The Poe Shadow Read online

  “But Monsieur Duponte…please…”

  It was only then that I could see what he had been reading so attentively: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The pamphlet I had left for him. Then he pushed me by the arm into the hall and closed the door. My heart sank fast.

  In the hall, I pressed my eye against the space between the door and the frame. Duponte was sitting up on the bed. His silhouette was surprisingly expressive as he continued to read. With each page he turned, it seemed his posture improved by just that much, and the shadow of his figure seemed to swell.

  I waited a few moments in bewildered silence. Then I knocked lightly and tried to appeal to his reason.

  I knocked harder until I was pounding; then I pulled on the handle until the concierge appeared and pried me from the door while threatening to call for the police. Monsieur Montor, back in Washington, had warned that under no circumstances should I allow the police to find me in some act of disturbance. “They are by no means like the police here in America,” he said. “When they set themselves against someone…Well!”

  I surrendered for the moment and allowed myself to be removed down the stairs.

  Speaking through keyholes and windows, rapping the door, pushing notes into the apartment…these were activities in the long painful days after this. I trailed Duponte when he took walks through Paris, but he ignored me. Once, when I followed in Duponte’s steps to the door of his lodging house, he stopped in the doorway and said, “Do not allow entrance to this impertinent young gentlemen again.”

  Though he was looking at me, he was speaking to his concierge. Duponte turned away and continued upstairs.

  I learned when the concierge tended to be out, and that his wife was content to let me through with no questions for a few sous. There is no time to lose, I wrote to Duponte in one of my unread notes to his door that would invariably be slipped back into the hall.

  During this time, another letter arrived from Peter back home. His tone had noticeably improved, and he urged that I should return immediately to Baltimore and that I would be welcomed back having finished with my wild oats. He even sent a letter of credit for a generous amount of money at the French bank so I could arrange my trip back without delay. I returned this directly to him, of course, and I wrote back that I would accomplish what I had come to do. I would, at length, successfully deliver Poe from those who would destroy him, and I would do all credit to the name of our legal practice by achieving this promised goal.

  Peter wrote subsequently that he was now very seriously considering coming to Paris to find me and bring me back, even if he had to drag me home with his two hands.

  I still collected articles on Poe’s death from the reading rooms that carried American papers. Generally speaking, newspaper descriptions of Poe had worsened. Moralists used his example to compensate for the lenience shown in the past toward men of genius who had been praised after death despite “dissolute lives.” A new low came when a merciless scribbler, one Rufus Griswold, in order to make a penny off this public sentiment, published a biography malevolently brimming with libel and hate toward the poet. Poe’s reputation sank further until it was entirely coated in mud.

  Occasionally amid this mad fumble to dissect Poe, a new and important detail arose illuminating his final weeks. It had been shown, for instance, that Poe had planned to go to Philadelphia shortly before the time he was discovered in Ryan’s hotel in Baltimore. He was to receive one hundred dollars to edit a book of poems for a Mrs. St. Leon Loud. This information, however, was met with the usual mystification of the press, as it was not known whether Poe did go to Philadelphia or not.

  Stranger still was the letter shown to the press by Maria Clemm, Poe’s former mother-in-law, which she had received from him directly before he left Richmond, telling her of his plans regarding Philadelphia. It was Poe’s last letter to his beloved protector. “I am still unable to send you even one dollar—but keep up heart—I hope that our troubles are nearly over,” read Poe’s tenderhearted letter to her. “Write immediately in reply & direct to Philadelphia.” Then he went on: “For fear I should not get the letter, sign no name & address it to E. S. T. Grey Esqre. God bless & protect you my own darling Muddy.” It was signed “Your own Eddy.”

  E. S. T. Grey Esqre? Why would Poe be using a false name in the weeks before his death? Why did he have such fear that Muddy’s letter would not reach him in Philadelphia? E. S. T. Grey! The papers that reported this seemed almost to be grinning at the apparent madness of it.

  My investigations seemed more urgent than ever, yet here I was in Paris, and Duponte would not even speak with me.

  8

  HAD THIS ALL been a tremendous mistake, a product of some delirious compulsion to be involved in something outside my usual scope and responsibility? If only I had been content with the warmth and reliability of Hattie and Peter! Hadn’t there been a time in childhood when I needed no more than the swirling hearth of Glen Eliza and my trusted playmates? Why turn my heart and my plans over to a man like Duponte, encased alone in a moral prison so far from my own home?

  I determined to combat my gloominess and occupy myself by visiting the places that, according to the advice of my Paris guidebook, “must be seen by the stranger.”

  First, I toured the palace at the Champs-Élysées, where Louis-Napoleon, president of the Republic, lived in rich splendor. At the great hall of the Champs-Élysées, a stout servant in laced livery accepted my hat and offered a wooden counter in its place.

  In one of the first suites of rooms in which the public is permitted, there was the chance to see Louis-Napoleon himself—Prince Napoleon. This was not the first time I had glimpsed the president of the Republic and nephew of the once-great Emperor Napoleon, who was still the people’s favorite symbol of France. A few weeks earlier, Louis-Napoleon was riding through the streets down Avenue de Marigny, reviewing his scarlet-and-blue-clad soldiers. Duponte had watched with interest, and (as he had still tolerated my companionship then) I had accompanied him.

  Crowds on the street cheered, and those dressed most expensively yelled out with passion, “Vive Napoleon!” At these moments, when the president was but an indistinct figure on his horse surrounded by guards, it was easy to see a resemblance, though faint, to the other sovereign Napoleon parading through the cheers of forty years earlier. Some said it was Louis-Napoleon’s name alone that had recently elected the president-prince. It was reported that illiterate laborers in the poorer countryside of France thought they were voting for the original Napoleon Bonaparte (by now dead some three decades)!

  But there were also twenty or so men, with faces, hands, and throats stained in black soot, repeating, in frightful chants, “Vive la République!” One of my neighbors in the crowd said they were sent by the “Red party” to protest. How shouting “Long live the Republic” was considered a protest or insult in an official Republic was beyond my understanding of the current political state. I suppose it was their tone that made the words threatening, and that made the term “Republic” fearful to the followers of this president, as if they were saying instead, “This is no Republic, for with this man it is a sham, but one day we shall overthrow it and have a true Republic without him!”

  Here at his palace he seemed a more contemplative man, quite pale, mild, and thoroughly a gentleman. Napoleon was flushed with satisfaction at the crowd of mostly uniformed people around him, many of whose breasts sparkled with impressively gilded decorations. Yet, I observed, too, a painful sense of awkwardness elicited by the reverence with which the president-prince was treated—one moment a monarch, the next an elected president.

  Just then, Prefect of Police Delacourt came in from the next chamber and conferred quietly with President Napoleon. I was surprised to notice the prefect glaring quite impolitely in the direction in which I stood.

  That unwanted attention expedited my departure from the Champs-Élysées. There was still the palace of Versailles to see, and my guidebook advised leaving first
thing in the morning when traveling there, but I decided that it was not too late in the day to enjoy a full visit to the suburbs of the city. Besides, Duponte had advised me to visit Versailles—perhaps if he knew I had he would be more inclined to speak to me.

  Once the railroad tracks exit Paris, the metropolis abruptly disappears, giving itself over to continuous vast open country. Women of all ages, wearing carnation-colored bonnets and laboring in the fields, briefly met my gaze as our train rattled by them.

  We stopped at the Versailles railway station. The crowd nearly picked me up and carried me into a stream of hats and trimmed bonnets that ended under the iron gates of the great palace of Versailles, where the running water of the fountains could be heard at play.

  Thinking back, I suppose it must have begun while I was touring the palace’s suites. I felt the sting of general discomfort, as when wearing a coat a bit too thin for the first winter day. I attributed my uneasiness to the crowds. The mob that had driven away the Duchess d’Angoulême from these walls was surely not as boisterous as this one. As my guide pointed out which battles were depicted in the various paintings, I was distracted by feeling so many sets of eyes on me.

  “In this gallery,” said my guide, “Louis the Fourteenth displayed all the grandeur of royalty. The court was so splendid that even in this enormous chamber the king would be pressed round by the courtiers of the day.” We were in the grand gallery of Louis XIV, where seventeen arched windows overlooking the gardens faced seventeen mirrors across from them. I wondered whether the notion of a monarch was more attractive now that the late revolution had vanquished it.

  I think my guide, whom I had hired at a franc an hour, had become tired of my distractedness over the course of the afternoon. I fear he thought I was ignorant of the finer qualities of history and art. The truth was, my distinct sense of being observed had been growing steadily—and in that hall of mirrors prodigal gazes were everywhere.

  I began to take note of those people who recurred in the different suites. I had convinced my guide to modify our path through the palace—an alien idea to him, clearly. Meanwhile, he did not help my mental state when he turned to the topic of foreigners in Paris.

  “They would know much about how you’re spending your time here—you being a young energetic man,” he mused, perhaps looking for a way to vex me.

  “Who would know about me, monsieur?”

  “The police and the government, of course. There is nothing that happens in Paris that is not known to someone.”

  “But, monsieur, I fear there is nothing so interesting enough about me.”

  “They would hear all from the masters of your hotel, from the commissionnaires who watch you leave and return, from fiacre drivers, sellers of vegetables, wine-shop masters. Yes, monsieur, I suppose there is nothing you can do that they cannot discover.”

  In my current state of nervousness, this commentary did not endear me. I paid him what I owed and dismissed him from his service. Without my guide I could now move faster, weaving through the slow gatherings of mobs in each chamber. I noticed behind me some commotion, men huffing and women exclaiming over some disturbance. It seemed some of the tourists were complaining about someone who was rudely pushing through the crowd. I turned into the next chamber, not waiting to see who had been the culprit of the strife. Meanwhile, I dodged every figure and expensive furnishing in my path until I reached the palace’s immense gardens.

  “Here he is! He’s the one plowing through the place!”

  As I heard this voice, a hand caught my arm. It was a guard.

  “I?” I protested. “Why, I was not pushing anyone!”

  After it was reported to the guard that the man rudely pushing through was spotted behind us, I was released into the gardens and quickly created distance between the guard and myself in the event he changed his mind. I would soon wish I had not left the safety of being at his side.

  I thought back to Madame Fouché warning me about the dangerous areas of Paris. “There are men and women who will rob you and then throw you over the bridge into the Seine,” she had said. It was from this population that the revolutionaries in March 1848 drew most of their “soldiers” to force out King Louis-Philippe and establish the Republic in the name of the people. A hackney cab driver told me that during that uprising he saw one of these villains, surrounded by police and about to be shot, yell, “Je suis bien vengé!” and remove fifteen or sixteen human tongues from his pockets. He tossed them into the air before dying, and they landed on the shoulders and hats of the police, and even in one policeman’s mouth, which had dropped open in disbelief at the disgusting sight.

  I was in the plush sanctuary of Versailles’s immaculate gardens, not in one of these neighborhoods of tongue-cutters. Still, I had the sensation that each step I made was being marked. The sharp hedges and trees of the gardens revealed fragments of faces. Passing rows of statues, vases, and fountains, I came to a standstill at the God of Day, a hideous deity rising up from a splashing fountain of dolphins and sea-monsters. How much more secure I might have been inside the suites of the palace, surrounded by hordes of visitors and my busybody guide! It was then that a man appeared in front and snatched my arm.

  Here is what I remember after that. I was inside a rickety carriage riding over loose stones. Next to me was the face I last saw before losing consciousness in the gardens of Versailles—a thick, rigid face carved below an emotionless frown. A face I had also noticed in several of the suites of the palace at Versailles. This had been my shadow! I licked my teeth and gums and found it was still present; my tongue, I mean.

  Did I think before I reached for the door of the carriage? I cannot recall. I threw myself onto it and tumbled to the road. When I pushed myself to my feet, another coach was barreling at me. It swerved and narrowly squeezed between me and the vehicle that had been carrying me. “Gare!” growled its driver, who seemed to me only a large set of yellow teeth, a slouched hat, and a floppy collar. A lean dog howled from that carriage’s window.

  I ran for the fields that sloped down from the road. Beyond that was open country.

  Then my captor was out of the coach and starting toward me, terribly fast for so bulky a man. I felt a quick, decisive blow to my head.

  My hands were stiff behind my back. I was looking around—or should I say up. Upon waking, I found myself in a wide trench indented some twenty feet into the earth. Above that were towering walls; they were nothing like the petite rows of buildings and homes on every Paris street. It was as though I had been brought to another world, and a monstrous silence stretched around us as in the widest desert.

  “Where am I? I demand to know!” I shouted, though I could see no one to shout to.

  I heard a voice mutter something in French. I craned my head but could not move enough to see behind me. Only a shadow fell over me, and I believed it was that of my captor.

  “Where are we, you blackguard?” I demanded. He made no indication of hearing. He just stood, waiting. Only when the villain in question came from the other side did I realize that this shadow belonged to someone else.

  Finally, the shadow moved and he came around to face me. But it was no man.

  Here she was, wearing a fresh white bonnet and a plain dress, she who could have been in one of the Parisian gardens. She stopped in front of my chair and leaned over me with what seemed to be caring protectiveness, looking at me with deep-set eyes—in fact, eyes so deep they seemed to reach to the back of her head. She seemed no older than a girl.

  “Stop squeaking.”

  “Who are you?” I whispered, hoarse from hollering.

  “Bonjour,” said the girl, who then turned her back and walked away.

  I returned the greeting, though thinking any attempt at cordialness odd under the circumstances.

  “You fool,” admonished my first captor, seeming to wish she not hear, as though he would be blamed for my error. “That is her name. Bonjour!”

  “Bonjour?” I repeated. Then
I realized I had seen her before, another time I was in jeopardy. “At Café Belge! I saw you there, holding a basket! Why were you there?”

  “Here we are!” a new voice boomed in English, tinged with a French accent but otherwise perfectly fluent. “Is it very necessary to have our welcomed guest from the great United States so restrained?”

  The answer was demure enough to identify the latest arrival as the leader. My captor moved closer to him and spoke confidentially, as though I had suddenly lost the power to hear. “He swooned at Versailles, and then he ran from the coach, leaping out the door like a madman. He nearly killed himself—”

  “No matter. Here we are all safe. Bonjour, please?” The girl agilely untied the ropes and released my wrists.

  I had not up to this point been able to see this new arrival, only glimpses of a long white cloak and light pantaloons. With my hands free, I stood and faced him.

  “My apologies for going to such lengths, Monsieur Clark,” he said, waving his bejeweled hand at our surroundings as though the whole thing was an accident. “But I am afraid these unfortunate fortresses are among the few places within the environs of Paris where I can still travel with some tranquillity. Most importantly—”

  I interrupted. “Now see here! Your rogue has ill-treated me and now—But in the first place, I would like to know where exactly you have had me taken and why…!” I choked on my words, staring at him through a spark of sudden recognition.

  “Most importantly, as I say,” he continued warmly, a grin pressing out the olive skin of his face, “we finally meet in person.”

  He took my hand, which fell limp when the truth struck me.

  “Dupin!” I cried out in disbelief.

  9

  YOU WILL RECALL that there were five or six other men that I seriously examined as potential inspirations for the Dupin character before eliminating them in favor of Duponte.