Was I here on "business," "touring," or "educational"? I responded in the negative on all counts.

"If not these, then how have you come to be in Paris this summer?"

"You see, Monsieur Prefect, I am to meet a citizen of your city regarding an important affair back in the United States."

"And," he replied, hiding his interest with a casual smile, "who is that?"

When I told him, he became quite still, then exchanged a glance with the officer sitting across the prefect's chambers. "Who?" the prefect then said, as though entirely moonstruck, after some moments had passed.

"Auguste Duponte," I repeated. "You do know him then, Monsieur Prefect? I have communicated with him by mail over the last months-"

"Duponte? Duponte has written you?" the other police officer, a small and fat old man, interrupted gruffly.

"No, of course not, Officer Gunner," said the prefect.

"No," I agreed, though irritated by the queer presumption of the prefect. "I have written Duponte, but he has not written in return. That is why I have come. I am here to explain myself in his private ear before it is too late."

"You shall have a hard time of that," mumbled Gunner.

"He is not…he is alive?" I inquired.

I think the prefect replied, "Almost," but he swallowed his word up whole and returned abruptly to his more jovial and freewheeling personality. (I had not noticed the reduction in his joviality, you see, until it was just then restored.) "Never mind this," he said of my passport, handing it to his colleague to be stamped with an apparently meaningful series of hieroglyphics. "A tool of the next Inquisition, no?"

He abruptly dropped the subject of Duponte, welcomed me to Paris, and assured me that I could call upon him if I should ever need assistance during my stay. On my way out, several sergents de ville regarded me with hard glares of suspicion or dislike, which provoked my great sense of relief upon reaching the anonymity of the busy street.

That same afternoon, I paid Madame Fouché, proprietress of the Hôtel Corneille, for a full week's stay, though in fact I anticipated a quicker end to my business.

I suppose there were signs, though, that I should have noted. For instance, the attitude of the concierge at the grand Paris mansion where I had addressed my letters to Duponte. This was my first stop the morning after arriving. When I inquired at the door, the concierge narrowed his eyes at me, shook his head, and spoke: "Duponte? Why would you want to see him?"

It did not seem inconceivable to me that the concierge for a person of this stature would dissuade casual callers. "I require his skills in a matter of moment," I replied, at which a strange hissing sound emanated from the man and revealed itself as laughter as he informed me that Duponte no longer lived here, had left no further information, and that Columbus probably couldn't find him now.

As I took my leave, I thought about the "Dupin" I had known well. I mean from Poe's tales-that liaison who had opened the portal into Poe by convincing me the inexplicable must yet be understood. "My French hero" was Poe's reference to the character in one of the letters he wrote to me. If only I had happened to inquire to Poe about the identity of the real Dupin; if only I had exhibited more curiosity-it would have saved me the last year and more that had been required to trace this singular man to Paris!

In his tales, Poe never physically described the character of Dupin. I realized this only after freshly reviewing this trio of particular tales of detection with that question in mind. Previously, if asked of this, I might have answered, as if talking to a perfect ass, "Of course Poe describes one of his most important characters, the character that embodies perfectly his writing, and in great detail, too!" But on the contrary, Dupin's form, you see, is strikingly imparted-but only to the careful and estimable reader who enters the tale with his full heart.

I mention here as illustration a rather frothy short tale by Poe called "The Man That Was Used Up." It features a celebrated army general whose sturdy physical appearance is widely admired. But the general has an unfortunate secret: each night he falls apart physically from his old war wounds and must have his body parts stitched back together by his Negro manservant before breakfast. I believe this was Poe's shove at those lesser writers, mere blots in the deep shadows of his genius, who thought physical description of features the key to enlivening their characters. Likewise, it was from the untellable soul of C. Auguste Dupin's character, not his choice of waistcoat, that he had long ago stepped into my consciousness.

When I had first received the newspaper cutting mentioning the real Dupin from the athenaeum clerk in Baltimore, I'd found fruitless all my attempts to secure the investigator's name from the New York newspaper where the column had appeared. However, a mere few weeks of research into French periodicals and directories produced a fairly impressive list of possible models for Poe's character.

All of their personal histories matched in some manner the two sources: the cutting's description as well as the traits of Poe's character. One possibility I turned up was a Parisian mathematical celebrity who wrote textbooks used to solve various scientific problems; and there was the lawyer, called sometimes the Baron, who acquitted persons accused of the most scandalous crimes, who had since gone to London; another, a former thief who acted as a secret agent of the Parisian police before operating a paper factory in Brussels. Each one of these and other possibilities were considered dispassionately and objectively and with the expectation that one would rise above the others as the clear source for Dupin.

And yet, another year and a half passed from the start of that research. Correspondence across the Atlantic proved slow and inconclusive. Promising candidates accumulated quickly before each one gradually dropped into a well of doubt after further inquires and exchanges.

Until one clear day in the spring of 1851. That's when I discovered in the French journal L'--the name Auguste Duponte. The name naturally caught my attention, but it was not the sound of the name only that struck a distinct harmony with Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. This fellow, Auguste Duponte, had gained prominence in France in the sensational case of Monsieur Lafarge, a gentleman of strong physical constitution and some local importance found mysteriously dead in his home. After some useless maneuvers by the Parisian police, one officer invited in his acquaintance, the young tutor Duponte, to translate the comments of a Spanish visitor who was a witness in the case (though that angle ultimately proved irrelevant).

Within the space of ten or twelve minutes after hearing the facts from the police officer, it was said Duponte conclusively showed the police that the dead man had been poisoned by Madame Lafarge at the end of a meal. Madame L. was convicted for the murder of her husband. She was later spared from death by sympathetic officials.

(Asked by the French newspaper La Presse what he thought about the murderess's sentence having been commuted, Duponte reportedly said, "Nothing at all. Punishment has little relation to the fact of a crime, and the least to do with the analysis of the crime.")

The news of Auguste Duponte's feat spread widely through France. The government officials, police, and citizens in Paris sought his analysis of other incidents. This swift introduction to the public eye-I discovered with immense satisfaction-occurred a few years before the appearance in an 1841 issue of an American journal of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Poe's description of Dupin's rise to fame in the second of the tales could be used with equal effect to describe the real history of Auguste Duponte: It thus happened that he found himself the cynosure of the policial eyes; and the cases were not few in which attempt was made to engage his services at the Prefecture.