Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"What have you done?" Hattie said to me in a nervous whisper. The throng had become louder, and the judge was now straining to silence them.

"Proved my great-aunt correct, perhaps," I said. "Your family will give us nothing, and I have already entered debt. I may have thrown away all we have, Hattie!"

"No. You've proved me right. Your father would be proud today-you are a chip off the old block, Quentin." Hattie kissed me quickly on the cheek and, pulling herself from my grasp, hurried to try to soothe her family.

Peter grabbed my arm. "What is this?"

"Where is he?" I asked. "Have you seen where Duponte went?"

"Quentin! Why did you not simply repeat whatever it was that Frenchman told you? Why did you not tell the court the truth of what you and he found?"

"And to what purpose, Peter?" I asked. "To save myself. No, this is what they hope for me to do so they might feel they know me, and that I am inferior because different. No, I do not think I will. Send public opinion to the devil today-this history will remain unspoken for now. There is one person I will tell today, Peter. I wish her always to understand me, as she has before, and she must hear for herself."

"Quentin, Quentin! Think of what you're doing!"

I DID NOTshare the narrative of Poe's death with that courtroom, not that day or any other. Instead, I worked alongside Peter and became, as he later liked to say, an unrecoverable lawyer, finding each item of inconsistency and weak supposition in the case against me. In the end, we won. I received official recognition of my sanity and did so quite handily, by the judgment of most who observed the entire proceedings. Though there were few who believed I was, in fact, completely sane, they admitted that the trial pointed to that fact.

My reputation for an original bent of legal acumen spread. I rejoined Peter as an equal partner and we became one of the more successful law practices in Baltimore in mortgages, debts, and the contesting of wills.

The practice also added a third attorney, a young man from Virginia of habitual industry, and Peter soon married the equally industrious sister of that gentleman.

Though the police did not look for Edwin Hawkins in relation to the infamous assault on Hope Slatter, the slave-trader was said to have privately declared that he would know the man when he met him. But only a few months after the incident, Slatter decided that Baltimore had begun to be unreliable for his line of business, and he moved his slave-trading firm to Alabama, permitting the safe return to Baltimore of Edwin Hawkins. Edwin, meanwhile, deprived of his situation at the newspaper offices, had begun reading more books on the law and became a first-rate clerk in our expanding practice and later, at age sixty, an attorney.

Nearly nine years after my last visit, I returned to Paris with Hattie, and brought along Peter Stuart's young daughter, Annie. There was none of the general surveillance and spying that I had once experienced. Indeed, in some ways Paris was a more comfortable place to be as an empire under Louis-Napoleon than as a republic under the same man. As an American from a nation that was a republic, I had been an unwanted influence by a man planning an overthrow of that very form of government. As an emperor, Louis-Napoleon had the power he wished for, and so no longer thought to exercise its full range from day to day.

The Baltimore line of the Bonaparte family, after Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte's conference with the new emperor, received by decree the right to the Bonaparte name for all of the descendants of Madame Elizabeth Bonaparte. But the emperor would yield no rights to succession or imperial property as Madame Bonaparte had instructed her son to demand. When Louis-Napoleon died years later, neither of Madame Bonaparte's two grandchildren, both as handsome and as tall as could be hoped for, became emperor of the French. She lived for many years in Baltimore, and could be seen often in her black bonnet and red parasol in the streets, outliving even her son Bo.

Bonjour, meanwhile, had become a popular member of the small French circle in Washington, and was much admired and sought after for her independence and wit. She found she had perfect freedom as a widow here in America. One who also called herself a widow (though her husband, the elder Jérôme Bonaparte, was still alive in Europe), Madame Bonaparte, for many years, found joy in instructing and encouraging Mademoiselle Bonjour regarding various schemes and romances, though Bonjour did not usually heed her advice. Bonjour refused to marry again even when she experienced serious financial trouble. Through certain friends she had made through Monsieur Montor, Bonjour was soon entered into the theater and became something of a minor sensation as an actress performing in several cities here and in England, before settling on the writing of popular novels.

That day in the courtroom was the last time I saw Auguste Duponte. There were only a few more words passed between us than I have mentioned already. I believe I had some second sight in the courtroom, some foreboding that this was to be our final meeting. Once the crowd had settled down, I escaped outside and located Duponte exiting the court building. I tried to think what I might say.

"Poe," I said, "it is Poe…"

In my mind, there was some coherent and important statement to convey before parting, but I could not now, facing him, imagine what it was. I thought about the letter I had anticipated for so long from Poe from his time in Richmond, which might have revealed that he had tried to arrange to meet me in Baltimore-the letter had not come and never would, yet on this morning I felt an almost exactly equivalent sensation as though it had, if such can be rightly judged.

Duponte was looking out from high on the courthouse steps, gazing over Monument Square at a man and woman laughing together and an old slave leading a young horse, knowing there could be those who had seen him on the streets and recognized him. Peter and a few other attorneys were calling for me to come back inside. I remember what I saw with the unfading vividness of today. Duponte's jaw seemed to loosen, his lips slide together, and that queer grin he had given the portrait artist, that very face of mischief and accomplishment and genius, passed over him for one extravagant moment before it disappeared with him across the street.

I would always search for mentions of him-under some assumed name, of course-in newspaper columns about far-off places.

Sometimes I was certain I found reference to my old friend, though he never revealed himself directly and, as far as was known to me, never returned to the United States. There were times I had a vague presentiment that he would appear unexpectedly when he was most missed-for example, during a period when Hattie fell bafflingly unwell, or in those months when no sign of Peter could be located during his much-talked-about time as a general in the war.

I felt myself for many years, in some ways, waiting. I waited to tell my story, Edgar Poe's story, waited for a time when Poe's mind had been uncovered; waited for a day when others would need what I had found from Edgar Poe. I wrote this story in careful hand in memorandum books-it took up more than one of these books, for I was forever adding to the impressions; and I then would wait and write more.

Sometimes I'd remove the Malacca cane from its place to feel its weight in my hands, and when alone unsheathe the shimmering blade, and I'd laugh with a start and think of Poe, dressed handsomely on his arrival to Baltimore, the Malacca confidently securing his steps.

Hattie wished to know more about Duponte. She even expressed envy of her aunt for having had a few encounters, though that subject was forbidden from being discussed with Auntie Blum even in the old woman's advanced years. Hattie often asked for my final assessment of him and his character. I could not say. I could formulate nothing close enough. I kept the portrait that had been painted so many years earlier, but what had seemed an exact replica before looked nothing like Duponte to me now or, for that matter, like the Baron. Or, rather, it resembled nowhere near as well Duponte as the images preserved in my mind.