The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Poe’s cunning language and persuasive tone serves to obscure a central weakness of his argument. In his judgment, the suitor who trifled with Marie’s affections in 1838 must also have swept her away in 1841, with tragic consequences. But Marie Rogêt—like Mary Rogers—was a young woman who had achieved some measure of fame on the strength of her “intense and irresistible” beauty. Indeed, as Dupin had noted earlier in the narrative, Marie’s employer Monsieur Le Blanc found that his shop “soon became notorious through the charms of the sprightly grisette.” Is it truly impossible that a woman of such potent allure might attract two offers of elopement in the space of three years or more? Dupin asks us to believe so. At the same time, Dupin assumes that the impulse to elope, rather than follow a more traditional course of courtship, must have originated with Marie’s paramour, rather than with Marie herself. It is plausible, however, that a young woman, upon receiving a marriage proposal, might suggest an elopement as a means of overcoming objections from her mother, or extricating herself from an unwanted betrothal.

  Poe’s theory also leans heavily on the fifth of his extracts from the newspapers, with its reference to “forcibly written urgent communications” to the press that attempt to place the blame for Marie Rogêt’s death on a “band of blackguards.” The fact that these communications were “well-written,” he suggests, lends credence to the notion of an officer’s hand, as common sailors were not noted for literacy. Once again, however, Poe has taken a vague and unsubstantiated surmise from earlier in the narrative—that Marie’s murderer might have written misleading letters to the press—and reintroduced it later in the story as a proven fact. Of all of Dupin’s many speculations and conjectures, this is perhaps the most suspect. In discussing the discovery of the murder thicket, Dupin had put forward the idea that Marie’s murderer might have sent these letters with “the view of diverting attention from the real scene of the outrage.” Even within Dupin’s own framework of the case, however, the notion does not support itself. By the end of his lengthy discourse, Dupin has brushed aside his earlier objections and embraced the murder thicket as the likely scene of the crime. If the assault actually took place in that “umbrageous hall,” as Dupin describes it, surely the murderer would not have sent letters, well written or otherwise, directing the authorities to its vicinity.

  By this time, Dupin has made several repetitions of his assertion that a naval officer stationed in Paris was “first known to have led the unfortunate” Marie astray. In this case, however, the parallel to the New York investigation is extremely slight—limited to the single passing reference in the Herald to the effect that Mary Rogers had been “seduced by an officer of the U.S. Navy, and kept at Hoboken for two weeks.” It is worth noting, then, that the statement in the Herald appeared in a brief, two-paragraph announcement of Mary Rogers’s death, intended to prod the mayors of New York and New Jersey to “do their duties.” The article marked the Herald’s first mention of the murder, and was printed in the pell-mell torrent of early speculation in the days following the crime, at a time when hastily assembled accounts in the other newspapers were bungling the basic facts of the case, including Mary Rogers’s name and address. In these circumstances, the accuracy of Bennett’s story is difficult to gauge. A great deal of false and contradictory information appeared in the New York press in the first week of August of 1841, a fact that is clearly reflected in the pages of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Early in the story, Dupin states that the interval between Marie’s first and second disappearances lasted “about five months.” By the final pages, the period has lengthened to three and a half years.

  The crucial assertion of the Herald story, that Mary Rogers had been “seduced by an officer in the U.S. Navy,” was never confirmed. It did not appear in any of the newspaper accounts at the time of the disappearance in 1838, including those in the Herald. Adding to the confusion, the Herald story contended that Mary had been “kept at Hoboken for two weeks.” This is difficult to reconcile with the accounts of the episode that appeared after Mary’s return to the cigar counter, some of which described the period of her absence as amounting to only a few hours.

  Much of the weight of Poe’s reasoning rests on this fleeting, isolated, and highly questionable reference in the Herald. Poe clearly assumed that the paper was correct in describing their suspect as an officer, rather than an enlisted man such as William Kiekuck—who was, in fact, arrested two days after the appearance of the Herald article. Having fastened on the notion of a naval officer as the villain, however, Poe allows Dupin to carry it through to a compelling conclusion. Dupin begins by pondering the “continued absence of him of the dark complexion.” If Marie’s escort on the fatal Sunday had been innocent of any crime, Dupin reasons, he would surely have stepped forward if, as the authorities believe, the assault had been committed by a gang. “But why is this man absent?” Dupin asks. “Was he murdered by the gang? If so, why are there only traces of the assassinated girl?”

  Dupin raises the possibility that the officer might have hesitated to come forward for fear of being charged with the crime. But this, he concludes, is a notion that would only have occurred to him well after the fact, not in the immediate aftermath. “The first impulse of an innocent man would have been to announce the outrage,” Dupin insists, “and to aid in identifying the ruffians.” Indeed, Dupin suggests, this course would have been far safer than staying silent for fear of prosecution. “He had been seen with the girl. He had crossed the river with her in an open ferry-boat. The denouncing of the assassins would have appeared, even to an idiot, the surest and sole means of relieving himself from suspicion. We cannot suppose him, on the night of the fatal Sunday, both innocent himself and incognizant of an outrage committed. Yet only under such circumstances is it possible to imagine that he would have failed, if alive, in the denouncement of the assassins.”

  As Dupin lays out the facts, the conclusion appears to him to be obvious. Marie’s companion is not dead, or his body would have been discovered. By the same token, he cannot be innocent of the crime or he would have gone to the authorities. He must, therefore, be the murderer himself. All that remains, then, is to discover his identity, a process made far easier by linking the murder to Marie’s earlier thwarted elopement. “And what means are ours of attaining the truth?” Dupin asks. “We shall find these means multiplying and gathering distinctness as we proceed. Let us sift to the bottom this affair of the first elopement. Let us know the full history of ‘the officer,’ with his present circumstances, and his whereabouts at the precise period of the murder.” Here Dupin returns to his theory that the murderer himself sent “forcibly written communications” to one of the evening papers, to throw the police off his scent. “Let us carefully compare with each other the various communications sent to the evening paper, in which the object was to inculpate a gang,” Dupin advises. “And, all this done, let us again compare these various communications with the known MSS. of the officer.” If the handwriting matches, Dupin reasons, it would go a long way toward establishing the officer’s guilt.

  If all else fails, Dupin says, there is a final means of tracking the guilty Lothario, one suggested by the sixth and final of the newspaper extracts, concerning the empty boat found floating down the Seine. “Let us now trace the boat,” says Dupin. According to the notice in the paper, a bargeman discovered the empty boat on the Monday after the murder. He then towed it back to the boatyard, removed its rudder, and pulled it onto shore. The following morning the boat was found to be missing, spirited away without the knowledge of its owner, and in such haste that the rudder was left behind. The notice drawing the matter to Dupin’s attention did not appear until Thursday, after the discovery of Marie’s body. Since there were no earlier notices concerning the boat, Dupin believes that only a navy man, availing himself of some “personal permanent connection” to the barge office, could have learned so quickly that the boat had been recovered. Realizing that it might incriminate him, the guilty sailor u
sed his private access to remove the boat from the barge office.

  “In speaking of the lonely assassin dragging his burden to the shore, I have already suggested the probability of his availing himself of a boat,” Dupin says. “Now we are to understand that Marie Rogêt was precipitated from a boat. This would naturally have been the case. The corpse could not have been trusted to the shallow waters of the shore. The peculiar marks on the back and shoulders of the victim tell of the bottom ribs of a boat.” Dupin speculates that the guilty officer pushed off from shore having neglected to bring along a weight with which to sink the body. Unwilling to risk a return to “that accursed shore,” he instead throws the corpse overboard in the middle of the river, hoping that it will remain at the bottom long enough to conceal his escape. “Having rid himself of his ghastly charge,” Dupin continues, “the murderer would have hastened to the city. There, at some obscure wharf, he would have leaped on land. But the boat—would he have secured it? He would have been in too great haste for such things as securing a boat. Moreover, in fastening it to the wharf, he would have felt as if securing evidence against himself. His natural thought would have been to cast from him, as far as possible, all that had held connection with his crime.” That being the case, Dupin reasons, he would have set the boat adrift in the river, hoping in his distress that it would never be found. After an uneasy night in which he imagines the consequences if the boat is discovered, he awakes to find his worst fears realized. “In the morning,” Dupin says, “the wretch is stricken with unutterable horror at finding that the boat has been picked up and detained at a locality which he is in the daily habit of frequenting—at a locality, perhaps, which his duty compels him to frequent. The next night, without daring to ask for the rudder, he removes it.” Here, Dupin proclaims, providence has provided an opportunity. “Now where is that rudderless boat?” he asks. “Let it be one of our first purposes to discover. With the first glimpse we obtain of it, the dawn of our success shall begin. This boat shall guide us, with a rapidity which will surprise even ourselves, to him who employed it in the midnight of the fatal Sabbath. Corroboration will rise upon corroboration. The murderer will be traced.”

  Dupin’s call for action presumes that each link in his chain of reasoning is sound. It takes for granted that a single Lothario stands behind both of Marie’s disappearances, and that this man wrote letters to the press that might serve to incriminate him. It also assumes that this man’s identity is widely known, if not a matter of public record. Finally, it presupposes that the villain made his escape in a rowboat, leaving behind some form of incriminating evidence which he subsequently felt compelled to obscure, even at the risk of being discovered in the act of stealing the boat from its mooring. But if some of the individual pieces didn’t quite seem to fit, the finished puzzle appeared to come together in a clear and compelling way. Poe had shown extraordinary skill in linking Marie Rogêt’s murder to her earlier disappearance, so as to place the blame on the debauched naval officer, and Dupin’s technique of approaching the matter from the “outskirts” gave a forceful demonstration of the power of ratiocination. When Dupin boldly pronounced that the murderer would be captured, the reader could not help but feel that a just resolution would not be long in coming.

  Unfortunately, Poe had backed himself into a corner. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had offered a tidy resolution: Poe had no sooner laid out his conclusions than the murderer arrived with a knock at the door. But “Marie Rogêt” had promised an even more dramatic climax. In the opening paragraphs of the story, and in his letters to prospective publishers, Poe had promised that his rigorous examination of the case would offer a series of exact parallels to the facts and theories of the Mary Rogers drama, and that he would “indicate the assassin in a manner which will give renewed impetus to investigation.” Now, within a page of his conclusion, Poe faced a creative impasse. Since the actual Mary Rogers investigation had failed to produce the murderer, Poe’s story could not name a villain without deviating significantly from established fact. Although Poe had sketched out a compelling theory, he had not left himself the breathing space needed to create a dramatically satisfying ending. Unlike “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” there could be no climactic confrontation, and no unmasking of the killer.

  Poe’s solution was ingenious and audacious, but also something of a cheat. Reaching back to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe fell back on a fabricated “editor’s note” to cover a narrative gap while blurring the line between fact and fiction. Thus, Dupin’s climactic statement, “The murderer will be traced,” was followed by an explanatory paragraph attributed to the editor of the Ladies’ Companion, inserted within editorial brackets: “[For reasons which we shall not specify but which to many readers will appear obvious, we have taken the liberty of here omitting, from the MSS. placed in our hands, such portion as details the following up of the apparently slight clew obtained by Dupin. We feel it advisable only to state, in brief, that the result desired was brought to pass; that an individual assassin was convicted, upon his own confession, of the murder of Marie Rogêt, and that the Prefect fulfilled punctually, although with reluctance, the terms of his compact with the Chevalier. Mr. Poe’s article concludes with the following words. — Eds.]”

  Poe’s feint leaves the reader to understand that Dupin’s conjectures were entirely correct—brilliantly so—and that the villain was, in fact, apprehended along precisely the lines of inquiry he had suggested. However, one must appreciate this marvel of deductive skill from arm’s length. Instead of joining in the discovery, the reader is asked to accept that it occurred offstage. Although it is clearly suggested that “Mr. Poe” supplied his answer in his original manuscript, the editor is cast in the role of censor and killjoy, removing the presumably thrilling passages for reasons of unstated propriety. One can only admire Poe’s outlandish cunning, but his bait-and-switch leaves the reader with a sense of having missed the final leg of a horse race.

  “There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story,” Poe once wrote. “Either history affords a thesis—or one is suggested by an incident of the day—or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative—designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or authorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.”

  There were a great many “crevices of fact” in the Mary Rogers case. The manner in which Poe chose to fill them showed extraordinary flashes of inspiration set off by an equal measure of guile. In several important respects, Poe had reason to feel pride in his interpretation of the case. The manner in which he demolished James Gordon Bennett’s “gang of ruffians” theory was brilliant, and his linking of the murder to Mary Rogers’s earlier disappearance showed a masterful grasp of the complexities of the case. The value of Poe’s conclusions, however, ultimately rests with the accuracy of his facts, and especially with the crucial six “extracts” upon which he based his solution. For many years it was assumed that Poe’s extracts were near-verbatim transcriptions of New York newspapers. More recent studies have effectively refuted this notion, and demonstrated that most of them were paraphrases and compilations, reflecting varying degrees of faithfulness. In five of the six extracts, however, the original sources are readily apparent. Although Poe occasionally gives greater emphasis to a fact or supposition than can be found in the source, he rarely strayed from the spirit of the original.

  The sixth extract, concerning the missing boat, is a different matter. The mock editorial comment at the conclusion of Poe’s story made a point of saying that the “slight clew” provided by Dupin had been followed up with stunning success. One presumes this refers to the matter of the missing boat, which Dupin believed would lead to the murderer “with a rapidity which will surprise even ourselves.” The extract was supposed to have been taken from the pages of the New York Standard, but no trace of the
original has ever been found. Although the Herald urged the police at one stage to “find out what boats and what crews were over at Weehawken that day,” there seems to have been no barge cast adrift in the Hudson, or surreptitiously removed from a boatyard.

  In the final paragraphs of his story, Poe appears to acknowledge that he has taken poetic license. He attempts to cover a multitude of sins by referring back to the device of creating “exact coincidences” between real and imagined events. “It will be understood that I speak of coincidences and no more,” he declares. “And farther: in what I relate it will be seen that between the fate of the unhappy Mary Cecilia Rogers, so far as that fate is known, and the fate of one Marie Rogêt up to a certain epoch in her history, there has existed a parallel in the contemplation of whose wonderful exactitude the reason becomes embarrassed. I say all this will be seen. But let it not for a moment be supposed that, in proceeding with the sad narrative of Marie from the epoch just mentioned, and in tracing to its denouement the mystery which enshrouded her, it is my covert design to hint at an extension of the parallel, or even to suggest that the measures adopted in Paris for the discovery of the assassin of a grisette, or measures founded in any similar ratiocination would produce any similar result.” Poe then retreats into a convoluted discussion of the Calculus of Probabilities, a process he likens to a roll of the dice: “Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes will not be thrown in the third attempt.…It does not appear that the two throws which have been completed, and which lie now absolutely in the Past, can have influence upon the throw which exists only in the Future.”