Dupin realized that unless he could deliver the killer to the police with irrefutable evidence of his crimes — or killed the clever madman himself — more women would die. In addition, he knew that he had little time to act, as he anticipated the killer’s scheme was to implicate him in his crimes, planting clews that must eventually lead to the inevitable (although false) conclusion that Dupin was the murderer.
The Chevalier’s analytical skills were not limited to unraveling mysteries of the past, but extended to predicting what, following a certain course of action, an individual would do next. This, he insisted, was not a matter of intuition, but of observation; it was a purely scientific exercise, and would always be successful so long as the initial observations were sufficient and correct. To me, this seemed to contradict the notion of free will, suggesting human beings were little more than mechanical objects, forced to move in a particular way once their springs had been wound, but his results were such that I could never argue. When he declared that he had worked out precisely when, where, and who the killer would next attack, I knew he must be right. The only problem was how to ensure that the police arrived on the scene before the girl was killed, but when Reclus’ murderous intentions were still clear enough that his arrest and subsequent conviction would prove inevitable.
To the public, Dupin’s skills could seem magical, yet he always insisted they were purely rational. And, in the past, in my previous stories about Monsieur Dupin, I have delighted in explaining the chain of reasoning that led him to feats of understanding which seemed like clairvoyance, mind-reading, or some other of those super-human skills sometimes displayed by people who have been mesmerized.
But I have never written about the case I might once have called “The Devil of Paris,” never given all the details of what was to be C. Auguste Dupin’s last case. Yes, he solved it, but at a great cost.
Of course, it was not his fault the police arrived too late to save the life of Dupin’s own cousin. At least they were in time to catch Reclus red-handed, and none of his influential friends were able to save him from the guillotine. In vain did I argue with my old friend that he had performed the great public service of protecting any number of young women from the ravages of “the beast”; sadly he could never allay the guilt he felt about focussing the attention of the murderer on his cousin and the other three blameless young women whose misfortune it was to be connected to men with whom Dupin had commercial dealings. In vain did I argue he could not possibly be held to blame for the actions of that evil creature. His reply was that he should have known how Reclus would take his revenge, that he should not have given the police the killer’s name without the evidence they needed to arrest him.
His partial failure weighed upon his conscience, and turned him away from the police. They had let him down as much as he had let down the last four victims of Reclus, and henceforth he would take no interest in contemporary crime or current affairs, but would instead dedicate all his mental capacities to questions of historic and philosophical matters. He instructed me never to write about his final case, and although I no longer feel bound by that injunction, neither do I wish to revisit those old days and write of his solving of the case of the beast — or devil — of Paris in the sort of detail I devoted to his earlier exploits. I merely raise the subject as a reminder to my readers, for its bearing on what would transpire later, the subject of this story.
Had I remained in Paris, I sometimes think things might have turned out differently for Dupin — but it was not to be. Even as my old friend was becoming more determinedly entrenched in his studies, retreating from the present day, I received a letter from my father, summoning me home with some urgency to help with the family business. With a feeling of profound melancholy, I bid farewell to the Chevalier, begging him not to forget me, and to write often.
I had, I think, half a dozen letters from him after my return to Baltimore, each one a superb, if not entirely comprehensible, essay on a subject of deepest obscurity, such as the origins of the Kartvelian languages; the meaning of the gigantic stone heads of Easter Island; the manner in which eels reproduce; and a new interpretation of the Mayan calendar. Apart from mentioning certain rare volumes he had been fortunate enough to acquire for his library, he made little reference to the details of his quotidian life, although from the regular changes of address I understood his fortunes were continuing to decline, as he moved to ever-poorer quarters.
That is, until the last letter, in which he mentioned, in a post-script, that he was about to be married and would shortly be departing Paris for his wife’s country estate. He mentioned no word of love, nor did he describe the beauty or charm of his intended, although he did inform me that the future Madame Dupin came from a family equal in age and nobility to his own, but far superior in wealth. She had also inherited a library of impressive size. I perceived at once that this was no love match, but a practical arrangement by which Monsieur Dupin might subsidize his bibliophilia.
Unfortunately, he neglected to include his new address, or even his fiancée’s name or the location of her library. Surely he intended to inform me once he was settled into his new home, but within days of receiving that last letter, I found myself in a tricky financial situation, and was forced to depart the city abruptly without leaving a forwarding address. Alas, this set an unhappy pattern for the next two years, and as I lived a vagabond existence and moved from Brooklyn to Boston, then from Philadelphia to Poughkeepsie, I could only scour the newspapers for news from France, and quiz any recent visitors for word of him, but to no avail.
Until, at last, one day, in the pages of the New York Herald, I glimpsed the name of C. Auguste Dupin almost buried in a dense column of black type devoted to a series of shocking deaths — that series of hideous, inhuman killings dubbed by our press “the French Wolf-Man Murders.” Although he had no connection with the police or this case (as I discovered after reading the entire article), Dupin’s name was invoked by the journalist who fancied he saw some similarities to the murders in the Rue Morgue, and thought the genius who had solved that strange mystery would also be able to explain this one.
At that point, there had been two deaths, within weeks of each other, in the same region of France. One young woman had been bloodily slaughtered in a lonely forest, and the other died in her own bed. Both had had their throats ripped out, apparently by some fierce beast. The girl in the forest had been presumed to have fallen prey to a wolf (very rare in that part of the country, yet presumably not quite extinct) until the second killing, which apart from the setting, seemed almost identical to the first. But how had a wolf come to enter and leave a young lady’s bedroom without attracting attention? Sensationalist newspapers and superstitious public alike spoke of that creature which is a man in daylight and a wolf by night: the were-wolf, or loup garou.