The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  * * *

  THE WORDS WOULD COME BACK to haunt him in the days to come. In effect, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” had been a roll of the dice, with Poe placing all of his chips on a mysterious, unnamed naval officer. Had the real-life murder investigation remained at a standstill, Poe’s glossy speculations would have achieved their purpose admirably. His bold and provocative new theory would likely have sparked renewed interest in the case, and perhaps even brought calls to reopen the investigation. The shotgun blast in Weehawken, however, had changed everything. From the moment he saw the chilling headline “THE MARY ROGERS MYSTERY EXPLAINED,” Poe knew that the stakes had been raised. His story made no mention of the possibility of Mrs. Loss’s involvement in the crime, or of a “premature delivery” gone wrong. Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” would be a laughingstock, and his creator would suffer the consequences.

  It was too late for Poe to make changes of any kind to the first two installments of the story, but the third and final section was still in the hands of William Snowden at the Ladies’ Companion. Steeling his nerves, Poe calculated the odds and made a decision. Then he picked up his pen and set to work.

  XVIII

  At Variance with Truth

  POE HAD VERY LITTLE TIME in which to act. As the gravity of the situation became clear, his long experience as a magazine editor came to the fore. With “Politan” and other earlier efforts, he had simply allowed an unsuccessful work to trail off rather than prolong a fruitless effort. Certainly he must have considered canceling the third installment of “Marie Rogêt,” so as to spare himself the embarrassment of advocating a solution that now appeared to have been proven wrong. But with his hopes for The Stylus, his projected literary magazine, hanging in the balance, he must have realized that he could not afford such a public admission of failure.

  A more logical course, then, would have been a hasty revision of the third installment to reflect the new information from Weehawken. Unfortunately, since he could not make any changes to the first two sections, this plan could only succeed to a limited degree. At the conclusion of the second section Dupin had already presented the six crucial newspaper extracts from which he derived his solution, and had even gone so far as to chide the French police for their “extreme remissness” in failing to arrest and question the mysterious naval officer mentioned in the second of the clippings. A total reversal was clearly out of the question; Poe had already established the forward momentum of the narrative, and planted the seeds of his solution. The challenge before him was to revise the final section without unsettling what had already been done, a process similar to trying to replace the bottom tier of a house of cards.

  There were only a few days remaining before the January issue of the Ladies’ Companion went to press. If anything was to be done, Poe and his editor, William Snowden, would have to work quickly. A decision was reached to push back the publication of the third installment until the February issue. This bought Poe a month’s breathing space in which to try to rescue the situation.

  It is not certain exactly how he proceeded. A widely circulated anecdote describes a drunken foray to New York at this time, during which Poe is said to have stumbled across an old sweetheart named Mary Starr Jennings. The woman had known Poe in Baltimore, but had since married and was living with her husband in Jersey City when Poe unexpectedly appeared at her door. Mrs. Jennings described Poe as having been “on a spree” that left him so disoriented that he had crossed the Hudson several times on the ferry, asking random strangers if they happened to know where she could be found.

  Upon finding her by lucky chance, Poe made surly accusations about her recent marriage. “Do you love him truly?” he demanded. “You don’t love him. You do love me. You know you do.” When Mrs. Jennings brushed aside his questions Poe lapsed into moody silence, chopping at some radishes with a table knife. At length he took his leave, only to be found a few days later “in the woods on the outskirts of Jersey City, wandering about like a crazy man,” in a scene reminiscent of the final hours of Daniel Payne.

  It is tempting to seize on this anecdote as evidence of Poe’s distress over “Marie Rogêt.” It places him in the vicinity of the Nick Moore House, suggesting that he might have attempted a firsthand investigation of the alleged scene of Mary Rogers’s death. It also gives evidence of the extreme agitation and recourse to drink that one might have expected under these stressful circumstances. But it is impossible to say for certain that he traveled to New York to investigate the Mary Rogers saga. Although he is known to have made a trip to New York in 1842, the exact dates are uncertain. Mrs. Jennings’s reminiscence of the event was published in 1889, long after Poe’s death. She placed the incident in the spring of 1842, whereas the death of Mrs. Loss and the subsequent revelations did not transpire until November of that year. While it is possible that Mrs. Jennings, looking back over more than forty-five years, could have been mistaken as to the precise month, or even the year, there are many details about her story that invite skepticism. Not the least of these is Poe’s apparent ardor for another woman at a time when all contemporary accounts show him to be assiduously attentive to his wife and her illness.

  If Poe had troubled to visit Weehawken personally, it is difficult to say what effect it might have had on the final portion of “Marie Rogêt.” Poe had been at pains to establish that Dupin would solve the crime without stirring from his armchair, and by means readily available to the casual observer. In contrast to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the fact that Dupin did not visit the crime scene was presented as an important component of his method. Poe, too, placed great value in this sense of distance, underscoring the notion that he was pitting his own cunning against that of the reader, just as he had done with his popular cryptography articles. Poe never wavered from this position. In later years he would claim that the story had been “composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity,” with only the newspapers as a guide. Earlier, when writing about the chess-playing automaton, Poe stated unequivocally that his conclusions had been based on “frequent visits to the exhibition.” Although the credibility of his solution to the Mary Rogers mystery might have benefited from a statement that he had visited the crime scene personally, Poe never claimed to have done so. “Thus,” he would later write, “much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities.”

  In the absence of Poe’s manuscript, and lacking any of his correspondence with Snowden, it is impossible to say exactly what changes were made to the story to allow for the revelations at Weehawken. Seen in the light of the new information, however, some of the more muddled passages of the story come into sharper focus. At one or two points Poe seems to have attemped to insert hasty and perhaps ill-considered revisions that only serve to contradict the earlier portions of the story. His strange vacillation over the murder thicket would seem to be the foremost of these inconsistencies. Through the first two-thirds of the story Poe appeared resolute in his determination to disprove that the crime had taken place in the thicket. The entire rationale behind the mysterious naval officer’s “forcibly written communications” to the press had been, Dupin claimed, to divert attention “from the real scene of the outrage.” Having insisted so adamantly on this point, however, the third portion of the story found Dupin retreating into uncertainty on the matter, and finally changing his opinion entirely: “You will not have apprehended me rightly, however, if you suppose it is my design to deny this thicket as the scene of the outrage.…I admit the thicket as the scene…” This abrupt change of direction may be more clearly understood if one imagines the Weehawken revelations arriving in the pause between the second and third portions of the story.

  Other aspects of the story show no signs of alteration, even where they appear to contradict the new interpretation of the crime. Madame Deluc (Poe’s stand-in for Mrs. Loss) is described in the third portion of the narrative as an “honest and scrupulous o
ld lady” whose only crime is that she may have misjudged the time of day at which certain events occurred. Dupin remarks on the manner in which she spoke “lingeringly and lamentingly” about some cakes and ale stolen by members of a gang, and speculates that she “might still have entertained a faint hope of compensation.” Not even the most suspicious of the readers of the Ladies’ Companion would have cast a sinister interpretation on this behavior.

  By contrast, Poe’s meandering discussion of the Calculus of Probabilities at the end of the story shows signs of being a late addition to the narrative. At the beginning of the story Poe had referred to this calculus as a means of applying the most “rigidly exact” aspects of science to the intangible “shadow and spirituality” of speculation. By the end, he has retreated from this confident position, saying that “it should be considered that the most trifling variation in the facts of the two cases might give rise to the most important miscalculations, by diverting thoroughly the two courses of events; very much as, in arithmetic, an error which, in its own individuality, may be inappreciable, produces, at length, by dint of multiplication at all points of the process, a result enormously at variance with truth.” In other words, two raindrops will not follow the same path down a windowpane—the slightest speck of grit will cause them to diverge. This passage, though undeniably true, hints strongly of an attempt to cover all contingencies.

  In spite of the limitations imposed on him by the urgent deadline and the previous publication of the earlier sections of the story, Poe managed to do just enough to salvage “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” He successfully backed away from his earlier insistence that the murder thicket and its environs could not have been the scene of the outrage, and he found additional breathing space in his concluding remarks about the notoriously problematic nature of scientific speculation. More importantly, Poe’s cunningly deceptive editorial note gave the impression that Dupin had emeged triumphant, but it scrupulously avoided giving any detail. The passage revealed only that “the result desired was brought to pass,” but gave no information as to the identity of the villain or the exact nature of what had transpired. In effect, Poe claimed to hold a winning hand without actually showing his cards.

  The third and final installment of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” appeared in February of 1843, with no explanation offered for the delay of one month. The story made a startling and original impression on its early readers, for whom the details of the Mary Rogers case were still very much a matter of concern. In an early review, the critic Thomas Dunn English noted:

  “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” has a local, independent of any other, interest. Everyone at all familiar with the internal history of New York for the last few years will remember the murder of Mary Rogers, the segar-girl. The deed baffled all attempts of the police to discover the time and mode of its commission, and the identity of the offenders. To this day, with the exception of the light afforded by the tale of Mr. Poe, in which the faculty of analysis is applied to the facts, the whole matter is shrouded in complete mystery. We think he has proven, very conclusively, that which he attempts. At all events, he has dissipated in our mind all belief that the murder was perpetrated by more than one.

  Although Poe had made no specific reference to Mary Rogers’s presumed death at the hands of an abortionist, his skillful dissection of the gang theory of the murder did a great deal to align his story with the dramatic shift in the public’s perception of the case. The previous year, when it was thought that the cigar girl had fallen victim to a gang of blacklegs and ruffians, the newspapers had united in calling for a more efficient police force. Now, in the wake of Mrs. Loss’s death and the drama at Weehawken, the editorial pages turned their energies to the outlawing of abortion. As Mrs. Loss had now passed beyond the reach of the law, much of the public outrage came to focus on the notorious Madame Restell, who continued to provide her powders and “still and lost” treatments—as opposed to “live and found” treatments, in which the patient would carry the pregnancy to term in a “lying in” house and then give the child up for adoption. “The exposures which we have recently made of this base woman’s practices have excited the profound attention of the community,” wrote the Police Gazette, “and moved by the deep necessity of providing a punishment adequate to her horrid and unnatural crimes, an association is already in the process of formation, whose intention it is to petition the legislature to make abortion a State Prison offense.”

  George Dixon, the editor of the weekly New York Polynathos, saw the fate of Mary Rogers as a threat to the very notion of female virtue. If women could so easily rid themselves of the evidence of sexual congress, he believed, the “coin of maidenhood” would be forever debased. “Madame Restell’s Preventative Powders have counterfeited the handwriting of nature,” Dixon insisted. “You have not a medal, fresh from the mint, of sure metal; but a base, lacquered counterfeit, that has undergone the sweaty contamination of a hundred palms.”

  The Police Gazette, meanwhile, demanded to know “if a community professing to be civilized will any longer tolerate this wholesale murder under their very eyes? Will a city possessing courts and a police wink at such an atrocious violation of the laws, and if it will, and the demon murderess Restell be too rich to be within the power of the law, will the community, in the last resort, suffer her to go on unrebuked by some sudden application of popular vengeance?” In raising the specter of “popular vengeance,” a reference to public lynching, the paper gave a fair measure of the depth of public feeling against Restell. “We are not now demanding justice upon the perpetratress of a single crime, but upon one who might be drowned in the blood of her victims, did each but yield a drop, whose epitaph should be a curse, and whose tomb a pyramid of skulls.”

  POE, EVER ALERT to the tide of popular opinion, would seize on this groundswell of sentiment to great effect in the months to come. For the moment, he was obliged to turn his attention to more pressing concerns. In February of 1843, as the final section of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” helped to stir indignation in New York, Poe issued a prospectus for The Stylus, a last-ditch effort at collecting enough subscription money to allow him to proceed. In contrast to the frivolous tone of the other magazines of the day, Poe declared that The Stylus would be “more vigorous, more pungent, more original, more individual and more independent.” Thomas Clarke, his partner in the enterprise, published the prospectus in his journal the Saturday Museum, along with a lengthy biographical sketch that praised Poe as a Byronic hero, describing heroic (though fictitious) exploits in Greece and St. Petersburg. Of greater merit were the lengthy extracts from his work, demonstrating that Poe, at thirty-four, had become one of the most distinctive literary voices in America. Although the sketch itself was immensely flattering, the woodcut portrait of Poe that accompanied it was not. “I am ugly enough, God knows,” he complained, “but not quite so bad as that.”

  Having averted a ruinous misstep with “Marie Rogêt,” it now appeared that Poe’s dream of running his own magazine would at last be realized. Within three months, however, Thomas Clarke had withdrawn his backing, having apparently become discouraged by Poe’s continued bouts of drunkenness. In a letter to James Russell Lowell, Poe wrote that the “magazine scheme has exploded, or, at least, I have been deprived, through the imbecility, or rather through the idiocy of my partner, of all means of prosecuting it for the present.”

  With his hopes dashed, Poe once again considered abandoning literature, and briefly explored a career in law. Predictably, this inspiration did not bear fruit. Finding himself with a great deal of unused material that he had intended for The Stylus, Poe set his sights on a new arena. Although he had disparaged “the present absurd rage for lecturing” when writing about Dickens, Poe launched his own career as a lecturer in November of 1843 with a speech at the William Wirt Literary Institute in Philadelphia on “The Poetry of America.” The timing was auspicious. A few months earlier, in June, Poe had published “The Gold-Bug,” a story in w
hich the unusual markings of a dung beetle hold the key to a pirate treasure. Coming only a few months after the final installment of “Marie Rogêt,” the story marked a continuation of Poe’s tales of ratiocination, with the Dupin-like figure of William Legrand using his “unusual powers of mind” to solve a baffling cipher. The story appeared in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper as the winning entry of a fiction contest, and would become the most popular and widely read of the stories Poe published in his lifetime. The success of “The Gold-Bug” helped to attract notice to the first of his Philadelphia lectures, with the result that hundreds of people were turned away at the door. Poe proved to be an engaging orator, alternating his passionate and melodic readings of poetry with the sharp literary insights that had made his reputation as a critic. The newspapers responded with enthusiasm, describing the lecture as “second to none” and praising Poe’s “command of language and strength of voice.” The evening brought Poe a payment of nearly one hundred dollars, and led to repeat performances in Wilmington and New York.

  Poe used his new public forum to settle a grudge against Rufus Griswold, the man who had succeeded him as an editor at Graham’s. The previous year, Griswold had compiled an anthology entitled The Poets and Poetry of America (which included Poe), in which he attempted to set forth a rigid critical ranking of the country’s poets. Although Poe initially praised the work as “the best collection of the American Poets that has yet been made,” his prospectus for The Stylus made it clear that he thought little of the work and intended to do a better job himself. In his lectures, Poe railed against Griswold’s “miserable want of judgment” and accused him of devoting an “extravagant proportion of space” to his cronies while giving short shrift to poets of “superior merit.” Although he did not say so, Poe undoubtedly resented that only three of his own poems had been included, as opposed to forty-five by the now-forgotten Charles Fenno Hoffman. George Graham would recall that Poe “gave Mr. Griswold some raps over the knuckles of force sufficient to be remembered.” Griswold would prove to have a very long and unforgiving memory.