The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  The following morning, the well-rested Dupin launches his investigation in earnest. With only police reports and newspaper accounts to guide him, he pledges to solve the mystery from the solitary comfort of his armchair. Dupin observes, in commencing his study of the public accounts, that he must “bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation—to make a point—than to further the cause of truth.” Therefore it would be a mistake, he suggests, to take these accounts at face value. With that in mind, he begins to search for the truth behind the rhetoric.

  The chief difficulty of the Marie Rogêt investigation, Dupin says, will be the “commonplace” nature of the crime, in contrast with the extraordinary circumstances of the Rue Morgue murder. In the earlier case, the seemingly inexplicable details—the locked room; the inhuman strength and agility of the murderer—were the ones that hastened its solution. By contrast, the comparatively routine aspects of Marie Rogêt’s death will make it far more difficult to solve. “This is an ordinary, although an atrocious instance of crime,” Dupin insists. “There is nothing peculiarly outré about it. You will observe that, for this reason, the mystery has been considered easy, when, for this reason, it should have been considered difficult of solution.” It has been all too simple, Dupin goes on to say, for the police to imagine various modes and motives for the murder. As a result, they have fallen into the trap of assuming that one of these many theories must be correct. “But the ease with which these variable fancies were entertained,” he explains, “and the very plausibility which each assumed, should have been understood as indicative rather of the difficulties than of the facilities which must attend elucidation.”

  In Dupin’s view, the real solution will be found in the details which do not at first appear to fit: “I have before observed that it is by prominences above the plane of the ordinary that reason feels her way, if at all, in her search for the true.” The essential question, Dupin contends, is not “what has occurred?” but rather “What has occurred that has never occurred before?”

  Searching for these “prominences,” Dupin gives his attention to the prevalent theories of the French newspapers and the police, effectively deflating each one as he holds it up to scrutiny. By extension, Poe undertakes to shoot down the efforts of the New York investigators, and the pet theories of the major newspaper editors. Poe appears to take particular relish in dissecting the work of James Gordon Bennett and the “gang of ruffians” theory. It is impossible, Dupin states, that the crime could have been committed by a gang. For proof, he points to the evidence of a violent struggle at the murder thicket, and the signs that the body had been dragged along the ground after death. These traces, he notes, had been interpreted as clear evidence of a group of attackers. “But do they not rather demonstrate the absence of a gang?” Dupin asks. “What struggle could have taken place—what struggle so violent and enduring as to have left its traces in all directions—between a weak and defenseless girl and the gang of ruffians imagined? The silent grasp of a few rough arms and all would have been over.”

  Moreover, Dupin continues, at the conclusion of the crime a gang would simply have carried the body away to the river, rather than take the time to fashion a cloth hitch and drag the corpse along the ground. By the same token, a gang would not have left articles of clothing behind; there would have been extra hands available to gather up the incriminating evidence. The crime scene can only be understood, Dupin observes, “if we imagine but one violator.” A single man would have had a struggle to overpower his victim, and would have had to resort to a hitch to dispose of the body, leaving himself too burdened to gather up the stray articles of clothing that were strewn on the ground. If any final evidence is needed, Dupin says, it can be found in the “altogether irresistible” weight of the large reward offered for information about the crime. “It is not to be imagined for a moment,” he declares, “that some member of a gang of low ruffians, or of any body of men would not long ago have betrayed his accomplices. Each one of a gang, so placed, is not so much greedy of reward, or anxious for escape, as fearful of betrayal. He betrays eagerly and early that he may not himself be betrayed. That the secret has not been divulged is the very best of proof that it is, in fact, a secret. The horrors of this dark deed are known only to one living human being, and to God.”

  Before abandoning the subject, Dupin even takes time to address the memorable remark about the deed having been carried out by “fellows without pocket handkerchiefs.” The comment, he explains, was intended to establish that the crime had been carried out by “the lowest class of ruffians,” but in the detective’s view, it serves exactly the opposite purpose. “You must have had occasion to observe,” Dupin remarks, “how absolutely indispensable, of late years, to the thorough blackguard, has become the pocket-handkerchief.” Indeed, Dupin insists, such men will be found to have a handkerchief “even when destitute of shirts.”

  Dupin shows a similar verve in refuting a “persistent rumor” that Marie Rogêt is still alive, allowing Poe to take aim at Benjamin Day and his newspapers. Under the pretense of allowing Dupin to muse over a lengthy article in a French paper called L’Etoile, Poe quotes and paraphrases the theories originally found in the pages of the Tattler and Brother Jonathan. In Dupin’s retelling of the events, the editor of L’Etoile is found to be indignant over the manner in which the police have accepted the identification of the corpse provided by Monsieur Beauvais: “What, then, are the facts on which M. Beauvais says that he has no doubt the body was that of Marie Rogêt? He ripped up the gown sleeve, and says he found marks which satisfied him of the identity. The public generally supposed those marks to have consisted of some description of scars. He rubbed the arm and found hair upon it—something as indefinite, we think, as can readily be imagined—as little conclusive as finding an arm in the sleeve.”

  Poe demonstrates a great deal of craft in advancing the newspaper editor’s point of view, as it appears at first glance to be unanswerable. But Dupin is given equal fluency in refuting the claim: “M. Beauvais, not being an idiot, could never have urged, in identification of the corpse, simply hair upon its arm. No arm is without hair.” The newspaper, Dupin claims, has resorted to a “perversion” of the testimony. “He must have spoken of some peculiarity in this hair. It must have been a peculiarity of color, of quantity, of length, or of situation.” Moreover, Dupin contends that this peculiarity is just one of several points upon which the identification rests. Taken together with the recognition of the clothing, hat, and shoes found on the corpse, the testimony of Beauvais gathers undeniable force. His statement, Dupin contends, does not rely on any one single point, but on a succession of telling points. “Each successive one is multiple evidence,” Dupin says, “proof not added to proof, but multiplied by hundreds or thousands.”

  As for Beauvais himself, Dupin dismisses him as “a busy-body, with much of romance and little of wit.” He brushes aside the various factors that might seem to indicate guilt or a guilty conscience—the business of the rose in the keyhole; the “elbowing the male relatives out of the way” in the wake of the discovery; and the apparent determination that “nobody should have anything to do with the proceedings except himself.” In Dupin’s view, there is a “charitable interpretation” for these actions: “It seems to me unquestionable that Beauvais was a suitor of Marie’s; that she coquetted with him; and that he was ambitious of being thought to enjoy her fullest intimacy and confidence. I shall say nothing more upon this point.” Dupin, unlike the New York press, leaves the disappointed suitor with a shred of dignity.

  Putting aside the identification of the corpse, Dupin turns to L’Etoile’s forensic pronouncements. According to the newspaper, the body found in the Seine could not be Marie’s because it had not been in the water for a sufficient period of time to rise to the surface: “All experience has shown that drowned bodies, or bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence, require from six to ten days for suffic
ient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water.” The statement is imported nearly verbatim from the pages of the Tattler, and it sets Dupin off on a lengthy and rather startlingly graphic discussion of the buoyancy of dead bodies. One wonders how many readers of the Ladies’ Companion were edified by Dupin’s thoughts on the stomach gases produced by the “acetous fermentation of vegetable matter,” or the manner in which a person with “an abnormal quantity of flaccid or fatty matter” might be expected to remain afloat long after drowning.

  Dupin even quotes one of L’Etoile’s more abstruse contentions, again echoing a statement from Benjamin Day’s newspapers: “Even where a cannon is fired over a [submerged] corpse, and it rises before at least five or six days’ immersion, it sinks again, if left alone.” Dupin’s answer to this has the ring of authority, although one doubts that either he or his author could have had any practical experience in this area. “The effect produced by the firing of a cannon is that of simple vibration,” Dupin states. “This may either loosen the corpse from the soft mud or ooze in which it is imbedded, thus permitting it to rise when other agencies have already prepared it for so doing, or it may overcome the tenacity of some putrescent portions of the cellular tissue, allowing the cavities to distend under the influence of the gas.” In either case, he asserts, the body will not sink again, as L’Etoile has claimed, at least not “until decomposition has so far progressed as to permit the escape of the generated gas.”

  To Dupin’s way of thinking, the premise raised in the pages of L’Etoile—that the body found floating in the Seine was not that of Marie Rogêt—serves to demonstrate “little beyond the zeal of its inditer.” It is sheer folly, he concludes, to suggest that Marie Rogêt might still be alive.

  Having dispensed with two of the most prominent theories of the case, Dupin takes a wildly unorthodox approach to solving the crime. He explains that he intends to divert his attention from “the event itself” and instead direct his energies to “the contemporary circumstances which surround it.” In other words, he intends to widen his focus dramatically, even at the risk of becoming mired in seemingly irrelevant details. “In the analysis which I now propose,” Dupin says, “we will discard the interior points of this tragedy, and concentrate our attention upon its outskirts. Not the least usual error, in investigations such as this, is the limiting of inquiry to the immediate, with the total disregard of the collateral or circumstantial events. It is the mal-practice of the courts to confine evidence and discussion to the bounds of apparent relevancy. Yet experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” In other words, as a later writer would state more succinctly, Dupin was proposing a method “founded upon the observation of trifles.”

  Toward this end, Dupin proposes to spend a week in solitary contemplation of the various accounts of the case. “I will examine the newspapers more generally than you have as yet done,” he tells his companion. “It will be strange indeed if a comprehensive survey, such as I propose, of the public prints, will not afford us some minute points which will establish a direction for inquiry.”

  At length Dupin emerges with six “extracts,” or snippets of information, from various newspapers that, he claims, will combine to suggest a solution. At first glance, these six clippings appear to have little to do with the murder. The first recounts Marie’s brief disappearance from the parfumerie three years earlier. The second extract amplifies the first: “An evening journal of yesterday refers to a former mysterious disappearance of Madamoiselle Rogêt,” it reads. “It is well known that, during the week of her absence from Le Blanc’s parfumerie, she was in the company of a young naval officer much noted for his debaucheries. A quarrel, as it is supposed, providentially led to her return home.”

  The third extract reports an “outrage of the most atrocious character,” the abduction and mistreatment of a young girl at the hands of a boatload of gang members. Apparently based on William Fanshaw’s fretful account of devil-may-care rowdies in flat-brimmed hats, the clipping describes the manner in which the girl was “brutally treated” and then returned to her parents. Though the newspaper draws no connection to the Marie Rogêt affair, Dupin has seen fit to include it.

  The fourth extract makes oblique reference to the saga of Joseph Morse, the hapless engraver who nearly found himself convicted of the murder: “We have received one or two communications, the object of which is to fasten the crime of the late atrocity upon Mennais; but as this gentleman has been fully exonerated by a legal inquiry, and as the arguments of our several correspondents appear to be more zealous than profound, we do not think it advisable to make them public.”

  The fifth snippet concerns the prevailing tide of opinion, expressed through several “forcibly written communications,” that “the unfortunate Marie Rogêt has become a victim of one of the numerous bands of blackguards which infest the vicinity of the city upon Sunday.”

  The sixth and final of Dupin’s clippings concerns an empty boat spotted floating down the Seine: “Sails were lying in the bottom of the boat,” it reads. “The bargeman towed it under the barge office. The next morning it was taken from thence without the knowledge of any of the officers.”

  Dupin’s companion is nonplussed. “Upon reading these various extracts, they not only seemed to me irrelevant, but I could perceive no mode in which any one of them could be brought to bear upon the matter in hand,” he admits. “I waited for some explanation from Dupin.”

  Dupin’s friend, like the reader, would have to wait some time for that explanation. Because Poe’s original manuscript had weighed in at nearly 20,000 words, William Snowden had been obliged to divide the story into three installments for publication in three successive issues of the Ladies’ Companion. As with the serial publication of Dickens’s novels, Poe may have hoped that spacing out the story would help to generate suspense, and afford a greater span of time in which to turn the publicity to his advantage. It must be said, however, that Snowden carved up the manuscript as if he were grinding out sausage links, without any regard for the ebb and flow of the story. The first section broke off almost in midsentence during the discussion of floating bodies, and the second ended abruptly in the midst of Dupin’s contemplation of the murder thicket. The two interruptions were awkward and deflating, and did nothing to encourage the reader’s continued interest.

  Even so, Poe felt encouraged by the warm response of his friends and colleagues when the first installment of “Marie Rogêt” appeared. His spirits continued to lift as conditions at home began to improve. “I am happy to say that Virginia’s health has slightly improved,” he had written in September of 1842. “Perhaps all will yet go well.”

  Although he remained in serious financial straits, he hoped that “Marie Rogêt” would restore some of the status he had lost with his departure from Graham’s, and help to secure his dream of launching his own literary journal. The second installment was due to appear during the third week of November. The third and final section, containing what Poe hoped would be a dramatic and highly provocative solution to the murder, would be published at the height of the December holidays.

  In his manuscript, as he prepared to “indicate the assassin” of Marie Rogêt, Poe made reference to a mode of thinking he described as the “Calculus of Probabilities,” which he defined as a means of applying the most “rigidly exact” aspects of science to the intangible “shadow and spirituality” of speculation. In its purest form, he implied, the Calculus of Probabilities would allow his conclusions in the case of the fictional Marie Rogêt to be applied to the mystery surrounding the real-life Mary Rogers. With that in mind, the conclusion of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” promised to be the talk of New York.

  AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT, however, came a very surprising development, as though the Calculus of Probabilities had risen up to deal a crushing blow. For the past year the official inquiry into the death o
f Mary Rogers had been all but dormant, leaving a clear field for Poe and his literary detective work. Suddenly, on November 18, just as the second installment of “Marie Rogêt” was due to appear, the name of Mary Rogers found its way back onto the front pages of the newspapers. The stark headline in the New York Tribune left no room for equivocation. It read simply:

  THE MARY ROGERS MYSTERY EXPLAINED.

  XVI

  A Mansion Built on Baby Skulls

  ON NOVEMBER 1, 1842, a woman’s screams were heard once again at Nick Moore’s Tavern in Weehawken. The police arrived to find that a tragic accident had befallen Frederica Loss, the tavern’s proprietor. One of her sons had been cleaning a shotgun when he lost his grip and the weapon accidentally discharged. The blast caught Mrs. Loss in the knee and knocked her to the floor, where she lay howling in agony as she clutched her mangled leg.

  The Kellenbarack boys carried their mother to her bed and summoned a physician, but the wound soon became septic. For ten days Mrs. Loss lay in a state of delirium, babbling incoherently in both English and German. As her condition worsened, the feverish woman was troubled by hallucinations, and began to see the spirit of a young woman hovering at the bedside. “Take her away!” Mrs. Loss cried, waving a trembling hand at the vision. “Shoo away!”

  The family physician, Dr. Gautier, treated the injury with ointments and poultices, but the patient continued to decline. When the last of his remedies failed to produce any benefit, Gautier informed the Kellenbarack boys that their mother was not likely to recover. As they absorbed this news, the boys were overheard to remark that upon their mother’s death there would be a terrible reckoning: “The great secret,” they said, “will come out.”