my master asks for."
The Baron, sotto voce, leaned in to Moran: "You can see you had the wrong sow by the ear, Doctor."
The heroism of the doctor's voice deflated. "I see the gist now. Very well. Back to Poe then. I told him, in trying to comfort him, that he would soon enjoy the society of his friends. He broke out with much energy and said, I remember, The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol. When he beheld what had become of him, he was ready to sink into the earth, and so on, as one talks when depressed in spirits. He then slipped into a violent delirium until Saturday evening, when he began calling for 'Reynolds' again and again, for six or seven hours until the morning, as I have told you the other day. Having enfeebled himself from exertion he said, 'Lord help my poor soul' and expired. That is all."
"What we wonder now," said the Baron, "is whether Poe had been induced to have taken some sort of artificial stimulus, a drug-opium, perhaps-that put him in this condition?"
"I do not know. The truth, sir, is that Poe's condition was quite sad and strange, but there was no particular odor of alcohol on his person, that I can remember."
During this exchange, I alternated between careful attentiveness to their words and desperate attempts to calm my pounding heart and breathing from my near discovery by Bonjour. When they closed the interview to the Baron's satisfaction, and I felt convinced by listening for footsteps they had left the fourth floor, I climbed past the body and heaved myself through the opening in the wall. I checked that the coast was clear and dropped into the lecture room. Flattening myself on the floor, I coughed out the air of the dead and gulped in rapid, grateful bursts.
You will perhaps judge me harshly for not immediately relating my adventures to Duponte, and yet you have seen yourself the frequent inflexibility of his philosophies. I am not of a particularly philosophical cast. Duponte was born an analyst, a reasoner; I, an observer. Though it may occupy only a lower rung of the ladder of wisdom, observation requires practicality. Perhaps Duponte, and our investigations generally, needed a light shove toward the pragmatic.
I should have explained above, when I was searching for the mention of Henry Reynolds, how it was I had free access to the newspapers we kept in the library without Duponte taking notice. Since the first day we had disembarked in Baltimore, Duponte had inhabited the library and oversaw all the contents of his sanctum. However, when he was reading other things he would remove himself from the increasingly cramped library to different chambers and bedrooms of Glen Eliza I had forgotten existed. He would choose the odd book that I had on my shelf; or one of my father's atlases of an obscure province of the world; or a pamphlet in French that my mother had brought from abroad. Duponte also read Poe, a practice that did not escape my interest.
At times the concentration with which he read Poe reminded me of the sheer nourishment the tales had provided me for so many years. But usually it was far more scholarly than that. Duponte read mechanically, like a literary critic. The critic never lets his reading overtake him; he never pulls the pages promiscuously close to his face and never wishes to be brought into the crevices of the author's mind, for such a journey would relinquish control. Thus, often a reader will read a magazine critic's notice of a book, after having already read the book himself, eager to compare perspectives, and think, "This cannot be the book I read! There must be another version, in which everything has changed, and I shall have to find it, too!"
I thought a dispassionate survey of Poe's works by Duponte quite fitting. I believe it allowed Duponte crucial insights into Poe's character and into the mysterious circumstances that we had begun to examine.
"If only it was known which ship Poe arrived to Baltimore on," I said one afternoon.
Duponte became instantly animated. "The local papers speak of it as the unknown details of his arrival. That they do not know, monsieur, certainly does not confine it to the bounds of the unknown. The answer is plainly presented in the articles from the Richmond newspapers published in the last months of Poe's life."
"When Poe