Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

The political rogues of the Fourth Ward Whigs, who kept their headquarters in the den of the Vigilant Fire Company's engine house across from Ryan's, placed the helpless poet in a cellar with other unfortunates-vagrants, strangers, loafers (as Americans say), foreigners. This explains why Poe, a heartily well-known author, was not seen by anyone over the course of these few days. The miscreants probably drugged Poe with various opiates.

When election day came, they took him around the city to various polling stations. They forced him to vote for their candidates at each polling venue and, to make the whole farce more convincing, the poet was made to wear different outfits each time. This explains why he was found in ragged, soiled clothes never meant to fit him. He was permitted by the rogues to keep his handsome Malacca cane, however, for he was in such a weakened state that even those ruffians recognized that the cane would be needed to prop him up. This cane he had intentionally switched for his own cane with an old friend in Richmond; for inside was hidden a weapon-a sword-of the most ferocious cast, and he called to mind his many literary enemies who in the past had challenged him on occasion to duels or otherwise mishandled him. But by the time he knew his danger here in Baltimore, he was too weak even to open its blade-though he would not let go of it either. In fact, he would be found with this very cane clutched to his chest.

The political club had not cooped as many victims as they would have preferred, due to the inclement weather, which kept people out of the streets. They even carried one man to the coop who was a prominent official of the state of Pennsylvania, captured on his way from the theater to Barnum's Hotel, but he was allowed to escape when it was discovered he was a big-wig. So Poe was used again and again, more than usual-and by the time his captors brought him to the Fourth Ward, located at Ryan's tavern, to vote again, he had been abused too much. After being administered an oath by one of the ward election judges, a Henry Reynolds, Poe could not make it across the room and collapsed. He called for his friend Dr. Snodgrass, who arrived in disgust. Snodgrass, a leader of local temperance groups, was certain Poe had indulged himself in drink. The political ruffians, abandoning their captive, were glad to have their foul deed hidden by this assumption. Nor would stern-minded Snodgrass be the last to make this egregious error-the wide world would soon believe noble Poe's death to be the result of moral weakness.

Yet now we have Truth come back to us.

Poe, heavily drugged and deprived of sleep, was in no condition to explain anything; and in the still rational portion of his mind, no doubt the ailing poet was devastated to see that Snodgrass, his supposed friend, looked down at him with disapproval and something like disdain. Poe was carried to a hackney carriage and driven alone to the hospital. There, under the careful ministering of Dr. J. J. Moran and his nurses, he drifted in and out of consciousness. Remembering like some distant vision his attempt to hide his own genius from its attackers through the nondescript name E. S. T. Grey, Poe deliberately told the good doctor as little as he could about himself and the purposes of his travels. But his mind was weak. At one point, no doubt remembering Snodgrass's betrayal, Poe yelled out that the best thing his best friend could do to him would be to blow his brains out with a pistol.

Poe, thinking of the last man who might have noticed his dilemma in time to stop the actions of his murderers-that judge, Henry Reynolds, who'd perfunctorily given the oath to all the voters-called out desperately as though he could still ask for assistance. Reynolds! Reynolds! He repeated this for hours, but it was not truly a cry for help as much as a death knell. "Oh the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells…Of despair!" Poe's time came to its restless end.

There. Now you alone have heard a speech that never occurred, have witnessed what the Baron Dupin would have said to electrify his audience that evening. It was a speech that, although I had eagerly reduced its pages to ashes, I'd soon be set to announce to the entire world.

ON THE THIRDday after my discovery of the ten-year-old Graham's magazine, Edwin could see my spirits were entirely demolished. I felt more poisoned than I had been when Neilson Poe had found me in front of 3 Amity Street; now it was my soul, my heart, that had been infected rather than my blood.

Edwin tried to talk to me about finding Duponte for assistance. I no longer knew Duponte, though. Who was he, what was he? Perhaps, I thought to myself, Poe had not even heard of my Duponte. All truth had been turned on its head. Maybe it was Duponte who'd deliberately and meticulously pilfered part of his character, insomuch as he was able, from Poe's tales, rather than the other way around. He was concealing himself, now, because he had known he could not fulfill the role he had imagined. Had it never occurred to me, in all the time I spent with Duponte, that his was some diseased reaction to the literature, rather than an inspiring source for it? I suppose the satisfaction of having assisted in Duponte's emergence from his isolation in Paris had led me to deny any dormant doubts. It was insignificant now, dust in the balance. I was alone.

The waters receded around the packinghouse, and with more people populating the streets nearby, Edwin advised that I must find another refuge. He secured a room in an out-of-the-way lodging house in the eastern district of the city. We arranged a time at which I would meet him to be taken to my new hiding place in a wagon covered with piles of his deliveries of newspapers. In the end, I was late, so distracted was I by the loss of Duponte.

I had requested that Edwin bring me more of Poe's tales. I read the three Dupin tales over and over whenever the packinghouse's light was sufficient. If there was no true Dupin, no person whose genius had bestowed onto Poe this character, why had I believed so fervently? I found myself first copying out sentences from the Dupin tales in a scattered fashion and then, without any particular objective, writing out the entire tales word by word, as though translating them into some usable form.

Poe had not discovered Dupin in the newspaper accounts of Paris. He had discovered Dupin in the soul of mankind. I do not know how best to share now what occurred in that upheaval of my mind. I heard again and again what Neilson Poe had said, that Edgar Poe's meaning was not in his life, not in the world outside, but in the words, in their truths. Dupin did exist. He existed in the tales, and perhaps the truth of Dupin was in all of our capacities. Dupin was not among us; he was in us, another part of us, a plural of ourselves, stronger than any person who might resemble Dupin slightly in name or trait. I thought of that sentence from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" again. We existed within ourselves alone…

I found Edwin waiting for me.

"You're safe," he said, taking my hand. "I was about to search the city for you. Give me that coat and put this one on." He gave me an old pepper-and-salt coat. "Come, up hat and cut stick now. There's a wagon I've borrowed to get to the lodging house. No loafing."

"Thank you. But I cannot stay, my friend," I replied, taking his hand. "I must see someone at once."

Edwin frowned. "Where?"

"In Washington. There is a man named Montor, a minister from France, who long ago first taught me about Duponte and tutored me for my visit to Paris."

I began to walk away when Edwin touched my arm.

"He is a man you can trust, Mr. Clark?"

"No."

Henri Montor, the French emissary to Washington, was worried. Back home, the Red Republicans and their followers complained more loudly. Vive la Republique! was hollered in the public squares. Parisians grew restless if there were too many months without political struggle, thought Montor, and so now they were turning their minds against Louis-Napoleon. The results could be catastrophic.