We moved into Neilson Poe’s library. There was a row of books and magazines of Edgar Poe’s writings that nearly rivaled my own. In my great surprise, I examined its contents, removing a particular volume or periodical from the impressive collection as I went.
Neilson could see that I was taken aback at his apparent devotion to Edgar’s writings. He smiled and explained. “I had been angry at Edgar in his last years, and even after his death, for I knew he saw himself as superior to me all along. He saw my life as dilapidated in its artistic qualities. I knew, in short, that he had hated me for many years! Yet it occurred to me that I had never hated him. It has occurred to me, further, that Edgar was a man who represented himself through his literary productions—that was him, more than the physical form and character he presented in person, more than any letter he might write in a fit of anger, or some comment he might pass in an excited state to an acquaintance. His art was never meant to be popular, it was not meant to have a principle or a moral sense, but it was his true form of being.”
As he spoke, Neilson situated himself in the corner of his library and, as he swiveled his chair for a volume of Edgar Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, there was a twitch at the side of his mouth that seemed a distinct quality of Edgar Poe’s. To hide my observation of him, I removed from the shelf the April 1841 number of Graham’s, containing the first tale of Dupin, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I held it reverently and thought of my own library, my own collection, my home, Glen Eliza, which no doubt had been disturbed and ruined by the police in their various searches for evidence of my guilt and obsessions.
“Do you know he was paid only fifty-six dollars for his first Dupin tale?” Neilson said, seeing the object of my interest. “In the time since his death, I have seen the press push and splatter him. I have seen that shameful and unjust biographer make Edgar whomever he would like. Remember, this is my name, too, Mr. Clark. Poe is the name of my wife, and my children are Poes—as my sons’ children will be. I am Poe. In the last months, I have read and reread nearly all that my cousin wrote, and have felt with each turn of the page greater affinity with him, a closeness of the highest order, as though the same words might have come from me that he had managed to extract from our common blood. Tell me, Mr. Clark, you had met him?” he asked offhandedly.
“No.”
“Good!” said Neilson. Seeing my puzzled reaction, he continued. “I mean only that it is better that way. Seek to know him through the words he published. His genius was of such a rare quality, hardly to be sustained in this world of magazinists, that he could not but believe all were against it and that, given time, even friends and relatives would turn into enemies. His perception, frightened and anxious on this point, was a result of a world harsh to literary pursuits—a harshness I discovered for myself in my youth. His life was a series of experiments on his own nature, Mr. Clark, that brought him far from the movements of our world into a knowledge only of the perfection of literature. We cannot know Edgar Poe as a man, but can know him well as the genius he was. This is why he could not be fairly read until after his death—by me, by you, and now, perhaps, by the world.” He paused. “You are feeling better now, Mr. Clark?”
I found I could think more clearly and had been freed of a surge of wild emotions that had before consumed me. I could only remember my latest actions as one thinks of a dream, or a distant memory. I blushed a bit in embarrassment to think of how Neilson had found me. “Yes, many thanks. I fear I had been rather overexcited when you came upon me at Amity Street.”
“Please, Mr. Clark,” he chuckled in surprise, “you must hardly blame yourself for being poisoned.”
“What do you mean?”
“The doctor who examined you was quite certain that you had been mildly poisoned. He found traces of the white powder still in the posterior of your mouth, an expert mixture of several chemicals. Do not worry. He was also rather certain the effects had quite exhausted themselves and were not permanently harmful in these doses.”
“Poison? But who—” I stopped myself, knowing with sudden clarity the answer. The guards at the prison who, with great vigilance, constantly replaced the pitchers of water on my cell table. Officer White, frustrated with my continued denials in the interviews with him, had likely been the one to order it: to confuse my mind enough to extract some kind of statement of responsibility, to ensure a confession of my wrongs! Indeed, I now also possessed Neilson Poe’s information about White’s desire to suppress the inquiry I had demanded. He would have poisoned me until I confessed or died, or was driven to harm myself. My life had been saved through the means of my chance escape.
All the derangement of my mental state in the hours after leaving the prison became clear to me and stung my mind. Searching for Poe—digging his grave with the belief that he was alive—invading his former home from so many years earlier! That person had dropped from me and I stood taller now, seeing all that was happening with perfect vision.
Neilson seemed momentarily thoughtful and, perhaps, anxious. “Perhaps you do need more rest, Mr. Clark.”
“The boy,” I said suddenly. “The messenger boy of whom you spoke, the one who helped you carry me, and then who returned with the doctor. Where is he?” I had not seen anyone in the house other than the children.
Neilson hesitated. I could hear a new sound, unmistakable and increasing. Horses, high-stepping through the watery streets; a carriage’s wheels splashing behind.
Neilson raised his head at the sound. “I am a member of the bar, Mr. Clark,” he said. “You are a fugitive from justice, and I have done my duty by sending the police word of your presence. I have a responsibility. Yet, somehow, I cannot help but think that you, of all people, have the ability to vindicate the memory of my unhappy kinsman and my name. I would be pleased to serve as your defender in court, should you wish.” I remained frozen in place. “Remember, Mr. Clark, you were an officer of the court, too. You have a duty to choose.”
Neilson stepped slowly in front of the door, and in my weakened state he would have likely subdued me with ease until his messenger boy entered with the police.
“The children,” Neilson said suddenly. “Do not think me too strict, Mr. Clark, but I must see to it that they are sleeping.”
“I understand,” I said, nodding with gratitude.
As he started into the hall toward the stairs, I dashed out of the room and did not look back.
“God watch over you!” Neilson called after me.
My mission was clear. I would find Auguste Duponte. He alone could provide the definitive proof of my innocence. Now that Bonjour had revealed to me that no harm had been done to him, even thinking of how close he might be lent me an air of invincibility that moved me rapidly through the drowned streets of Baltimore. Indeed, perhaps Duponte had already begun to investigate the shooting of the Baron. Perhaps he had even come to the lyceum that evening, before it occurred, had witnessed it and fled in preparation for the troubles he knew would come from it.
It seemed the most necessary objective in the world to prove my name to Hattie, for she had persisted in her friendship to me throughout my stay in prison when others had abandoned me. It might seem small compared to the fact that my life could end as a criminal, and she was marrying another man anyway, but my goal now was to prove myself to Hattie.
I would not dry thoroughly for days; my ears, lungs, and insides were swimming long after I’d waded and splashed through the treacherous streets of Baltimore. It felt as though the Atlantic had broken over the shores and was moving across to unite with the Pacific. I was able to locate Edwin, and he secured me changes of linen and modest suits of clothing. He wished to assist me in obtaining a place safer from the eyes of the police. He had brought clothing in bundles to an empty packinghouse, once belonging to my father’s firm, where I took refuge by remembering a loose door hinge from years ago that had never been repaired.
“You have helped me enough, Edwin,” I said, “and I sho
uld not wish to risk your safety any further. I have called down enough trouble on everyone’s heads for a lifetime.”
“You have done what you believed right, you have bet your life on it,” he said. “Poe is dead. A man has been shot. Your friend, disappeared. And enough people have been hurt. You must stay safe, at least, so there is someone sure of the truth.”
“You must not be thought committing any crime, for aiding me,” I said. This was a serious point. If a free black was convicted of a significant offense, he could be punished in the worst way imaginable for a freeman: by being entered by the authorities back into slavery.
“I was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl.” Edwin laughed his reassuring laugh. “Besides, I think not even Baltimore has punished a man yet for giving some old duds to a man whose linen is out at the elbows. Now, will you be able to rest here for the night?”
Edwin continued to lend his aid and searched me out at the packinghouse at regular intervals. Although tempted to do so, I refrained from trying to make any calls on Hattie out of concern that they might endanger her. My outings were severely restricted, and I knew not to go anywhere near the grounds of Glen Eliza for fear of being seen. I still had in my possession the issue of Graham’s from 1841 that I was holding in my hand when I fled from Neilson Poe’s house—the issue in which “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first introduced Dupin. I was thankful for this as though it were a talisman. I would reread the tale and wonder what Duponte might have already discovered about the Baron’s death. Yet this magazine was, for the time, all I had to read. So I read the other pages, too, though it was ten years old.
One time, Edwin came at an appointed hour and found me staring at the Graham’s.
“All right, Mr. Clark?”
I could not stop reading these pages—reading and reading. I could hardly speak. I do not know how to describe my heart-wrenching discovery that night—I mean the truth about Duponte—or Dupin (you see I hardly know how to swallow all I understood, I hardly know where to begin)—that Duponte never was the real Dupin at all.
Once I had read the Baron Dupin’s handwritten lecture notes several times in my cell at the Middle District station house, and had ensured that every word remained forged in my memory, I had thrown the pages to the fire that sizzled in the hall separating the men’s and women’s cells. I had not assassinated the Baron, of course, but I eagerly murdered his handiwork. After all that had happened, the possibility of his fictions about Poe’s death spreading was a risk not to be borne.
It was not that his words were not convincing as to Poe’s death. They were quite convincing, but not the truth—the opposite of Poe, who wrote only the truth even when many were not ready to believe. We shall come to the Baron’s theories of Poe’s death later. The Baron Dupin, in his notes, had also taken the occasion to defend his claim as the real Dupin.
Here is a sample: “You know the Dupin of these tales as forthright, brilliant, fearless. Those qualities, I must admit, Mr. Poe derived from my own humble adventures in truth-telling.…For that is what Dupin really does, isn’t it? In a world where truth is hidden by the mountebanks and swindlers, by the lords and the kings, Dupin finds it. Dupin knows it. Dupin tells it. But those who tell the truth, my friends, shall always be met with ridicule, neglect, death. That is where we have found Edgar—no”—here I imagined the Baron shaking his head somberly, perhaps a leaden tear dropping from the corner of one eye—“that is where we have lost Edgar Poe. Edgar Poe has not left us, but has been taken away….”
Now, before Edwin’s arrival, as I sat in the empty warehouse’s small splash of light, I picked up that April Graham’s, that magazine containing the first appearance of Poe’s Dupin. “How fortunate for Graham’s to have Poe then,” I thought, “for he not only contributed his tales but also he was their editor.” Then my thumb stopped on a particular page. I strained in the light to see. It was not even a page I had meant to look at.
In the same number that “Rue Morgue” appeared, in that same April ’41 number, the editor of the periodical—that is, Poe—reviewed a book entitled Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France. This collection of biographical sketches, we find, includes a number of French persons of distinction. The one that attracted my eye was George Sand, the famed novelist. I should not know how it raced into my mind from some distant article or biography I had read about her—but I somehow recalled that her given name, which she changed to the masculine George Sand to allow her to publish without prejudice, was Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin. Poe, in his review of Sketches, delights in an anecdote that involved Madame Sand/Dupin sitting dressed up in a gentleman’s frock coat and smoking a cigar.
Another name in Poe’s review arrested my attention: Lamartine. You may hardly know the name, for his reputation as a Parisian poet and philosopher I doubt will persist in memory. But look here. I turned back through our magazine to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that first tale of ratiocination.
We reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks.
Was it a coincidence, that in the same number of the magazine that Poe published his first Dupin tale, he used the name of another prominent French writer in both the Dupin tale and this review he wrote? Do not stop there. Look at “Rue Morgue” further, and read about one of the witnesses to the beastly violence, as told by the narrator:
Paul Dumas, physician, deposes that he was called to view the bodies about day-break…
Should this Dumas not make us all think of Alexandre Dumas, the inventive novelist of French romances and adventures? And there was this:
Isidore Musèt, gendarme, deposes that he was called to the house about three o’clock in the morning…
Yes: a name much like Alfred de Musset, the French poet, intimate companion of George Sand herself.
You have probably already guessed at the conclusion now ready to be drawn. My mind spiraled down without warning. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—I can almost hear Poe chuckling cleverly at the real hidden mystery of this tale—was actually built as an allegory for the modern state of French literature. The references to George Sand (a.k.a. Dupin), Lamartine, Musset, and Dumas were the most prominent of the network of quiet, clever allusions.
If this was so, as I was instantly certain it was, Poe had not drawn on a real investigator to invent this hero, not Auguste Duponte, not Baron Claude Dupin, but had worked wholly from his head and his thoughts on the various literary personages. When I first found all this, I made bold to walk openly to a book stall and pillage various books; I found that not only was my recollection correct about George Sand’s real name, not only was her given name Dupin, but also that she had lost a brother in infancy named—yes, but you probably already guessed—Auguste Dupin. Auguste Dupin. Would Poe have known this detail? What was Poe’s message to us? He re-created her lost brother in the form of a genius against death and violence. Had Poe thought of his own brother William Henry, taken from him while poor Edgar was yet a boy?
In frantically reading again through “Rue Morgue” I found new meaning in the narrator’s description of his living circumstance with C. Auguste Dupin: “We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone.” Wasn’t Poe trying to tell us? The astounding ratiocinator existed only in the imagination of the poet.
We have been informed by a “Lady Friend” of the brilliant and erratic writer Edgar A. Poe, Esq. that Mr. Poe’s ingenious hero, C. Auguste Dupin, is closely modeled from an individual in actual life, similar in name and exploit, known for his great analytical powers…&c.
I thought of that newspaper extract, the one given to the athenaeum clerk by John Benson and then to me, with blurry vision and brewing contempt. How vague it was, these sentences, this flighty rumor that had taken
me in. Who was this “lady friend” of Poe’s? How was it we could know she should be trusted? Had she ever existed at all? I searched my mind for answers to these singular questions, but all the while the larger reality possessed me like an unholy spirit—it seemed to say, “Duponte was nothing more than a fraud, Poe is dead, and you too will die, will walk the ladder to the gallows, will die for wanting more than you already had.”
Duponte was no more.
“Clark, are you unwell? Perhaps I should bring you to a doctor.” Edwin was trying to shake me from my spell.
“Edwin,” I gasped, with just this peculiar phraseology: “I am nearly dead.”
I should say something more, by way of an interlude, about what began all this—Poe’s death. For several chapters, I have mentioned knowing the Baron’s full lecture on the subject, and it would be stingy of me to withhold it any longer from the reader. As I say, I remember every word of the Baron’s notes. “‘Reynolds! Reynolds!’ This shall ring in our ears as long as we remember Edgar Poe, for it was his valedictory address to us. And he might have just said: ‘This is how I died, Lord. This is how I died, friends and fellow sufferers of the earth. Now find out why….’”