The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Dupin is also suspicious of the fragments of clothing found hanging from the interior branches of the thicket, which had been repeatedly described as “torn strips” of cloth. It would be nearly impossible, Dupin claims, for the thorns of the thicket to tear the fabric in such a fashion. “I never so knew it,” he tells his companion, “nor did you.” If the dress had truly been snagged by thorns, he continues, the cloth would have torn in ragged, irregular patches, rather than tidy strips. Here again, Dupin sees evidence of careful staging, rather than the natural effects of a struggle.

  Dupin cuts to the heart of the matter when he declares that the true particulars of the scene “could only have been ascertained from the words, and thus from the recollections, of two small boys; for these boys removed the articles and took them home before they had been seen by a third party.” It was a vital observation: Long before the police had been notified, the two boys in Poe’s story, like Charles and Ossian Kellenbarack, had snatched up all of the items from inside the thicket and carried them home to their mother. No one ever saw the arrangement of the clothing and other articles at the scene except the boys themselves. Any discussion of the thicket as the scene of the crime, therefore, must stand or fall on the accuracy of their description. It should be remembered that the younger boy, Ossian, was twelve years old at the time. His brother Charles was sixteen.

  Dupin does not dwell on the point. For the moment he is more interested in exploring the implications of his theory about the staging of the murder scene. Having established to his own satisfaction that the clothing and other articles could not have gone unnoticed for an entire month, he speculates as to why the evidence should have been planted in the murder thicket at a later date. The answer, he believes, lies in the fifth of the extracts he has culled from the newspapers, which reads: “We have received several forcibly written communications, apparently from various sources, and which go far to render it a matter of certainty 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 Our own opinion is decidedly in favor of this supposition. We shall endeavor to make room for some of these arguments hereafter.”

  The timing of these “forcibly written communications,” or letters to the editors, strikes Dupin as highly suspicious, as their appearance coincides almost exactly with the discovery of the clothing at the murder thicket. He suggests that the “guilty authors” of the letters are none other than the criminals themselves, who had become fearful that authorities were on the point of discovering the true scene of the crime. In arranging a plausible alternative at the murder thicket, and then drawing attention to it in the newspapers, the murderer or murderers were acting with “the view of diverting attention from the real scene of the outrage.”

  Having said all of this, Dupin goes on to suggest that discovering the actual scene of the crime holds no real importance. “You will not have apprehended me rightly,” he says, “if you suppose it my design to deny this thicket as the scene of the outrage.” In spite of all that he has said on the matter, he considers it to be “a point of minor importance” when weighed against the other questions in the case. “We are not engaged in an attempt to discover the scene,” he says, “but to produce the perpetrators of the crime.” In this, he insists, the critical question remains whether Marie fell victim to a gang or a single murderer. Seen in this light, the clothing in the thicket assumes a new and very different importance. The arrangement of the items is clearly intended to suggest the work of a gang, but Dupin looks beyond this artifice to confront an even stranger conundrum. He cannot understand, he says, the “startling circumstance of the articles’ having been left in this thicket at all, by any murderers who had enough precaution to think of removing the corpse.” To Dupin, it seems impossible that these evidences of guilt should have been left by accident, especially the embroidered handkerchief that pointed so clearly to the identity of the victim. “If this was an accident, it was not the accident of a gang,” Dupin concludes. “We can imagine it only the accident of an individual.”

  Though the official investigators have embraced the evidence at the murder thicket as proof of more than one attacker, the scene only makes sense, Dupin claims, if “we imagine but one violator.” In language that clearly recalls Bennett’s poetics in the Herald, Poe paints a vivid scene of the solitary murderer cowering beside the corpse of his victim. “He is alone with the ghost of the departed,” Dupin begins. “He is appalled by what lies motionless before him. The fury of his passion is over, and there is abundant room in his heart for the natural awe of the deed. His is none of that confidence which the presence of numbers inevitably inspires. He is alone with the dead. He trembles and is bewildered.” Only now, Dupin says, does it occur to the panicked murderer that he must find a means of disposing of the corpse. With great effort, he carries it to the nearby river, but as he strains under the weight of the body, he must leave the clothing and other evidence behind, telling himself that he will return for it in a few moments. “But in his toilsome journey to the water his fears redouble within him,” Dupin continues. “The sounds of life encompass his path. A dozen times he hears or fancies he hears the step of an observer. Even the very lights from the city bewilder him. Yet, in time, and by long and frequent pauses of deep agony, he reaches the river’s brink, and disposes of his ghastly charge—perhaps through the medium of a boat. But now what treasure does the world hold—what threat of vengeance could it hold out—which would have power to urge the return of that lonely murderer over that toilsome and perilous path, to the thicket and its blood-chilling recollections? He returns not, let the consequences be what they may. He could not return if he would. His sole thought is immediate escape. He turns his back forever upon those dreadful shrubberies, and flees as from the wrath to come.”

  A gang would not have been prone to the same fears, Dupin insists. “Their numbers would have inspired them with confidence,” he says, “if, indeed, confidence is ever wanting in the breast of the errant blackguard.” And where one man might quail at the thought of returning to the thicket, the problem would not have arisen with a group of four or more. “They would have left nothing behind them; for their number would have enabled them to carry all at once. There would have been no need of return.” The same logic applies to the cloth hitch said to have been used to drag the corpse to the water. “The device is that of a single individual,” Dupin reasons. “To three or four, the limbs of the corpse would have afforded not only a sufficient, but the best possible hold.” Similarly Dupin can see no reason why the fence posts along the route to the river should have been taken down. “Would a number of men,” he wonders, “have put themselves to the superfluous trouble of taking down a fence, for the purpose of dragging through it a corpse which they might have lifted over any fence in an instant?”

  By this time Dupin appears to have thoroughly reversed himself on the question of whether or not the murder thicket had been the actual scene of the crime. But on the question of a gang, he remains consistent throughout. Marie Rogêt, he maintains, met her death at the hands of a single murderer.

  For the identity of this man, Dupin turns to the first and second of the extracts he has culled from the newspapers, which concerned Marie’s brief disappearance from the parfumerie more than three years earlier:

  About three years and a half ago, a disturbance very similar to the present was caused by the disappearance of this same Marie Rogêt from the parfumerie of Monsieur Le Blanc, in the Palais Royal. At the end of a week, however, she re-appeared at her customary comptoir, as well as ever, with the exception of a slight paleness not altogether usual. It was given out by Monsieur Le Blanc and her mother that she had merely been on a visit to some friend in the country; and the affair was speedily hushed up. We presume that the present absence is a freak of the same nature, and that, at the expiration of a week or, perhaps, of a month, we shall have her among us again.

  An evening journa
l of yesterday refers to a former mysterious disappearance of Mademoiselle Rogêt. 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, it is supposed, providentially, led to her return home. We have the name of the Lothario in question, who is at present stationed in Paris, but for obvious reasons forbear to make it public.

  Dupin expresses contempt for the “extreme remissness” of the police in failing to explore the full ramifications of this earlier disappearance. He insists that “it is mere folly to say that between the first and second disappearance of Marie there is no supposable connection.” He puts forward the possibility that an intended elopement lay behind the first disappearance, a marriage to which Madame Rogêt would presumably have objected. Before the marriage was to have taken place, Dupin speculates, the two lovers fell to quarrelling and the affair ended with “the return home of the betrayed.”

  Poe draws a clear parallel between Marie’s disappearance from the parfumerie and the equivalent episode from the life of Mary Rogers: her brief, widely reported absence from Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium in 1838. In Dupin’s formulation, the murder and the earlier disappearance must be viewed as two halves of a single event. He is convinced that the circumstances surrounding Marie’s departure from home on the fatal Sunday indicate “a renewal of the betrayer’s advances.” If so, the man who lured Marie away from home in 1838 and the man she went to meet on the fatal Sunday of 1841 are one and the same.

  In linking the two disappearances in this manner, Poe opened up a provocative and original line of thought. Although the earlier disappearance had not been entirely overlooked in the New York investigation, the episode did not draw a great deal of comment in the days following her murder. The fact that Poe knew of it at all must owe something to the time he spent in New York in 1838, just before the disappearance, and also the degree to which he studied the New York newspapers afterward. Poe’s ambition in yoking the two events was plain enough: The New York police, he suggested, had missed an opportunity. They had concentrated their energies exclusively on the crime of 1841. Poe’s surmises, if correct, gave an equal weight to the disappearance of 1838, and suggested an entirely new means of tracking the murderer. If Poe could identify the man who had squired the young woman away in 1838, instead of focusing his energies on the events of 1841, the murder might be solved.

  Dupin gives several reasons for believing that Marie intended to elope at the time of her murder. He recalls that Marie had told St. Eustache, her “accepted suitor,” that she was simply going to visit her aunt on the day in question, and that she arranged to meet him at nightfall so that he might escort her safely home. At first glance, Dupin admits, this tends to cut against the suggestion that Marie was planning to run off with another man. And yet, he points out, it is clear that Marie was intentionally deceiving St. Eustache at the time. She did not go to her aunt’s home and was never expected there. Instead, according to the testimony of numerous witnesses, she met with a male companion and crossed the river with him, arriving at the Barrière du Roule at three o’clock in the afternoon. Marie must surely have been aware that there would be “surprise and suspicion aroused in the bosom of her affianced suitor, St. Eustache,” when she failed to keep their evening rendezvous. It seems probable to Dupin that she did not intend to face the consequences. “She could not have thought of returning to brave this suspicion,” Dupin says, “but the suspicion becomes a point of trivial importance to her if we suppose her not intending to return.”

  Seen in this light, Dupin says, the matter becomes plain. Marie left home on the morning of her disappearance with the intention of eloping with her secret lover, never to return, just as she had three years earlier at the start of her week-long disappearance. Dupin is adamant that the second episode must be viewed as a continuation of the first, rather than a second, unrelated entanglement. “We are prepared to regard it as a ‘making up’ of the old amour, rather than as the commencement of a new one,” Dupin says. “The chances are ten to one that he who had once eloped with Marie would again propose an elopement, rather than that she to whom proposals of an elopement had been made by one individual, should have them made to her by another.”

  Who is the mysterious swain?

  Beyond St. Eustache, and perhaps Beauvais, we find no recognized, no open, no honorable suitors of Marie. Of none other is there any thing said. Who, then, is the secret lover, of whom the relatives (at least most of them) know nothing, but whom Marie meets upon the morning of Sunday, and who is so deeply in her confidence, that she hesitates not to remain with him until the shades of the evening descend, amid the solitary groves of the Barrière du Roule?…And what means the singular prophecy of Madam Rogêt on the morning of Marie’s departure?—“I fear that I shall never see Marie again.”

  For an answer, Dupin turns once again to the second of the extracts he has drawn from the newspapers, concerning the mysterious “Lothario,” “a young naval officer much noted for his debaucheries,” who is believed to have been in Marie’s company during her first disappearance. The language of this invented extract, particularly in the use of the word “Lothario,” recalls the strangely ribald “gallant gay Lothario” article from the Times and Commercial Intelligencer of 1838. The core of the information, however, was plainly culled from a Herald article of August 3, 1841:

  This young girl, Mary Rogers, was missing from Anderson’s store three years ago for two weeks. It is asserted that she was then seduced by an officer of the U.S. Navy, and kept at Hoboken for two weeks. His name is well known aboard his ship.

  These three lines from the Herald are of vital importance, as they comprise the only known reference to a “naval officer” being implicated in the affair, as opposed to an enlisted man such as the sailor William Kiekuck. Poe, through the character of Dupin, fastens onto this fleeting mention with a steely determination:

  “[L]et me call your attention to the fact,” Dupin says, “that the time elapsing between the first ascertained and the second supposed elopement is a few months more than the general period of the cruises of our men-of-war.” In other words, the gap of time between Marie’s two disappearances corresponds almost exactly with a naval officer’s average length of service at sea. “Had the lover been interrupted in his first villainy by the necessity of departure to sea,” Dupin asks, “and had he seized the first moment of his return to renew the base designs not yet altogether accomplished—or not yet altogether accomplished by him? Of all these things we know nothing.”

  Before the reader has a chance to reflect on any possible shortcomings in Dupin’s reasoning, he moves on to other details of the case. When he returns to the subject later in the narrative, there has been a shift in tone. The hypothesis that Marie met her death at the hands of a naval officer is now presented as established fact:

  “Let us sum up now the meagre yet certain fruits of our long analysis. We have attained the idea of a murder perpetrated, in the thicket at the Barrière du Roule, by a lover, or at least by an intimate and secret associate of the deceased. This associate is of swarthy complexion. This complexion, the ‘hitch’ in the bandage, and the ‘sailor’s knot’ with which the bonnet-ribbon is tied, point to a seaman. His companionship with the deceased, a gay but not an abject young girl, designates him as above the grade of the common sailor.” Dupin adds that the “circumstance of the first elopement” as described in the first of his newspaper extracts has served to “blend the idea of this seaman with that of that ‘naval officer’” mentioned in the second extract. It is this shadowy figure, Dupin states, who “is first known to have led the unfortunate into crime.”

  With these statements Dupin is asking his companion (and, by extension, the reader) to take a great deal on faith. As with his earlier statements about mildew and grass growth, his steady flow of persuasive rhetoric masks several highly dubious claims. His confession of ignorance of the mysterious sailor’s in
tent serves to disarm the reader, inspiring confidence in the deceptively offhand assertions of fact that follow. The implications of the sailor’s knot and hitch had been discussed in numerous sources, and had been put forward by the New York police and the New Jersey coroner as evidence of the likelihood of a sailor’s involvement in the crime. But Poe’s insistence that the sailor must have been an officer is the vital link between the murder and the earlier disappearance, and the arguments here are decidedly less convincing. Dupin describes Marie as “gay but not abject” to suggest that she enjoyed an elevated social status, placing her beyond the reach of common sailors and into the more rarified realm of the officers’ table. It is certainly possible that a clerk in a parfumerie—or a cigar store—should have enjoyed the attentions of an officer, but it is too much to say that she should have been outside the sphere of the lower classes. As the daughter of a boardinghouse keeper, Mary Rogers performed a daily round of chores ranging from scrubbing floors to beating rugs. She was hardly upper crust, and had in fact descended in social status from her early years in Connecticut.

  Poe employs a similar tactic in his discussion of the “general period” of naval voyages. Although his words have an authoritative ring, several historians have argued that in fact there were no set periods governing the length of a nineteenth-century warship’s service. Mary Rogers’s own life provided several examples of navy men whose service records contradict Poe’s assertion, ranging from the sailors who frequented Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium to the young William Kiekuck, whose visits to the boardinghouse occurred at far more regular intervals than three and a half years. Once again, Poe is asking the reader to take a great deal on faith, and employing the language of ironclad certainty to describe what had heretofore been simple conjecture.