directed to do?"
She waved the nurse out of the room and frowned. "Dolts," she said. "They mistook one man for another. I understand they were told by the Paris police to expect your presence around this Duponte they were after, yet they saw you waiting around the hotels of this other-this false Baron, this false Duponte. No matter, for what was needed was achieved: no one interfered with Louis-Napoleon's plans, and now he has ascended." She examined me closely again and I could feel the acute judgment of her eyes growing.
"Tell me," she said. "From what we have understood, you brought along these two men of genius in some attempt to find a poet that you fancy. I have heard about this Poe. His talent has mostly been dismissed by America."
"Not for long," I said.
She laughed. "You do have faith. Perhaps you will be interested that I have heard that young poets and writers in Paris are now reading him in great numbers, your Poe. It seems he was like their own Monsieur Balzac-brilliant but luckless, doomed to be a puppet of fate. He will be brought into the European spirit, as all the better American minds are. Yet this is not enough for your Poe-worship, is it, Mr. Clark? My son is not dissimilar from how you must be; he believes books are written primarily for his personal readership."
"Madame Bonaparte, my motives are not important. This is not about me."
"But, stay! Think of it, dear Mr. Clark. You have helped by giving us an important task to perform, which has allowed us to prove our loyalty to France. We have ensured a new emperor from this, and he will create an empire in which my family can survive forever! I have spent a lifetime to see to it that my children have their proper inheritance, and would give my life for it now. What about you? You were but a chrysalis and you made the mistake of giving up what your family made you into. Tell me, what did you find?"
I rose from my chair without answering. "I have only one other question, Madame Bonaparte. If they came to know they assassinated the wrong man at the lyceum that night, did they then locate the right one? Has Duponte been killed, too?"
"I have told you," the woman said slowly, "I only provide comfort. I provide a place to start, you might say, a birthplace for noble plans. Others must decide the rest for themselves."
I had written and discarded a whole notebook of letters to Auguste Duponte. I detailed for him not only the hard reality-that Poe, apparently, had not modeled his character C. Auguste Dupin from any real person, but rather and remarkably only from imagination. I included not just this, but also the steps of thinking that had led me to reach this conclusion, knowing he would have an interest in the line of reasoning. However, if Duponte was still alive and escaped, I did not know where to address any letters. Not to Paris, not to his former residence, I felt certain. He would not be in this Paris, not in Louis-Napoleon's Third Empire, where his genius was seen as an enemy to the emperor's unending ambitions.
It was seeing the anxiety in Madame Bonaparte's face at the close of our interview, when I asked whether Rollin and his rogues had found Duponte, that made me decide Duponte was probably closer than I'd considered. He had been patiently waiting-not for me, exactly, but it would be me he would have to see.
Passing the bustle of porters and guests at the massive Barnum's Hotel one day, these various thoughts dissolved into an idea. Returning to Glen Eliza, I considered that my time to act might be short. I started on my way back to Barnum's. I did not leave, though, without remembering to reach into the closet for the old pistol that the police had returned along with my other possessions. This time I checked-before slipping it into my pocket-that its age and disuse had not left the hammer entirely immobile.
"Sir?"
An ashen clerk with tight whiskers glared at me suspiciously and waited for me to say something.
"Monsieur," I said abruptly and, as I'd hoped, he raised an eyebrow of interest at the French word. "There is a member of the French sovereign class currently residing in your hotel."
He nodded with all the depth of his responsibility. "Indeed, sir. He has been staying in the room once occupied by the