1992 - Reading Poe's Mind. Politics, Mathematics, And the Association of Ideas in 'the Murders in the Rue Morgue

Reading Poe's Mind: Politics, Mathematics, and the Association of Ideas in "The Murders inthe Rue Morgue"Author(s): John T. IrwinSource: American Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 187-206Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489985 .

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Reading Poe's Mind:

Politics, Mathematics, and the Association of Ideas in

"The Murders in the Rue

Morgue" John T. Irwin

One of the best known and most intriguing passages in Poe's fiction occurs near the beginning of his first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The narrator has been describing Dupin's remarkable powers of observation and de- duction, and he illustrates these with a brief example. The two men had been walking one evening through the streets of Paris in the vicinity of the Palais Royal. "Being both, apparently, occupied with thought," neither of them "had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes," when suddenly Dupin breaks in on the narrator's meditations with the comment, "He is a very little fellow, that's true, and would do better for the Theatre des Varietes" (2: 533, 534). The narrator says that he had just been thinking of an actor named Chantilly, "a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the role of Xerxes, in Crebillon's tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains" (2: 534), and he ex- presses his astonishment at Dupin's ability to read his thoughts. In response Dupin explains the deductive method that allowed him to eavesdrop on his friend's meditation. He points out that some fifteen minutes earlier the narrator had been jostled in the street by a "fruiterer, with a large basket upon his head." The man, "brushing quickly past," had thrust the narrator upon "a pile of paving-stones collected at a spot where the causeway is undergoing repair" (2: 535). The incident, says Dupin, had clearly launched the narrator on a train of thought, and by close observation of his facial movements and gestures and by a series of deductions based on his knowledge of the narrator's thought processes, Dupin had reproduced the associative logic governing his companion's meditation, until the moment when he decided



188 Reading Poe's Mind

to test the accuracy of his method by agreeing with the narrator's last mental comment. As Dupin explains, the "larger links" in the narrator's chain of thought "run thus-Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer" (2: 535).

Dupin's subsequent explanation of this chain is a remarkable exercise in the association of ideas, an explanation that we will examine presently in some detail. But what interests me most about this passage, in which Dupin theorizes the associations that produced this linking of ideas in the narrator's mind, is the question of the actual associations existing in Poe's mind that led him to create this particular sequence of thoughts as an example of associative logic. For I would argue that this chain grows out of the association, in Poe's mind, of the realms of mathematics and politics in revolutionary and postrevolu- tionary France and that the visible link between the two realms in the narrator's train of thought is the word "Stereotomy."

To pursue this line of inquiry we must recall for a moment the importance of mathematics in Poe's three Dupin stories. Beginning with the narrator's remark at the opening of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" that "the faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and es- pecially by that highest branch of it which ... has been called ... analysis" (2: 528), the amount of mathematical reference and imagery increases almost exponentially from one Dupin story to the next. The second tale, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," is filled with references to Laplace's calculus of probabilities, while the third tale, "The Purloined Letter," contains, in response to the narrator's remark that Dupin apparently has "a quarrel on hand ... with some of the algebraists of Paris" (3: 987), a lengthy digression by Dupin on the relationship between the words "analysis" and "algebra." Part of the explanation for this mathematical component in the tales is that the Dupin stories are subtly but unmistakably grounded in contemporary French politics, and in France mathematics and politics were closely linked during the period in which the stories are set. Recall that Paris, besides being the center of French political life, was at this period the mathematical capital of the world, and a great many of the most distinguished French math- ematicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were eminent political figures as well. For example, Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), perhaps the foremost French geometer of his day, was a staunch republican and Bonapartist. The inventor of descriptive geometry, Monge had already had a long and distinguished career as a teacher of mathematics when he was



American Literary History 189

appointed to important administrative and political positions during the Revolution and the empire (Taton). In 1792-93 he served briefly as minister of the navy. Working to provide the technological expertise needed for the defense of the republic, he took an active part in establishing the Ecole Polytechnique, where he taught descriptive geometry. In 1796 he made the acquaintance of Napoleon and later accompanied him on his expedition to Egypt. Returning to France in 1798, he was named the first president of the Institute of Egypt and resumed teaching at the Polytechnique. A loyal supporter of Napoleon, Monge was subsequently appointed a member of the Senate and given the title of count of Pelusium. But later, upon Napoleon's fall, he was stripped of his offices and titles by Louis XVIII and died soon after (Cayley).

When Monge was expelled in 1816 from the Academie des Sciences, his place was filled by the appointment (not the election) of Augustin-Louis Cauchy, a devout Catholic and royalist and perhaps the foremost French algebraist of the day. A professor first at the Ecole Polytechnique and later at the Faculte des Sciences and the College de France, Cauchy published in 1821 his famous Cours d'Analyse, which revolutionized mathematical analysis by basing it on limits, functions, and calculus. But just as Monge had seen the political part of his career overwhelm the scientific part with the fall of Napoleon in 1815, so Cauchy experienced the same fate in 1830 when the July Revolution replaced the Bourbon Charles X with the Orleans king Louis Philippe. Refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the new king, Cauchy lost his academic positions and went into self-imposed exile. In 1833 Cauchy "was called to Prague, where Charles X had settled, to assist in the education of the crown prince" and was eventually made a baron by the ex-king as a mark of his esteem (Freudenthal). With the revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Republic, the oath of allegiance was repealed, and "Cauchy resumed his chair at the Sorbonne.... He retained this chair even when Napoleon III reestablished the oath in 1852, for Napoleon generously ex- empted the republican Arago and the royalist Cauchy" (Freu- denthal).

The fact that leading figures from two distinct mathematical camps in nineteenth-century France-the geometer Monge and the algebraist Cauchy-were deeply involved, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, in the governmental tur- moil of the period explains in part the appropriateness of Poe's including a reference to mathematical partisanship (Dupin's quarrel with "some of the algebraists of Paris") in a tale of




For in both the political and the mathematical spheres it must have seemed that revolution and counterrevolution, exile and return, were the order of the day.

French political intrigue like "The Purloined Letter." For in both the political and the mathematical spheres it must have seemed that revolution and counterrevolution, exile and return, were the order of the day. Indeed, this association of politics and mathematics in the affairs of the time sheds light on Poe's choice of a name for his detective. The traditional explanation of the detective's surname holds that Poe took it from one Andre-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin (1783-1865), a "French advocate and president of the chamber of deputies" ("Dupin"). And the evidence most frequently cited for this identification is the fact that Poe reviewed, in the same issue of Graham's Magazine (April 1841) in which he published the first Dupin story, a book translated by R. M. Walsh entitled Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France that contains a chapter devoted to the political career of Andre Dupin (Mabbott 2: 525). Moreover, the book's author, Louis Leonard de Lomenie, describes Andre Dupin in terms that bear a striking resemblance to those describing Poe's detective. He says, for example, that Dupin is "a perfect living encyclopaedia. From Homer to Rous- seau, from the Bible to the civil code, from the laws of the twelve tables to the Koran, he has read every thing, retained every thing" (224). He also notes that Dupin's character seems to be compounded of nothing but antithetical qualities, a description recalling the narrator's sense of his friend as "a double Dupin" whose dual powers of intellect-the creative and the resolvent-recalled "the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul" (Mabbott 2: 533):

He is the personage for whom the painters of political portraits, make the most enormous consumption of an- tithesis. In the same picture, he will be drawn as both great and little, courageous and timid ... white and black; there is no understanding it.... If, like every one else, and even more than every one else, the honourable deputy of Nievre has his contrasts of light and shade, is it therefore to be supposed, that so many heterogeneous elements are combined in him in such equal proportions, as to render his character a jumble so strange as to be absolutely mon- strous? (Lomenie 210-11)

Perhaps the most interesting piece of information that Lo- menie provides about Andre Dupin for our purposes is that he has a brother, the Baron Charles Dupin (1784-1873), who is a famous mathematician. Now while it seems fairly clear that Poe had the lawyer and politician Andre Dupin in mind when




he chose a name for his detective in the first Dupin story, it seems equally clear that Poe had Charles Dupin in mind as well when he provided his detective with an antithetical double, the Minister D_, in the third story. In giving the Minister the same initial as Dupin (and as the word "double"), Poe suggests a structural kinship between the two opponents, a kind of antithetical "family resemblance." Poe guided himself in creating this resemblance by taking biographical details from both Du- pin brothers and giving them to the characters of the detective and his rival, the Minister D_.

We can see this process more clearly if we examine for a moment the career of the mathematician Charles Dupin. He graduated "in 1803 from the Ecole Polytechnique... as a naval engineer," having been a student there of the geometer Monge (Struik). When Dupin published his Developpements de geo- metrie in 1813, he acknowledged this discipleship by dedicating the work to his "illustre maitre" Monge. Occupying himself mainly with naval engineering projects during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Charles Dupin eventually became "professor of mechanics at the Paris Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, a position he held until 1854" (Struik). In 1824 he was made a baron by Louis XVIII; in 1828, elected deputy for Tarn; in November 1834, served briefly as "minister of marine affairs"; in 1838, was made a peer; and finally in 1852, became a member of the Senate (Struik).

In "The Purloined Letter" Poe indicates that he has both Dupin brothers in mind by having the narrator remark of the Minister D : "There are two brothers I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus" (3: 986). Undoubtedly one of the reasons that Poe associates both the Dupins with this story is that the tale is set against the complex political backdrop of the French court, a court with which both brothers were involved to varying degrees. From internal evidence we can make a fairly accurate estimate of the political period in which the action of "The Purloined Letter" takes place. In all of the Dupin stories, Poe refers to the prefect of the Paris police as G_, and Poe scholars have generally taken this to be the initial, as Mabbott notes, of "Henri-Joseph Gisquet... prefect of police in Paris, 1831-1836. ... Baudelaire in 1865 identified G_ as Gisquet" in a footnote to his translation of"The Mystery of Marie Roget" (2: 573n31). Given that Gisquet was prefect from 1831 to 1836, the French king and queen in the tale would then be Louis Philippe and his queen, Maria Amelia.

Louis Philippe, the duke of Orleans, had, of course, gained




the throne as a result of the revolution of 1830, in which Charles X attempted to abdicate in favor of his grandson the comte de Chambord (with Louis Philippe as regent) but was deposed instead by the Chamber of Deputies who "proclaimed Louis Philippe 'King of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people'" (Phillips). Andre Dupin, as one of the leading members of the Chamber of Deputies, had played a major role in the events of July 1830.

In the political spectrum of the period, Andre Dupin seems to have maintained a fairly consistent stance of liberal opposition to absolute rule. In 1815, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he "strenuously opposed the election of the son of Napoleon as emperor after his father's abdication" ("Dupin"). After the restoration Dupin was not reelected to the Chamber of Deputies, and the new monarchy "made an effort to win the distinguished advocate" with the offer of a position as secretary general in the Department of Justice (Lomenie 218). Dupin refused, choosing instead to defend "with great intrepidity the political victims of the reaction," most notably Marshal Ney ("Dupin"). Like many liberals of the period, Andre Dupin found Louis Philippe, who had been a republican hero at the battle of Jemappes and had courted the favor of the liberal bourgeoisie throughout his adult life, an attractive political alternative to the other members of the royal family, and he became Louis Philippe's personal friend and political ally, serving from 1817 as "one of his legal counselors ... and as his business agent" (Brown). In 1820 Louis Philippe appointed Andre Dupin "a member of his private council" (Lomenie 218). In 1827 Dupin was again elected to the Chamber of Deputies, taking "his seat in the left centre" (Lomenie 218), and after the accession of Louis Philippe in 1830, Dupin became president of the Cham- ber of Deputies in 1832, an office he held for the next eight years.

At the period, then, in which "The Purloined Letter" is set-somewhere in the five-year space between 1831 and 1836 when Gisquet was prefect of the Paris police, and probably after late 1832 when Dupin became president of the Chamber of Deputies- Andre Dupin's relationship with Louis Philippe (first as his business agent and a member of his private council, then as a deputy who worked for his accession to the throne, and finally as president of the Chamber of Deputies) was certainly as intimate as the Minister D_'s was with the king in the tale, which is to say, a relationship close enough that it permitted the Minister D_ to enter the royal boudoir for an audience with the king and, after conducting "business transactions," to




converse "for some fifteen minutes, upon the public affairs" (3: 977), as if his visit were an everyday occurrence. The difficulty here is that Poe gives D the title "Minister," a title that allows for some confusion; for while Andre Dupin had served briefly as "minister without portfolio" in the first cabinet formed after the revolution of 1830, his brother Charles, as we noted, had also served briefly as minister of marine affairs in 1834. One might wonder, then, whether Poe had taken the name of his detective from one brother (the politician Andre) and the character of the Minister D_ from the other brother (the mathematician Charles, who, in his application of differential calculus to geometry in the Developpements, could certainly have been said to have "written learnedly on the Differential Calculus," as the narrator says of the Minister D_). Yet to judge from Lomenie's description of the way in which the press portrayed Andre Dupin at the time of the July Revolution (a portrayal that Lomenie feels is unjust and attempts to correct), the character of the Minister D_ (whom Poe describes as a man of"dar- ing, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity" [3: 990], given to political intrigue and the use of influence to satisfy his personal ambition for power) seems to be derived from the popular image of the politician Andre rather than from his brother Charles. It would seem, then, that Poe took the surname and some of the mental traits of his detective as well as the broad outline of the Minister D_'s political character from one brother (Andre), while in "The Purloined Letter" he added to the characters of both the detective and the Minister features taken from the other brother (Charles). In so doing, Poe was able to super- impose upon the figures of the detective and the Minister an image of structural kinship (the antithetical twinship of doubles) and thus personify the creative/resolvent power of mind which they shared as that of poet and mathematician, a move that took advantage of the fact that one of the Dupin brothers was actually a famous mathematician. (Whatever the Dupin brothers' poetic talents might have been-and certainly writing verse was a standard accomplishment for men of their class and era, as evidenced by the reams of bad poetry produced by the mathematician Cauchy-history seems to have ignored them as poets.)

In mingling details from the careers of the two Dupin brothers in "The Purloined Letter," Poe may well have been reflecting the combined influence that nineteenth-century French politics and mathematics had had on the specific circumstances of his own mathematical education. Recall that when Poe left the University of Virginia in 1826 after his foster father John Allan




had withdrawn his financial support, he traveled to Boston and enlisted as a private in the US Army in May 1827 under the name Edgar A. Perry. He spent the next two years in the service and was eventually promoted to sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank. Having paid a substitute to serve out his enlist- ment, he was honorably discharged in April 1829 and sought an appointment to West Point. Poe entered the US Military Academy as a cadet in July 1830-the same month in which Andre Dupin was, according to Lomenie, continually mentioned in the French press for his active role in the events of the July Revolution, which brought Louis Philippe to the throne. And the school that Poe entered at West Point that summer was one whose curriculum had been modeled since 1817, when Major Sylvanus Thayer became superintendent, on that of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, the school created by Monge in 1794 to train engineers and scientists for republican France and at which Charles Dupin had been educated.

In 1815 Thayer had been sent abroad by the War De- partment "to look into the military system of Europe, particularly of France" (Cajori 114). Thayer, who had graduated from West Point in 1808 and taught mathematics there from 1810- 12, was a Francophile, and most of the two and a half years he stayed in Europe were spent in Paris examining the organization of various technical schools (Molloy 386-87). In 1816 Thayer was informed by the War Department that, upon his return to the US, he would become superintendent of the US Military Academy, and it was with the reform of West Point's curriculum in mind that Thayer focused his attention on the Ecole Poly- technique. Thayer was able "to spend time with faculty members at Polytechnique" through the help of the Marquis de Lafayette and General Simon Bernard, "who was about to sail for the United States as Chief of the Board of Fortifications" (Molloy 388).

Bernard, an early graduate of the Polytechnique, had entered the French army's engineers corps and eventually risen to become Napoleon's aide-de-camp in 1813 and a field marshal the following year (Carter 307). With the fall of Napoleon, he emigrated to the US, having accepted an appointment in the "Corps of Engineers, with the rank of Brigadier General" (Mol- loy 368). In the US, Bernard "executed a number of extensive military works for the government, notably at Fortress Monroe, Virginia" ("Bernard"). (We might note in passing that as an enlisted man in the US Army, Poe was stationed at Fort Mon- roe, Virginia, from December 1828 to April 1829 [Thomas and Jackson 87-90].) In 1830, after the July Revolution, Bernard




returned to France and was appointed a lieutenant general by Louis Philippe. He became aide-de-camp to the king in 1832, served briefly as minister of war in November 1834, and was again appointed minister of war in 1836 (Carter 307). Bernard would thus have been minister of war in 1834 at the same time that Charles Dupin was minister of marine affairs and Andre Dupin was president of the Chamber of Deputies. It was Ber- nard, then, who helped Thayer find his "way in Parisian scientific circles" in 1815-16, arranging for him "to receive in- struction in descriptive geometry, and in advanced stonecutting" at the Ecole Polytechnique (Molloy 374), and it was Bernard again who, as a brigadier general in the Corps of Engineers and chief of the Board of Fortifications, acted as Thayer's staunch supporter in modeling the curriculum of the Military Academy on that of the French technical school.

To understand what that modeling involved, we must con- sider for a moment the original purpose of the Polytechnique as it was conceived by Monge in 1794, compared to its purpose in 1816 when Thayer saw it. When Monge drew up the original curriculum for the Polytechnique, he planned to create a pure engineering school, a single institution to train France's civil, military, and naval engineers, and for the first five years of its existence this was the role the Polytechnique filled. But in 1800 the curriculum began to change. As a result of constant political pressure from the Ecoles d'Application (specialized schools of advanced training in science and engineering), the Polytechnique gradually became a preparatory school for the advanced schools, with its length reduced from three years to two and its curriculum devoted to pure and applied mathematics rather than to engineering (Molloy 70, 78). In 1804 Napoleon militarized the Polytechnique, requiring the students to wear uniforms, perform infantry drill, and live in barracks at the school (Molloy 80), for the emperor's main interest in the institution was as a source of engineers and artillery officers for the army. But his decision to place the students under military discipline was prompted as well by the fact that the Poly- technique was a bastion of republican sentiment, manifested in early 1804 in a series of anti-Bonapartist acts by the student body. Indeed, this strong republican bias remained an ongoing aspect of the school, as demonstrated some twenty-five years later when the students "went in a body to the barricades to fight for the Liberals in the Revolution of 1830" (Molloy 85).

The Polytechnique which Thayer saw in 1815-17, then, was a military school with long-standing republican traditions and a curriculum devoted to pure and applied mathematics.




But "Thayer had no intention of modeling West Point's curriculum after the advanced and highly abstract curriculum of the Ecole Polytechnique of 1815; instead, he looked back to the curriculum of the years 1795-1804, when the Polytechnique had been a genuine engineering school. Perhaps Thayer was influenced in this respect by General Bernard, an early graduate of the Polytechnique" (Molloy 389). Though mathematics was at the core of the curriculum that Thayer established, the em- phasis was on its practical applications, with a specific bias against the theoretical: "The Cadets were not encouraged to express themselves in abstract terms" (Molloy 432-33). Indeed, one wonders whether Dupin's quarrel with "some of the algebraists of Paris" reflects a bias against theoretical mathematics left over from Poe's education at West Point.

Thayer copied not only West Point's curriculum and its system of examinations from the Polytechnique but even specific regulations, such as that forbidding cadets to have any books in their rooms "beyond prescribed texts and reference works" (Molloy 390). In addition, he employed a graduate of the Polytechnique, Claude Crozet, to teach engineering. Crozet, who had been an artillery officer in Napoleon's army, had accompanied Bernard to the US in 1816, serving first as an engineer in the US Army and then on the engineering faculty at West Point from 1816 to 1823. Like Charles Dupin, Crozet had been a student of Monge's at the Polytechnique, and he introduced into the US the study of descriptive geometry, the field that Monge had invented. In 1821 Crozet published A Treatise of Descriptive Geometry for the Use of Cadets of the U.S.M.A., a text that was still "the standard work for third and fourth classmen until 1832" (Molloy 444) and would thus have been available to Poe.

When Poe entered the Military Academy in 1830, Thayer's Polytechnique-derived curriculum had been in place for thir- teen years, and so we can be fairly certain what Poe's course of studies involved. For the first two years at West Point, a cadet concentrated on two subjects-mathematics and French. In the examination system "subjects were weighted according to their importance. Thus for freshmen, who studied only mathematics and French, the former subject received a weight of two, the latter a weight of one" (Molloy 438). Included in the study of mathematics was "a little drawing, and a fair amount of descriptive geometry" (Molloy 441). In his first year, a cadet, "even in the slowest section, mastered algebra, plane geometry, plane analytic geometry, plane trigonometry, and basic techniques of surveying; the advanced section covered advanced




plane and spherical geometry in addition to the previous subjects" (Molloy 422). Poe was in the advanced section in mathematics, as he bragged to John Allan in a letter dated 6 No- vember 1830: "I have an excellent standing in my class-in the first section in every thing and have great hopes of doing well." But he adds that "the study requisite is incessant, and the discipline exceedingly rigid." He goes on to note, "I am very much pleased with Colonel Thayer, and indeed with everything at the institution" (Letters 38).

As one of Poe's contemporaries at West Point, A. B. Ma- gruder, recalled, Poe "was an accomplished French scholar, and had a wonderful aptitude for mathematics" (Thomas and Jackson 107). Indeed, Poe's standing in his studies, as he told Allan, was excellent: after the January examinations in 1831, he was third in French and seventeenth in mathematics in a class of eighty-seven (Thomas and Jackson 112). And since "the performance of each Cadet was charted on a daily basis," with the grades being turned over to the superintendent weekly (Mol- loy 428), Poe's ranking in these areas during his five months of classes at West Point is a significant gauge of his ability, particularly of his mathematical aptitude, for at the time that Poe attended West Point and for several decades after, the Military Academy was "unquestionably the most influential mathematical school in the United States" (Cajori 121).

Poe's sense of his high academic standing in his class can be seen in a subsequent letter to the superintendent. After getting himself court-martialed in February 1831 for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders" and dismissed from West Point, Poe wrote Thayer on 10 March requesting a letter of recommendation: "I intend by the first opportunity to proceed to Paris with the view of obtaining, thro' the interest of the Marquis de La Fayette, an appointment (if possible) in the Polish Army. In the event of the interference of France in behalf of Poland this may be easily effected. ... A certificate of'standing' in my class is all that I have any right to expect. Any thing farther-a letter to a friend in Paris-or to the Marquis-would be a kindness which I should never forget" (Letters 44-45). One wonders whether Poe's plan to go to Paris to continue a military career after his dismissal from West Point had been influenced by the recent return to France of Bernard. Indeed, one wonders whether Bernard was Thayer's "friend in Paris" mentioned in Poe's letter. French army records show that Bernard had "returned to active service in the Corps of Engineers" as of 12 February 1831 (Carter 307), a month before Poe's letter.

To judge, then, from the curriculum at West Point in Poe's




day, it seems fairly certain that his course of studies there would have indelibly linked in his mind the subject of mathematics with contemporary French politics. It would have done so not just because Poe was required to spend five of the nine hours a day that cadets devoted to their studies on learning mathematics and the other four on French, but because the very reason for this odd, two-subject curriculum for new cadets was rooted in the events of recent French history-the founding of the Ecole Polytechnique in revolutionary France to provide civil and military engineers for the fortification and defense of the republic; the militarization of the school in 1804 by Napoleon; the de- parture from France, upon the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy, of some of the Polytechnique's most distinguished graduates (such as Bernard and Crozet) to follow careers in the US Army; the modeling of West Point's curriculum on that of the Polytechnique and the resultant need for the cadets to know French well enough to keep up with the latest mathematical developments at the school (Thayer had purchased over a thousand technical books in France for the West Point library during his 1815-17 sojourn); and the return of Bernard to France, upon the accession of Louis Philippe, to rejoin the French army and ultimately become minister of war, serving alongside his fellow Polytechnician Charles Dupin, who was minister of marine affairs.

All of which ultimately returns us to the passage in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" where Dupin explains the train of thought initiated in the narrator's mind by his being jostled in the street by a tradesman and thrust against a pile of paving stones and returns us with enough background information to explain why Poe created this specific sequence of thoughts as an example of associative logic. Noticing that the narrator, in the wake of being thrust against the pile of stones, keeps looking at the rough pavement as he walks, Dupin concludes that he is "still thinking of the stones," and when they reach "a little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks," he notes that the narrator's lips move, and he assumes that he is murmuring "the word 'stereotomy,' a term affectedly applied to this species of pavement" (2: 535-36). According to the Oxford English Dic- tionary, the word stereotomy literally refers to "the science or art of cutting, or making sections of, solids; the art of cutting stone or other solid bodies into measured forms, as in masonry." Therefore, the application of the word to a particular form of road paving does seem, as Dupin says, somewhat affected. But




recall that what interests us here is not so much the fictive chain of associations in the narrator's mind as the real chain of associations in Poe's. By calling attention to the affected use of the word stereotomy, Poe seems to be encouraging the reader to inquire into its more normal use. And as one of the historical citations in the OED makes clear, stereotomy was, at the time and place in which the story is set, a word with very specific technical connotations: "Stereotomy ... in the scientific lan- guage of the Polytechnic School, signifies that part of stonecutting, on which Frezier and De la Rue have written so much." Indeed, in the curriculum for the Polytechnique that Monge drew up in 1794, half of the time allotted for mathematical study "would be given over to 'stereotomy,' or civil and military engineering," an area of study that "included descriptive geometry, mechanical drawing, theories of shadows and perspec- tive and their applications to stone and wood cutting techniques" (Molloy 104) for use in road building, bridge and canal construction, and harbor improvements and fortifications. Poe's use of the word, then, almost certainly reflects his own Poly- technique-based schooling at West Point and possibly reflects as well his sense of the influence that the Polytechnique's scientific innovations had had on daily life in France by the 1830s.

And, indeed, I think we can detect here some of the associations at work in Poe's own mind that led him to use this odd technical term connected with the Polytechnique. The chain of associations would seem to begin with Poe's choice of a name for "the little alley" whose paving reminded the narrator of the word stereotomy. He calls the alley "Lamartine." Mabbott is undoubtedly correct in thinking that the name is an allusion to "the voluminous poet" Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869). According to Mabbott, Poe considered Lamartine "a bore, and slyly gave his name to a little alley" (2: 571nl 8). But there is clearly more involved in his use of the name than just a passing slap at a boring poet. Like Andre Dupin, Lamartine was one of the figures discussed at length in Lomenie's Sketches of Con- spicuous Living Characters of France, the book that Poe reviewed in the same issue of Graham's Magazine in which he published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." In the chapter devoted to him, Lamartine is depicted as a man who has suc- ceeded in a dual career-being both a brilliant poet and an adept politician. Having held various diplomatic posts under the restored monarchy, Lamartine eventually became a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1834, serving in that body at the same period when Andre Dupin was its president and




Charles Dupin, another member, was appointed minister of marine affairs.

At the beginning of his political career, Lamartine en- deavored, says Lomenie, "to respond both to the inspiration of the poet and the functions of the deputy" (121), but as time passed, he tended to regard poetry as the "humble vassal of politics" and to resent those who "would confine him to his poetic inaction" at the expense of his "social labour" (122). The sight of one of France's greatest poets preferring political involvement to artistic achievement gave rise, says Lomenie, "in the literary world to grave discussions upon the mission of the poet in modem societies" (122), as well as to a feeling on the part of many in France that while the country had "no want of politicians" it had "only one poet" like Lamartine (123). The image of Lamartine that emerges, then, from the book is that of a poet-politician; and since Charles Dupin (who is mentioned in the chapter on his brother Andre) was an eminent mathematician-politician, one wonders whether, in designating the Minister D_ as both "poet and mathematician," Poe recalled from Lomenie's work that a famous poet and a renowned mathematician had both been important political figures in the Chamber of Deputies over which Andre Dupin presided.

If for Poe the name of the poet-politician Lamartine was associated with the name of his opposite, the mathematician- politician Charles Dupin, then it would have been a short step from the latter individual, a star pupil of Monge's at the Poly- technique, to a word closely associated with the Polytech- nique's curriculum-stereotomy. That Poe's use of the word was prompted by its association with the Polytechnique is further confirmed by the fact that in the narrator's train of thought, as explicated by Dupin, "stereotomy" leads him to think im- mediately of atomies, the theories of Epicurus, and finally of the way in which "the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony" (2: 536); and we know from Eureka the name of the French mathematician whom Poe always associated with that "most mag- nificent of theories"-"the Nebular Cosmogony of Laplace" (245). Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), whose calculus of probabilities provides, as we noted earlier, a kind of mathematical-philosophical background for the second Dupin story, was, like Monge, associated with the Ecole Polytechnique in both a mathematical and political capacity, though often this relationship was more adversarial than otherwise. When Na- poleon seized power in 1799, Monge became the director of the Polytechnique, and Laplace became for a brief period min-




ister of the interior, head of the governmental department that administered the school. Laplace favored the legislative bill changing the curriculum of the Polytechnique from an engineering school to a school of pure and applied mathematics, and the bill became law in December 1799 (Molloy 78). Several years later Laplace again altered the structure of the Polytech- nique when, after the fall of Napoleon, he headed a commission to reorganize the school in 1816 (Molloy 88). It would seem, then, that besides being linked in Poe's mind with the calculus of probabilities, the author of the nebular cosmogony may also have been associated with that peculiarly French blend of mathematics and politics that characterized the Polytechnique, the school whose curriculum had been the basis of Poe's own mathematical education.

If the mention of the nebular cosmogony (with its implicit link to Laplace and thence to the Polytechnique) does indeed represent another echo of the connection between mathematics and politics in France at this period, then we can perhaps detect the image pattern that triggered Poe's own mental associations as he created the narrator's fictive train of thought. Recall that the incident begins with the narrator's being bumped by a laborer in the street and his falling against a pile of paving stones. Since the narrator seems to be of the same upper-class social stratum as the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, his being jostled, inadvertently or not, by a common laborer gives added significance to the detail of his falling against the paving stones. Since the French Revolution the most readily available weapons for the Parisian mob in the periodic uprisings that convulsed the country were the paving stones in the streets, torn up and hurled at the enemy. And the narrator is in fact slightly injured by being thrust against the pile of stones.

I would suggest that what governs the imagery in the narrator's train of thought is precisely this opposition between low and high, between common laborer and aristocrat, between the lowly paving stones (at which the narrator continues to gaze for several minutes as he walks) and the constellation Orion (to which he directs his attention when the chain of associations leads him to think of the nebular cosmogony). At the period in which the tale is set, the most recent example of a popular uprising in Paris would have been the revolution of 1830, the uprising in whose wake the poet Lamartine, a descendant of an upper-class family, became a member of the popularly elected Chamber of Deputies. If we are correct in thinking that Poe antithetically associated the figure of Lamartine with that of the Baron Charles Dupin-one a poet, one a mathematician; both




involved in politics as members of the legislature; one bearing the same name as the detective who traces the associations in the narrator's thoughts-then there is probably both a high road and a low road leading to the next link in the chain (the word "stereotomy"). The high road leads from Lamartine to Charles Dupin, and then to Dupin's association with the Polytechnique and the use of the word stereotomy in its curriculum to refer to the type of civil engineering that included techniques of stonecutting for road building. The low road leads from the laborer who jostles the narrator against the pile of paving stones, to the little street called Lamartine, to the sufferings of Lamartine's aristocratic family at the hands of the mob during the French Revolution as recounted by Lomenie, to Lamartine's survival to become a popular figure and a member of the Chamber of Deputies (a body that both represents the populace and tries to prevent its rising up and restoring the chaos of the Revolution), and finally to the particular form of paving in the little alley named Lamartine, a paving that employs "overlapping and riveted blocks" (2: 536) that are clearly difficult to dislodge, stones that cannot rise out of their place and hurt the people that walk on them. (We should note that after its militarization in 1804, the Polytechnique changed from being a school open to any bright young student of whatever social class to a school "for the sons of the middle and upper classes" [Molloy 86], so that this road-building technique meant to keep the paving stones in their place [and associated with the Polytechnique through the word "stereotomy"] suggests the way in which the technical and scientific advances that grew out of the revolutionary spirit which created the Polytechnique eventually became middle-class tools for discouraging continued revolution by the lower class.)

Clearly, the symbolic equation at work in the narrator's train of thought identifies the members of the lower class (the laborers in the road) with the paving stones beneath the narrator's feet-each (person and stone) being a basic, atomlike element in a larger structure (state and street). Given this implied comparison, it is not surprising that Dupin continues his explication of the narrator's thought processes by remarking, "I knew that you could not say to yourself 'stereotomy' without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus; and since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great nebula




in Orion" (2: 536). From the implicit imagery of common laborers and paving stones as atoms in a larger body, the chain of associations runs to the theory of the ancient Greek philos- opher Epicurus that all things are composed of atoms, and then on to a modem derivation from that theory, Laplace's nebular cosmogony. In Eureka Poe discusses the link between the work of Epicurus and Laplace by noting that Laplace's

original idea seems to have been a compound of the true Epicurean atoms with the false nebulae of his contemporaries; and thus his theory presents us with the singular anomaly of absolute truth deduced, as a mathematical result, from a hybrid datum of ancient imagination inter- tangled with modem inacumen. Laplace's real strength lay, in fact, in an almost miraculous mathematical instinct:... in the case of the Nebular Cosmogony, it led him, blind- folded, through a labyrinth of Error, into one of the most luminous and stupendous temples of Truth. (266)

Recall that when Dupin originally listed the "larger links" in the narrator's chain of thought the list ran: "Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer." But in his subsequent explanation of this sequence, Dupin never tells us who Dr. Nichol is or how he fits into the chain of associations. Mabbott notes that "Dr. John Pringle Nichol (1804-1859), Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow Uni- versity, published in 1837 [a] popular presentation of the find- ings and theories of current astronomy," in which he quotes at length from the work of Sir William Herschel on the Orion nebula and "describes the nebular hypothesis" (2: 570n16). Thus Nichol's book, in describing the Orion nebula, forms the connecting link between Laplace's nebular cosmogony (which Poe takes to be a modem scientific restatement of Epicurean atomism) and the constellation Orion. That Poe did not include Dr. Nichol in Dupin's explication of the narrator's chain of thought seems simply to be an oversight.

As the narrator's gaze rises (through his thoughts of Epi- curean atomism and Laplace's nebular cosmogony) from the individual paving stones to the great nebula in Orion, the so- ciopolitical aspect of this movement from low to high is made clear by the final link in the associative chain. Having seen the narrator look up at the constellation Orion, Dupin says, "But in that bitter tirade upon Chantilly, which appeared in yester- day's 'Musee,' the satirist, making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler's change of name upon assuming the buskin,




quoted a Latin line about which we have often conversed. I mean the line

Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum

I had told you that this was in reference to Orion, formerly written Urion.... It was clear, therefore, that you would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion and Chantilly" (2: 536). Earlier the narrator had told us that when Dupin suddenly broke in on his unspoken chain ofthought the subject of his meditation at that moment had been this same Chantilly, "a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the role of Xerxes, in Crebillon's tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains" (2: 534). The Latin line that Dupin cites is, as Mabbott notes, from a passage in Ovid's Fasti (5.536) "concerning the birth of the 'Boeotian Orion'" and the derivation of his original name "Urion" (2: 571n22). According to Ovid, Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury had been journeying one day and accepted at nightfall the hos- pitality of a farmer named Hyrieus. In return for his kindness they granted him a favor. Hyrieus was old and widowed and had never had a son but wanted one. The three gods granted his request: they took a bullock's hide, urinated on it, then covered it with earth, and in ten months a son was born. Hyrieus called the boy Urion because of the manner of his begetting, the name deriving from the Greek word for urine; though as Ovid remarks in the line Dupin quotes, "The first letter of his name has lost its original sound." Dupin's learned allusion, evoking the notion of a name change that disguises a laughable, not to say faintly obscene, origin, is undoubtedly meant as a further slap at Chantilly, suggesting that the cobbler's change of name may hide an origin equally comic.

According to Dupin, then, the link between the ideas of Orion and Chantilly is simply that each has undergone a change of name, but for Poe the connection between the two is more complex than that. Clearly, within the high/low opposition that governs the passage's imagery, Chantilly represents a member of the lower class who has attempted to rise above his station by playing the role of a king, and his new name, the same as the French city famous for fine lace (a common ornament of the aristocracy), makes his upper-class aspirations obvious. Giv- en Poe's association of the lower classes with the paving stones, it is only appropriate that Chantilly should be a former cobbler, someone whose trade depends upon the literal contact between shoe leather and cobblestones ("cobbler" and "cobblestone"




share a common root). The associative link between the constellation of stars called Orion and the actor Chantilly is, then, not just that both had had other names at one time but that Chantilly has attempted to rise in society from his former cobblestone-oriented trade by becoming a star in the theater in the tragic role of a king. The use of "star" to refer to the principal actor in a theatrical production had, as the OED shows, become commonplace by the 1820s.

From a would-be theatrical star to the image of stars in the heavens is an easy mental step, but a stellar translation, whether in the theater or in ancient mythology, is more difficult for a groundling to effect, particularly when the groundling in question is built too close to the ground to reach that high. Dupin says that when the narrator thought of "the poor cobbler's immolation" by the press, he changed his posture: "So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly. At this point I inter- rupted your meditations to remark that as, in fact, he was a very little fellow-that Chantilly-he would do better at the Theatre des Varietes" (2: 536-37). That the narrator interprets the public humiliation of this lowly upstart as having a larger social significance, a significance that bears on the narrator's being jostled in the street by a common laborer, seems clear from the fact that after gazing down at the pavement and stooping in his gait following the incident with the laborer, the narrator appears to recover himself, to remember who and what he is by drawing himself up to his full height. This almost subliminal drama of the tensions between high and low in post- revolutionary France is, of course, wholly appropriate to a tale in which a humanlike animal slave first mimics or, if you will, apes its master (the shaving episode) and then breaks loose from its master's control to spread terror through the streets of Paris. That the fallen aristocrat Dupin intervenes in this case of master/slave reversal to help restore order bespeaks a political orientation that later becomes explicit in "The Purloined Letter" when he intervenes again, this time on the side of royalty, to thwart another master/slave reversal-an orientation that no doubt reflected to some degree the political sentiments of the fallen Virginia gentleman who invented Dupin, a gentleman who, after his wealthy foster father had disowned him, spent the rest of his life trying to regain his lost social status by playing the role of the mastermind, hoping to rise through the uncertain social ranks of Jacksonian America by the power of sheer in- telligence to occupy his rightful position in an American aris-




tocracy that would be based, as Jefferson said, not on wealth and birth but on brains and ability.

Works Cited

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Brown, Robert. "Dupin, Andre-Ma- rie-Jean-Jacques." Historical Dictio- nary of France from the 1815 Res- toration to the Second Empire. Ed. Edgar Leon Newman. 2 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1987.

Cajori, Florian. The Teaching and History ofMathematics in the United States. Washington: GPO, 1890.

Carter, William H. "Brevet Major- General Simon Bernard." Profes- sional Memoirs (Corps of Engineers, United States Army) 5 (1913): 306- 14.

Cayley, Arthur. "Monge, Gaspard." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1 lth ed. 1910-11.

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Freudenthal, Hans. "Cauchy, Au- gustin-Louis." Dictionary of Scien- tific Biography. 1970.

Lomenie, Louis Leonard de. Sketch- es of Conspicuous Living Characters of France. Trans. R. M. Walsh. Phil- adelphia: 1841.

Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed. Col- lected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969- 78.

Point as America's Ecole Polytech- nique, 1802-1833. Diss. Brown U, 1975. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1976. 7615673.

Phillips, Walter Alison. "Louis Phi- lippe I." Encyclopaedia Britannica. lth ed. 1910-11.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Eureka. Complete Works ofEdgarAllan Poe. Ed. James A. Harrison. Vol. 16. New York: FreddeFau, 1902. 179-315. 17 vols. 1902.

. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. John Ward Ostrom. Vol. 1. New York: Gordian, 1966. 2 vols.

. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Mabbott 2: 521-74.

. "The Mystery of Marie Ro- get." Mabbott 3: 715-88.

. "The Purloined Letter." Mabbott 3: 972-97.

Struik, Dirk J. "Dupin, Pierre- Charles-Francois." Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 1970.

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Molloy, Peter M. Technical Educa- tion and the Young Republic: West



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1992 - Reading Poe's Mind. Politics, Mathematics, And the Association of Ideas in 'the Murders in the Rue Morgue