As I waited for any sign of progress in my search for Duponte's address, I wrote to Hattie. Remembering the pain it had caused me whenever I'd seen her sad, I had been experiencing deep regret that the timing of this endeavor had caused her even the slightest grief. In my letters to Baltimore I promised her as little a delay as possible to our plans and entreated her in the meantime to come to Paris, however short a stay and dull a program my present venture might require. Hattie wrote that nothing would please her more than such a voyage, but she was needed to help care for the two new children recently added to her sisters' households.
Peter, for his part, wrote a farewell letter explaining that I had ruined my life, and nearly ruined his, by yielding to the decadence and indecency of Europe.
What he must have been imagining! If only he could see how different the reality here in my chambers!
The nightly gaieties of the Parisian summer drifted recklessly through my window, the open-air orchestras and gala dances, the theaters that seated happy audiences by the hundreds. I, by contrast, opened and closed my two chests of drawers and stared at the clock on my room's mantelpiece-waiting.
One day Madame Fouché came into my room and offered to tie a strip of black crêpe around my arm. Bothered by the interruption to my indolence, I assented.
"My deep condolences," she said.
"Appreciated. How so?" I asked, suddenly alarmed.
"Hasn't someone died?" she gasped importantly, as though her pity was in short supply and I had wasted it. "Why have you entered such a melancholy state, if not?"
I hesitated, frowning at the black cloth now wrapped on my coat.
"Yes, madame, some have died. But that is not the nearest cause of my agitation. It is the address, this blasted address! Pardon my language, Madame Fouché. I must find Monsieur Auguste Duponte's residence soon, or leave Paris empty-handed and my actions shall be declared even more fantastic by my friends. That is why I wish to visit the postal office."
The next day, Madame Fouché brought me breakfast herself in lieu of the regular waiter. She badly hid a smile and handed me a piece of paper with some writing on it.
"What is this, madame?"
"Why, it is the address of Auguste Duponte, of course."
"I thank you infinitely, madame! How marvelous!" I was at once up and out the door. I was too excited to even pause to satisfy my curiosity as to how she had come upon it.
The place, not fifteen minutes away, was a once-bright yellow structure connected to a scarlet-and-blue house around a courtyard, a good example of the fashion of Paris's gingerbread architecture and colors. The neighborhood was more removed from cafés and shops than the first residence I had visited-a tranquillity conducive to the demands of ratiocination, I supposed. The concierge, a thick man with a hideous double mustache, instructed me to go up to Duponte's rooms. I paused at the bottom of the stairs and then returned to the concierge's room.
"Beg your pardon, monsieur. Would it not be preferable to Monsieur Duponte's tastes if I were announced first?"
The concierge took offense-whether because the suggestion questioned his competence or because the notion of announcing a visitor demeaned his role to that of a house servant, I did not know. The concierge's wife shrugged and said, with a touch of sympathy that she directed with an upturned glance to God, or the floor above, "How many visitors does he have?"
The odd exchange no doubt contributed to my nervous rambling when I first met the man himself in the doorway to his lodging. The employment of his skills was even more exclusive and rare than I had imagined. Parisians, to judge from the comment of the concierge's wife, did not think it worthwhile even to attempt to secure his help!
When Duponte opened the door to his chambers, I poured out an introduction. "I wrote you some letters-three-sent from the United States, as well as a telegraph directed to your previous address. The letters spoke of the American writer Edgar A. Poe. It is crucial that the matter of his death is investigated. This is why I have come, monsieur."
"I see," said Duponte, screwing his face into a grimace and pointing behind me, "that this hall lamp is out. It has been replaced many times, yet the flame is out."
"What? The lamp?"
That is how it went with our conversation. Once inside, I repeated the chronicle narrated in my letters, urged that we strike at once, and expressed my hope that he would accompany me back to America at his earliest convenience.
The rooms were very ordinary and oddly devoid of all but a few unimportant books; it felt uncommonly cold in there, even though it was summer. Duponte leaned back in his armchair. Suddenly, as though only now realizing I was addressing him rather than the blank wall behind, he said, "Why have you told this to me, monsieur?"
"Monsieur Duponte," I said, thunderstruck, "you are a celebrated genius of ratiocination. You are the only person known to me, perhaps the only person in the known world, capable of resolving this mystery!"
"You are very far mistaken," he said. "You are mad," he suggested.
"I? You are Auguste Duponte?" I responded accusingly.
"You are thinking of many years ago. The police asked me to review their papers from time to time. I'm afraid the journals of Paris were excited with their own notions and, in some cases, assigned me certain attributes to meet the appetites of the public imagination. Such tales were told…" (Wasn't there a flicker of something like pride in his eyes when he said this?) Without a blink or a breath, he overthrew the topic altogether. "What you should know, might I say, are the many worthwhile outings in Paris in the summer. You will want to see a concert at the Luxembourg Gardens. I might tell you where to see the finest flowers. And have you been to the palace at Versailles? You will be pleased by it-"
"The palace at Versailles? Versailles, you say? Please, Duponte! This is monstrously important! I am no idle caller. Nearly half the world has passed by my eyes to find you!"
He nodded sympathetically and said, "You certainly should sleep, then."
The next morning I awoke after a deep, uncomfortable July sleep. I had returned to the Corneille the night before in a state of dull shock at my reception by Duponte. But in the morning my disappointment faded, eased by the thought that perhaps it was my own weariness that had clouded my first talk with Duponte. It had been unwise and unseemly to burst in on him like that, tired and anxious, disheveled in my appearance, without even a letter of introduction.
This time I took a leisurely breakfast, which in Paris looks just like dinner minus soup-even beginning with oysters (though Cuvier himself could not put these small, blue, watery objects in any class of true oyster for an appetite born of the Chesapeake Bay). Arriving at Duponte's lodgings, I lingered near the concierge's chambers, and was glad to find that the concierge was out on business. His more talkative wife and a plump daughter sat mending a rug.
The older woman offered me a chair. She blushed easily at my smile, and so I tried to smile liberally in the pauses between my words to induce her cooperation. "Yesterday, madame, you mentioned that Duponte does not receive very many callers. Are there not those who visit him professionally?"
"Not in all the years since he has lived here."
"Had you not heard of Auguste Duponte before?"
"Why certainly!" she answered, as if I had questioned her very sanity. "But I did not think it could have been the same one. They say that man was of importance to the police; our boarder is a harmless fellow, but quite in a stupor much of the time, a dead-alive sort of a man. I presumed it was a brother or some distant relation of his family. No, I suppose he hasn't many acquaintances to visit him."