as Claude, and my father was not a man to tolerate overmuch dissent from his students....”
By this time, of course, my imagination was conjuring up all kinds of wild fantasies. Throughout the time I had known him, Dupin had shown even less interest in the opposite sex than I had, and had always seemed to me to have cut himself off conclusively from all emotions of that kind. I had never quite been prepared to take it for granted that the sole reason for that exclusion was his devotion to the cause of study and rationality. I had always wondered whether his excessive commitment to dispassionate logic might have been, at its inception, a reaction to some wounding experience. Now, the notion that he might once have been in love with Julie Maret, but had lost her, in a context of parental disapproval, to an older rival he had initially counted as a friend, and then as a betrayer....
I had to remind myself, sternly, that real life does not normally bear overmuch resemblance to a feuilleton in Le Constitutionnel.
“At the risk of being indiscreet,” I said, glad for once to be an unrepentant gambler, “may I ask why you want to see Monsieur Dupin so urgently.”
“I want to ask him, rather urgently, for his help,” she said, bluntly. After a moment, during which she challenged me with her eyes, she added: “You don’t seem surprised. I presume that Lucien isn’t the only person who solicits his aid on a regular basis.”
“Indeed not,” I murmured. I could not resist the temptation to add: “But Madame Lacuzon turns most of them away, with a ferocity that has become legendary. I have never known her to reveal his whereabouts to anyone.”
“Amélie always made an exception for me,” was Julie Guérande’s curt but revealing reply. In a sense, I supposed that “Amélie” had always made an exception for me, too, but never with a conspicuously good grace. The gorgon evidently understood that I was in some sense essential to Dupin, and therefore to be tolerated, but it seemed, if I were reading the implication correctly, that Julie Maret had not been merely tolerated, but actively welcomed. Julie Maret had evidently grown used to thinking of the old witch as “Amélie”—a name that even Madame Bihan, her cousin, hesitated to pronounce.
It was possible, of course, that Madame Lacuzon had not been a “gorgon” or a “old witch” in 1820, but a mere middle-aged woman of much milder character—but somehow, I doubted it, Dupin might have been young at heart then, but not the concierge.
“If she did not guard him so closely,” I admitted, “he would be besieged. He lives semi-reclusively, but his reputation has nevertheless spread. I suppose that is partly my fault—or Poe’s, for not observing the convention of changing names to protect the innocent. Eddie assumed that his stories would never filter back to France, and would not strike a chord if they did...but even in the absence of translations, the tales have somehow been communicated. The steamships that have regularized communication between the continents have facilitated a freedom of information that Eddie, in spite of being an unusually far-sighted man, had not quite grasped imaginatively. Even without that excessively lurid account of the murders in the Rue Morgue, however, Dupin’s adventures in detection and the solution of strange mysteries would have generated rumors. Even the wizards of modern Paris take Dupin for a magician as great as themselves; at least one of them firmly believes that he is a reincarnation of John Dee—which goes to show how rare logic and erudition are in today’s world.”
Madame Guérande did not laugh at the half-hearted witticism. She weighed the book she was holding in her hand, and then glanced around the shelves again. “Has Auguste abandoned his more esoteric interests, then?” she asked, curiously. “I did not see his once-precious copy of Les Harmonies de l’enfer on your shelves.”
“Oh, he keeps his shelf of forbidden books in his own apartment,” I told her, laconically. “They might not be safe here, without Madame Lacuzon to guard the threshold.”
She looked at me strangely, apparently wondering how serious I was, or ought to be. Then she nodded her head, almost imperceptibly. It was not a communication, but a faint reflex.
“Has the reason you want his help something to do with the Harmonies of Hell?” I asked, tentatively.
“Not in the sense that the silly book in question means the phrase,” she assured me, “although there is an underworld involved, and strange legends concerning it—but it’s more a matter of disharmony than harmony. There’s nothing truly supernatural involved, so far as I can tell.”
“If there’s one thing I have learned in my acquaintance with Dupin,” I said, with a slight sigh, having taken note of the cautionary truly, “especially in recent years, is that one never can tell. He is very adamant in saying that everything that happens is natural, but if he is right...well, the bounds of the natural are not what I once thought them to be.”
Again, there was an imperceptible nod, as if she were taking note of another echo of the distant past. “That was one point of faith on which all the members of my father’s secret society agreed,” she said, softly. “Everything that had ever happened was natural: the origin and progress of life; the origin and progress of humankind. They took reverent delight in private speculation and deduction on such subjects, all the more so because their mouths were routinely sealed in public.”
I had discussed similar issues many times with Dupin, and had always been struck by the idiosyncrasy of his attitude when he mentioned certain matters. The majority of intelligent men, he had once told me, had believed ever since Carl von Linné published his taxonomy of species, that humans were a natural product of evolution, closely related to the great apes—but none had dared say so in their writings, and some had even resorted to vehement denial, for fear of the disapproval of the Church. I had been in Paris long enough to know that the Revolution of ’89 had not put an end to the power of that disapproval, especially in the upper echelons of Academe, which still retained the legacy of its one-time domination by the Church.
Madame Guérande looked at her daughter, who had fallen asleep in the armchair. Gently, she removed the empty plate from the little girl’s knee and set it down on the tray.
“Have you come far?” I asked, innocently—but with an extensive hidden agenda of my own.
“From the Ardèche,” she said, casually.
“That’s a long journey,” I observed, although I had only the vaguest notion of where the Ardèche was.
“It was very long the first time I made it,” she agreed, “but now that the railway from Paris has reached Chalon...within three years, or five at the most, it will stretch all the way to Lyon, perhaps to Marseilles....unless a new Revolution throws the country into chaos again.”
“The one thing about which there is no political dispute is the necessity of expanding the railways as rapidly as possible,” I said. “On that matter, the king and Monsieur Thiers are in complete agreement, and have no need to seek a juste milieu. The most hardened Legitimists and the most radical Anarchists are similarly besotted with railways, even if they disapprove of the role played by the Bourse in their instigation. No one can any longer imagine how we could once have been content with canals. You traveled by train, then, all the way from Chalon to Paris?”
“Yes. Have you traveled by railway yourself?” What she wanted to know, I presumed, was whether Dupin was amenable to railway travel. In spite of my enthusiastic little speech, she and I both knew that there were people in the world who had sworn that they would never step into a railway carriage, either for fear of accidents or love of horses.
“Only as far Rouen,” I told her. “It was an experience. If you’re correct about the speed of the network’s
