Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

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 should 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: