I put particular emphasis on this last phrase, but it had no effect on the listener.
“Poe was taken to Washington hospital,” I continued, “where he experienced exceeding tremors of the limbs, and active delirium. When questioned in reference to his family, his answers were incoherent. When asked where he lived, he could not say. Towards the end, in his stupor and torment, he called out for ‘Reynolds! Reynolds!’ — which onlookers took to refer to the navigator of the South Seas, an inspiration for The Narrative for Gordon Pym — until his poor soul was finally at rest.” I looked up. “But he is not at rest, monsieur — is he?”
Dupin had sunk back in his seat, the wings of which served to conceal his face in shadow. He placed his fingertips together in a steeple.
“Yes, a man was found drunk in a gutter,” I said. “But he called out ‘Reynolds’ in his delirium because that was his own name. And nobody would listen. He was identified by the Malacca cane borrowed by Poe from Dr. John Carter simply because the object had been placed in his hands by another. On the evidence of witnesses themselves this substitute was more ‘haggard’ yet more ‘bloated’ than Poe (perhaps the word ‘fatter’ would be more accurate) except Dr. Snodgrass recognized his friend’s clothes, albeit that they hardly fitted the occupant. Of course they didn’t. Because the man was not Poe. Poe was alive. Is alive.”
Who is it? squawked the parrot.
“And the mystery of the missing moustache is self-evident,” I said. “For one can dress a double to look like one’s self, but one cannot force him to grow facial hair he does not have. And so you shaved off your own.”
“Bravo!” Dupin laughed and clapped his hands. We had been conversing in French but he spoke English now for the first time, with the musical lilt of a Southern gentleman. “Many have tried but none has got so far! Le Bon, the cognac! This is a cause for celebration! Chevalier Auguste Dupin has met his match!” The dapper negro emerged from the gloom and poured me an ample glassful. “I do not partake myself.”
“The stuff can be the death of you.”
“I fear water will be the death of me now.” Poe grinned, holding up a glass into which he had poured clear liquid from a jug. “A ‘way to watery death’ is not quite the poetic thing, is it? I quite resist banality, in death as in life.”
“And the death of the flower girl?” I made it quite clear in my tone that I had not forgotten the purpose of my visit. “What is the poetry in that, sir?”
He avoided my question.
“Let me first tell you of the last weeks on this earth of Edgar Allan Poe.” Whilst he spoke the manservant Le Bon circled the room lighting candles. “It had been a year of wild dullness…. I was drumming up support for a five-dollar magazine and trying to convert my Philistine countrymen to literature — an impossible task. I came to the conclusion I could only raise money by lecturing again: with tickets at 50¢ I could clear $100 — if sober. So, with the ferocious spirit of the true dipsomaniac I took the oath of abstinence, prostrated myself at the Sons of Temperance: a solid challenge to my cravings — but, alas, unattainable…. The word ‘teetotal’ had hardly wettened my tongue before — I fell, spectacularly…. My lecture was stolen. I descended further into debt: but these are excuses. The true drinker repels the very idea of his own happiness. We deem the prospect of solace intolerable.
“I had to leave Richmond on business, but the real reason was a desperation to escape. Escape my own shabby dreams, and, ringing like a foul tintinnabulation, the doctor’s warning after Philadelphia that one more drop of the hard stuff would see me to the bone yard. Truth was, my life had become all pose and no prose. Fancy-mongering was wearisome now. I was a performing dog wandering the miasmic stars of Eureka. So I propped up the steamer’s bar, wishing most the while a maelstrom would suck it down, and me with it.
“As you said, the streets of Baltimore were en fête with election fever. I went unnoticed in streets teeming with drunks filthier drunk than me. I was on a spree. Maybe my last. I was determined to put and end to this life, little knowing I would start a new one.
“Outside a tavern a man pestered me for a game of cards. He wanted to win back money he had lost, because he was sailing for Europe the next day and didn’t want to arrive penniless. The man was drunk, drunker than me — so drunk he was not even aware that, a little thinner in the girth and thicker in the cheeks, he was my double. I did not even remark upon it and I drank with him until he passed out in an alley. I thought he was dead. I felt his pulse.
“Then, with a thundering heart, I saw an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent my life, if I had the audacity to carry it through. He, being dead, had nothing to lose, and I everything — everything to gain. I took a ticket from his inside pocket, made out in the name of ‘Reynolds’: his passage across the Atlantic. I changed clothes, taking all his identifying belongings and giving him mine, finally leaning the Malacca cane I had borrowed from Dr. Carter against his knee: the final piece of evidence that this dishevelled inebriate was Poe.
“I took the ocean crossing, shaving off my moustache and cutting my hair lest someone identify me. No-one did. On arrival I read of my own demise, of poor Reynolds calling out his name again and again: my doppelganger, my William Wilson calling for his own identity to be restored, in life, in death — but, alas, it never was.
“He was interred at the Presbyterian cemetery on Lafayette and Green Street. My premature burial. I read the despicable death notices penned by Griswold, twisting the facts, emphasizing my bad points and down-playing my good, but I could hardly react to any attack on my former identity without exposing my new one. As it was, I feared someone might uncover my ploy, the police or the Reynolds family, and come looking for me, so I changed my name again on arrival.”
“To Dupin?” I said. “Your most famous character?”
Poe shook his head. “Not at first. To begin with I stayed with my friend Charles Baudelaire, the poet. He had read many of my works before I died. For that reason, and my innate Francophilia, I gravitated to Paris. He’d translated my piece on Mesmeric Revelation in La Liberté de Penser. He saw me as a mystic and visionary and the inventor of skillfully engineered tales, and had written to tell me as much, so it was fitting I turned to him in my hour of need. He kept me under lock and key in rooms at the Hôtel Pimodon, always in penury over the years, partly because he kept me afloat too.
“We had certain similarities. His stepfather General Aupick he despised, as I despised mine. He endured a life of money troubles, as had I. He was afflicted by bouts of pessimism, as was I. Arrogant, as was I…. But his vie libre was also a vie libertine, centred on the taverns of the Latin Quarter. He hated solitude. I welcomed it. To begin with I ventured outside rarely, if at all. I helped him with his satirical contributions to the Corsaire-Satan, and later with Les Fleurs du Mal. He in turn brought me the world, by way of the Café Tabourey or the Théâtre de l’Odéon.
“After a while he introduced me to his Bohemian cronies as ‘Dupin’ — his little joke. The name wasn’t known in France because in the first translation of Rue Morgue the detective was re-named ‘Bernier’ for some reason unknown to either of us. And ‘duping’, you see — the pun was deliciously appealing.