Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"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.

HAD THIS ALLbeen 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)!