The two had spent the evening together, drinking, and (this is how the story went, anyway) Poe had gently pumped Lewis’s grandfather for stories of the bizarre, of the occult and of the morbid. The worldly-wise traveler was glad to oblige, pouring out believe-it-or-not fragments that the writer later turned into The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In both those stories, peering out from between the atrocities, was the peculiar genius of C. Auguste Dupin.
C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s vision of the perfect detective: calm, rational and brilliantly perceptive. The narratives in which he appeared rapidly became well-known, and through them Dupin became a fictional celebrity, without anyone in America knowing that Dupin was a real person.
He was the brother of Lewis’s grandfather. Lewis’s great uncle was C. Auguste Dupin.
And his greatest case — the Murders in the Rue Morgue —they too were based on fact. The slaughters that occurred in the story had actually taken place. Two women had indeed been brutally killed in the Rue Morgue. They were, as Poe had written, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye. Both women of good reputation, who lived quiet and unsensational lives. So much more horrible then to find those lives so brutally cut short. The daughter’s body had been thrust up the chimney; the body of the mother was discovered in the yard at the back of the house, her throat cut with such savagery that her head was all but sawn off. No apparent motive could be found for the murders, and the mystery further deepened when all the occupants of the house claimed to have heard the voice of the murderer speaking in a different language. The Frenchman was certain the voice had spoken Spanish, the Englishman had heard German, the Dutchman thought it was French. Dupin, in his investigations, noted that none of the witnesses actually spoke the language they claimed to have heard from the lips of the unseen murderer. He concluded that the language was no language at all, but the wordless voice of a wild beast.
An ape in fact, a monstrous orang-outang from the East Indian Islands. Its tawny hairs had been found in the grip of the slain Madame L’Espanaye. Only its strength and agility made the appalling fate of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye plausible. The beast had belonged to a Maltese sailor, had escaped, and run riot in the bloody apartment on the Rue Morgue.
That was the bones of the story.
Whether true or not the tale held a great romantic appeal for Lewis. He liked to think of his great uncle logically pacing his way through the mystery, undistressed by the hysteria and horror around him. He thought of that calm as essentially European; belonging to a lost age in which the light of reason was still valued, and the worst horror that could be conceived of was a beast with a cut-throat razor.
Now, as the twentieth century ground through its last quarter, there were far greater atrocities to be accounted for, all committed by human beings. The humble orang-outang had been investigated by anthropologists and found to be a solitary herbivore; quiet and philosophical. The true monsters were far less apparent, and far more powerful. Their weapons made razors look pitiful; their crimes were vast. In some ways Lewis was almost glad to be old and close to leaving the century to its own devices. Yes, the snow froze his marrow. Yes, to see a young girl with a face of a goddess uselessly stirred his desires. Yes, he felt like an observer now instead of a participator.
But it had not always been that way.
In 1937, in the very room at number eleven, Quai de Bourbon, where he now sat, there had been experience enough. Paris was still a pleasure-dome in those days, studiously ignoring rumours of war, and preserving, though at times the strain told, an air of sweet naïveté. They had been careless then; in both senses of the word, living endless lives of perfect leisure.
It wasn’t so of course. The lives had not been perfect, or endless. But for a time — a summer, a month, a day — it had seemed nothing in the world would change.