Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"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.