Isidore Musèt, gendarme, deposes that he was called to the house about three o'clock in the morning…

Yes: a name much like Alfred de Musset, the French poet, intimate companion of George Sand herself.

You have probably already guessed at the conclusion now ready to be drawn. My mind spiraled down without warning. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"-I can almost hear Poe chuckling cleverly at the real hidden mystery of this tale-was actually built as an allegory for the modern state of French literature. The references to George Sand (a.k.a. Dupin), Lamartine, Musset, and Dumas were the most prominent of the network of quiet, clever allusions.

If this was so, as I was instantly certain it was, Poe had not drawn on a real investigator to invent this hero, not Auguste Duponte, not Baron Claude Dupin, but had worked wholly from his head and his thoughts on the various literary personages. When I first found all this, I made bold to walk openly to a book stall and pillage various books; I found that not only was my recollection correct about George Sand's real name, not only was her given name Dupin, but also that she had lost a brother in infancy named-yes, but you probably already guessed-Auguste Dupin. Auguste Dupin. Would Poe have known this detail? What was Poe's message to us? He re-created her lost brother in the form of a genius against death and violence. Had Poe thought of his own brother William Henry, taken from him while poor Edgar was yet a boy?

In frantically reading again through "Rue Morgue" I found new meaning in the narrator's description of his living circumstance with C. Auguste Dupin: "We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone." Wasn't Poe trying to tell us? The astounding ratiocinator existed only in the imagination of the poet.

We have been informed by a "Lady Friend" of the brilliant and erratic writer Edgar A. Poe, Esq. that Mr. Poe's ingenious hero, C. Auguste Dupin, is closely modeled from an individual in actual life, similar in name and exploit, known for his great analytical powers… amp;c.

I thought of that newspaper extract, the one given to the athenaeum clerk by John Benson and then to me, with blurry vision and brewing contempt. How vague it was, these sentences, this flighty rumor that had taken me in. Who was this "lady friend" of Poe's? How was it we could know she should be trusted? Had she ever existed at all? I searched my mind for answers to these singular questions, but all the while the larger reality possessed me like an unholy spirit-it seemed to say, "Duponte was nothing more than a fraud, Poe is dead, and you too will die, will walk the ladder to the gallows, will die for wanting more than you already had."

Duponte was no more.

" Clark, are you unwell? Perhaps I should bring you to a doctor." Edwin was trying to shake me from my spell.

"Edwin," I gasped, with just this peculiar phraseology: "I am nearly dead."

I should say something more, by way of an interlude, about what began all this-Poe's death. For several chapters, I have mentioned knowing the Baron's full lecture on the subject, and it would be stingy of me to withhold it any longer from the reader. As I say, I remember every word of the Baron's notes. "‘Reynolds! Reynolds!' This shall ring in our ears as long as we remember Edgar Poe, for it was his valedictory address to us. And he might have just said: ‘This is how I died, Lord. This is how I died, friends and fellow sufferers of the earth. Now find out why…'"

Though the Baron's account of Poe's death would have been ruinous to the truth, in some manner I regret that he did not deliver his words aloud. For now you cannot receive a full description of what it would have been like-the Baron marching back and forth on the stage as though it were his courtroom in his better days. Imagine the Baron, flashing his unmistakably shining teeth, spreading his hands wide and proclaiming the mystery solved:

29

POE HAD COME to Baltimore at the wrong time. It had not been his plan to visit Baltimore, for he was on his way to his New York cottage to fetch his poor mother-in-law and start his new life. But some ruffians on the ship from Richmond to Baltimore harassed the poet and probably stole his money, so Poe missed the train from Baltimore to travel north. This is shown by the fact that Poe had earned money lecturing in Richmond, but was not found with any just a few days later. Stranded in Baltimore, he noticed himself being followed by the thieves and attempted to take refuge in the house of a kind friend, the editor Dr. N. C. Brooks. However, Dr. Brooks was not home and these craven ruffians, not knowing this and worrying that Poe would report their actions to someone inside, recklessly started a fire that nearly burned down the Brooks home. Poe barely managed to escape with his life.

The poet had money enough left for a small room at the United States Hotel, but not yet enough to take another train to New York or to Philadelphia, where a lucrative literary task awaited him. His new literary magazine, to be called The Stylus, was about to trumpet a new era of genius in American letters-but his enemies wished to stop him from exposing the mediocrity of their own writings. Poe therefore had begun to assume a false name, E. S. T. Grey. He even directed his own sweet mother-in-law-his cherished protector-to write him by this name in Philadelphia "for fear I should not get the letter," for he worried that his adversaries would seek to intercept any letters of support or subscriptions to his daring enterprise. Nor did he wish them to know he was going to Philadelphia, certain that they would interfere with his task and destroy his attempt to raise money for his journal.

He found himself trapped in Baltimore during a heated election week. Poe was a literary man. He was above all this. He was above the petty and the grievous actions of politics and of ordinary man. But to the everyday rascal, the great genius is mere fodder.

Poe was easy prey. He had been traveling under his new alias, E. S. T. Grey. On the evening before election day, in the dismal weather that had plagued the city that week, he was snatched from the street. Here began the murder of Poe, perhaps one of the longest murders in history, certainly the longest and most pathetic in the history of literary men. The saddest since the poet Otway was strangled by a few crumbs of bread, the most iniquitous since Marlowe was stabbed through the head, into the very organ of his genius; and all of this turned Edgar Poe into the most slandered man since Lord Byron.

Worse still, Edgar Poe's family-those very people in the world who should have protected him-were among those to make him a target and a victim. One George Herring, who may be sitting among us today, oversaw the Fourth Ward Whigs-and it was at the very place Poe was found, Ryan's Fourth Ward hotel, that these Whigs met. George Herring was a relation to Poe [here the Baron was barking somewhat up the wrong tree, as Henry Herring was a cousin of Poe's by marriage, and it was Henry, not Poe, who was related to George Herring, but to let him continue…] and as a near relation knew Poe was vulnerable. It was not a coincidence, ladies and gentlemen protectors of the names of genius, that Henry Herring was one of the first men to approach Poe when it was announced he was stricken-that Dr. Snodgrass was surprised to find Henry Herring there even before he sent word to him! For the Herrings had selected Poe as a victim-they knew him; he was not to them "E. S. T. Grey." George Herring knew from Henry that Edgar Poe was unpredictable when forced to take alcohol or other intoxicants, and determined that he was a vulnerable person to join the wretched voting "coop." Knowing that Poe was likely to have severe side effects, George later sent for Henry to usher Poe away to the hospital in order to avoid trouble for the Fourth Ward Whigs. Henry Herring, we know, still resented Poe for having attempted to court his daughter, Elizabeth Herring, with love poems when the two cousins were young at the time Poe lived in Baltimore. Here was Henry Herring's small-minded revenge for an outpouring of pure-hearted playful affection from a young poet.