Edgar Allan Poe and Paris and love.
American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is best known for his macabre tales of horror, madness, superstition, and the dark forces. He was also recognized as a leader in the detective genre and the introduction of shorts – the short story genre. Although he never visited Paris, he was familiar with French authors, the language, and the culture.
I was reading a collection of 19 short stories by Edgar Allan Poe in the 2012 edition of The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales – stories written in the 1840s. Many of the stories are headed by quotes from French authors (there are English and Latin quotes too).
For example, the first story in the collection, Manuscript Found in a Bottle, begins with a quote from the French dramatist and librettist Philippe Quinault (1635-1688). It’s from his text in the 1676 opera Atys:
Qui n’a plus qu’un moment à vivre
N’a plus rien à dissimuler.
He who has but a moment to live
No longer has anything to hide.
The story The Man that was Used Up includes a quote by tragedian Pierre Corneille (1606-1684):
Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau!
La moitié de ma vie a mis l’autre au tombeau.
Weep, weep, my eyes, and dissolve in water!
The better half of my life has put the other in the tomb.
The Fall of the House of Usher includes a quote from poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean De Béranger (1780-1857):
Son Coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’un le touche il résonne.
His heart is a suspended lute;
Whenever one touches it, it resonates.
The Man of the Crowd begins with words from Parisian philosopher and moralist Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696): Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul – This great misfortune, not being able to be alone.
The title of this collection comes from one of his most well-known stories – the longest of his short stories – The Murders in the Rue Morgue – about the ‘brutal, bloody, and baffling’ murder of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille in their home in the Montmartre district of Paris. Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin and the Parisian police set about to solve this mysterious crime. It is said that Poe was inspired to create Dupin from a real Frenchman who established the first detective agency in the world – Eugène-François Vidocq (1775-1857). Vidocq was an interesting man – a criminal that became a criminalist.
Concluding this edition of Poe’s short stories is an article by British author D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) on why Poe’s morbid tales continue to be popular. He writes of the story The Murders in the Rue Morgue that ‘murder is a lust to get at the very quick of life itself and kill it.’
He writes that La Bruyère’s quote at the beginning of The Man of the Crowd – This great misfortune, not being able to be alone – refers to La Bruyère’s philosophy that unhappiness comes from the yearning for love so that we are not alone in life and that, ‘if we do not live to eat, we do not live to love either.’
Lawrence boldly states that Poe’s short stories are not merely about the macabre, but ‘really about love.’ Love, yes! Love pushed to the verge; love pushed to the extreme; and sometimes a battle of wills. Love of drugs, people, food, self-destruction, and love of love itself.
D.H. Lawrence says Edgar Allan Poe ‘was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul.’ Lawrence ends with:
‘Poe knew only love, love, love, intense vibrations and heightened consciousness.’
