out of our voyage.

"Monsieur Duponte?" I said attentively, hoping I could oblige him. "All right?"

"Do request, Monsieur Clark," Duponte said, taking my elbow, "that the steward inform our ship's captain there is a stowaway on board this ship. Armed."

My anxiety flitted away into utter astonishment. When I had sufficiently regained my calm, I commanded an interview with the steward in a private corner.

"Sir, there is a stowaway on board the ship," I whispered urgently, "possibly armed."

He lowered his brow at me, showing no concern. "How do you know that?"

"Whatever does that matter?"

"We checked all stowage and cabins already, sir, as always. Did you see someone on board?"

"No," I replied. "We have only just arrived!"

He nodded, persuaded that he had proven his argument.

I looked back at Duponte across the deck. I could not fail him so soon, not after all that had been required to secure him. I wanted him to feel that anything he asked was no sooner suggested than done. "Sir, what do you know of ratiocination?" I asked the steward.

"Aye. That is a new sea-beast, sir, with six hundred legs and a hunched back."

I ignored this. "It is the rare ability of knowing, by a process of reasoning not only using logic, but through the higher logic of imagination, that which is outside the mental function of most ordinary people. There is-I promise you-an armed and most villainous stowaway here. I suggest the captain be informed double-quick and that you look more carefully."

"I was going to have another look anyway," he said importantly. He walked with a deliberately slow step.

A few minutes later, the steward was calling-or, rather, shrieking-for his superior to come to the mail chamber. Soon the burly old captain and the steward had wrestled a struggling, shouting man from down below.

The stowaway thrust both his elbows out, breaking loose and shoving the steward flat on his back. The few passengers lolling about went immediately scurrying below in fear for their lives, or at least in fear for their jewels. Others, along with Duponte and myself, clustered together to watch the scene. There was a moment of stillness as the captain stood across from the intruder.

"Trying to steal our mail?" the captain barked out. Our steamer, like most crossing the ocean, supplemented its finances in large part by transporting mail.

The stowaway seemed for a moment a phantasm from another world, large and red in the cheeks. Perhaps the captain experienced a similar effect looking at him, as he put his hands in front of him in a soothing gesture. "Peace," said the captain.

"You shall want to know what I know!" warned the stowaway, looking beyond the captain toward the passengers, seeming to be assessing which one of us to take prisoner. We all took a step back, except for Duponte.

The captain did not jump at the man's declaration, but the foolish steward was intrigued by the bluff. "Like what?" he asked. "What could you know?" The stowaway lost his footing on some wet boards and the captain and steward charged again, overwhelming their victim. After a few awkward attempts and to the cheers of some passengers, they heaved him straight overboard.

The captain leaned over the side and observed the fellow, whose lost hat had left his baldness to shine in the sun. I rushed to the rails, too, and stood watching for a long while. I could not help feeling some pity for the shocked, flailing rogue. The captain, believing his own crew member responsible for the discovery, shook the steward by the hand probably more heartily than ever before.

Later that same day, after we'd pushed away to sea, the steward found me alone and said with a snarl, "How the deuce did you know about him?"

I held my tongue.

"How in the devil could someone know there was a stowaway here, just after stepping on deck? How in the devil? How did you get this ration-sin-ation?"

He would take his small-minded revenge by giving Duponte and me undesirable seats at the dining table. But that day I could not help but wear a peculiar grin, which reappeared whenever I saw the steward during all three weeks of our voyage to America.