1 – The Facts
À Madame Aupick
[Paris.] Mercredi 20 juillet 1859
Je t’écris très sommairement. J’ai trouvé tes deux lettres à la Revue française, et si je ne t’ai pas répondu plus tôt, c’est que je reste quelquefois trois ou quatre jours sans y aller.
Mes affaires vont à peu près bien. — Sauf la question terrible des dépenses. — J’ai payé mille francs de dettes urgentes, mais j’ai reçu beaucoup plus, et, comme arrivé a l’état de provincial, je souffre horriblement de cette nécessité de dépenser 20 et 30 francs par jour. Je ne quitterai Paris qu’après avoir résolu la question du Drame; je te récrirai a ce sujet. — Si je n’avais pas été réellement contraint de venir à Paris, je n’y serais pas venu. Ce n’est pas seulement les dépenses qui m’affligent, mais, ce qui est plus grave, l’impossibilité de clairvoyance et de concentration de ma pensée. Je suis étourdi, abruti, abêti; tu sais que j’avais pris l’habitude d’une pensée lente et patiente, l’habitude des journées heureuses.
Je ne puis pas, tu le comprends facilement, te développer l’emploi de mes journées, minutieusement. Ce qu’il faut avouer, c’est que dans cette maudite ville, inondée de chaleur, de lumière et de poussière, il faut retourner plusieurs fois chez chaque personne dont on a besoin pour la trouver. Ainsi, le travail a disparu, et mon envie de revenir est excessive — car, si les dépenses monstrueuses me tourmentent, il y a quelque chose qui me tourmente bien plus, c’est la fuite des journées sottement employées.
Ta seconde lettre m’a profondément touché. Tu sais que je ne brille pas (en apparence du moins) par la sensibilité; ainsi tu peux prendre pour véridiques les paroles que je t’écris. C’est une chose vraiment douce, au milieu de tant de chagrins réels, de découragements, de sentir, auprès de soi, une bonté et une charité qui veille. Toutes les folies maternelles que tu m’as écrites, même ton cidre (qui n’est pas une chose pressée) m’ont ému. Comment se fait il qu’avec un coeur si bon et si délicat, tu sois quelquefois si maladroite?
Les dix derniers jours (car je ferai en sorte de revenir au commencement d’août, et je te préviendrai quatre jours ou trois jours d’avance) seront employés a me procurer pour la troisième fois, une forte somme d’argent, et à prendre des engagements nouveaux avec une Revue suisse, de Genève. Le futur directeur du Cirque est malheureusement en Normandie. Tu devines les lenteurs forcées. Il s’agit de la grosse affaire.
Pour comble de malheur, la politique est à l’orage, a l’angoisse, a l’inquiétude. Tu ne peux te faire une idée du désordre créé par l’empereur dans tous les esprits et de l’effet désastreux causé par la Conclusion de la Paix.
Il y a eu des malheurs à la Revue française; tu vas recevoir coup sur coup deux numéros, dont l’un contiendra tout le reste de mon Salon.
Je t’aime et je t’embrasse, et je te remercie de nouveau de ta dernière lettre.
Je demeure jusqu’à la fin du mois: hôtel de Dieppe, rue d’Amsterdam. J’y suis aussi mal que possible.
CH. BAUDELAIRE. [1]
To Mrs. Aupick
[Paris]. Wednesday 20 July 1859
I’m writing to you very cursorily. I found your two letters at the Revue française, and if I haven’t replied before, it’s because I sometimes go three or four days without going there.
My business is going reasonably well. – Except on the terrifying level of expenses. – I’ve paid 1,000 francs of urgent debts, but I’ve now incurred a lot more, and as I’m now acclimatised to the provinces, I suffer horribly at the necessity of forking out twenty or thirty francs per day. I won’t leave Paris until I’ve settled the question of the Play; I’ll write to you again about that. – If I hadn’t been absolutely forced to come to Paris, I never would have come here. It’s not just the expense that irritates me, but something far worse: the impossibility of seeing and thinking clearly here. I’m battered, bruised, bewildered; you know that I’d formed the habit of thinking things through slowly and patiently, the fruit of contented days.
I can’t, you’ll appreciate, describe how I spend my days to you in minute detail. What one is forced to realise is that in this accursed city, drowned in blinding heat and dust, it’s necessary to visit each person several times before finding them in. As a result, the work I can get has dried up, and my anxiety to get out of here gets stronger and stronger – because, even if the monstrous expense gets on my nerves, there’s something which torments me still more: wasting days in a nonsensical way.
Your second letter touched me deeply. You know that I don’t shine (superficially, at least) in expressing my feelings; so you can take it that what I’m writing to you now is completely sincere. It’s a really sweet thing, in the middle of so many real sorrows and discouragements, to feel, when I’m near you, your goodness and loving kindness watching over me. All the motherly anxieties you’ve poured out to me, even your cider (which is hardly urgent) moved me. So how is it that with such a good and caring heart, you can still be so clumsy sometimes?
The next ten days (because I’m planning to return at the beginning of August, and will tell you exactly when four days or three days in advance) will be employed in getting myself a good sum of money, for the third time, and in making a deal with a Revue suisse in Geneva. The new director of the Cirque theatre is unfortunately in Normandy. You can guess how this enforced idleness grates on me. It’s all in reference to my most important piece of business.
To add insult to injury, the political situation here is troubled, stormy, confused. You can form no conception of the anxiety the Emperor has given rise to in everyone’s mind, and of the disastrous effect of the Peace Treaty.
There have been some problems with the Revue française; you’ll be receiving two issues, one after the other, one of which will contain the rest of my Salon article.
I love you and kiss you, and thank you again for your latest letter.
I will be staying till the end of the month at the Hotel Dieppe, rue d’Amsterdam. I’m as uncomfortable there as it’s possible to be.
Charles Baudelaire. [2]
2 – The Letter
2 – The Letter
Scott Hamilton gave it to me. He said it belonged to some friends of a friend of his whom he’d stayed with whilst backpacking through France. He mentioned to them that he was interested in poetry, so they showed him – with elaborate precautions – a (so-called) genuine manuscript letter of Baudelaire’s which had been passed down in the family.
Scott was very excited by this discovery, and managed to persuade them (later, after he’d returned to New Zealand) to send him a photocopy of the text. It was this photocopy he passed on to me, as his French is somewhat less than proficient. He was under the impression that it was still unpublished.
It wasn’t, of course.
After making a few attempts to decipher the dreadful handwriting, I went to the university library and checked through the Pléiade edition of Baudelaire’s Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1973 (rev.ed. 1993). Sure enough, there it was. On pp. 588-89 of the first volume.
Even more interestingly, the notes (p.1021) record that:
Elle a été reproduite en de nombreux fac-similés qui ont trompé d’innocents acquéreurs. [It has been reproduced in numerous facsimiles which have duped innocent collectors.]Collectors like Scott’s French friends, presumably.
And what is the letter about? It’s addressed to Baudelaire’s mother, Mme Aupick. It dates from the period after his conviction for obscenity (six of the poems in the original edition of Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil] were ordered to be excised – printer, publisher, and author were all fined for offences against public morals). The poet had now turned to Art criticism (“The Salon of 1859,” mentioned above) and translation – principally of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, for whom he had an unbounded enthusiasm – as alternative sources of funds. He also, it appears, had ambitions of making money in the theatre (the play mentioned above, Le Marquis du 1ère Houzzards [The Marquis of the First Hussars], was – fortunately or unfortunately – never produced).
Banal, quotidian, intimate by turns, it’s fairly typical of his correspondence: complaints about money, about Paris, about politics. There’s nothing in it that makes it an obvious candidate for forgery. Superficially, at any rate.
•
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is the last of three stories he wrote featuring his super-intelligent alter-ego, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, who is described in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” the first of the series, as residing in “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion … tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.” Dupin’s unnamed friend, the Watson-like narrator of the stories, goes on to comment:
Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen – although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. … [3]Why? Because Dupin insists on exchanging night for day … literally.
It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamored of the Night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon.What else shall I call it? What indeed? Sickness? Monomania? More of this below.
The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the messy shutters of our old building; lighting a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays.When true darkness falls, however, they sally forth, “roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.”
Poe’s three Dupin stories laid down, once and for all, the essential characteristics of the detective story genre. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, Dr. Thorndyke and all that immense host of sleuth-hounds with their tics and eccentricities would scarcely be conceivable without him.
And what of the story itself? “The Purloined Letter” was written to celebrate the art of misdirection. The best place to hide a leaf is in the forest (one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories demonstrates that the best place to hide a dead body is on a battlefield – if necessary, one you’ve manufactured for the purpose [4]). The best place to hide a letter is therefore in a rack full of other letters. It’s too obvious for anyone to give it a second glance.
There are certain fallacies in this proposition, of course. Naturally all the obvious flat surfaces and letter-repositories will be checked by assiduous searchers before they start to pull up the floorboards and peel off the wallpaper. But if the letter in question has “been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed,” and thrust into a “trumpery fillagree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece,” then it has become, to all intents and purposes, invisible.
To the truly disciplined mind, however, the very “hyper-obtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor,” was “strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.” [5]
In one who came with the intention to suspect. That is the essence of Dupin’s method. He is not trusting. He can penetrate the psychology of any opponent by recreating it in his own head. In this case, “the radicalness of these differences [between the two letters], which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, … [were] suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document.” It is because it looks worthless that he sees it as (potentially) valuable.
Simply by holding up a mirror to the object he is examining Dupin can see its anti-self, the true identity its owner is endeavouring to conceal with such suspicious fervour.
•
Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Histoires extraordinaires (1856) – a selection of the most important stories (including “La Lettre volée” [The Purloined Letter]) from Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) – was followed by Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1857); Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym (1857); Eurèka (1864); and, finally, two years before his death, Histoires grotesques et sèrieuses (1865). His version of Poe’s bizarre metaphysical tract Eureka (1848) eventually appeared, in fact, in the Revue suisse mentioned in the letter above.
The implications of the deductive method employed in “The Purloined Letter” were therefore in no way alien to him.
Why forge a letter? To make money from it, presumably. Just like selling a gold brick or the Brooklyn bridge to passing suckers. But why this letter? Because the handwriting is so bad, so unclear? Did that make it so much easier to forge?
Or could it be that the best place to hide information is in a forged, obviously spurious document? The attention of the authorities will be entirely on the genuineness (or otherwise) of the artefact – its contents will be a matter of no interest except to the few in the know.
What better way, again, to distribute information than hidden inside such a forgery?
But what kind of information could it be that is susceptible to being passed along in this way? And when did the process of copying begin? In 1859, at the time of its composition? or years later, for completely different reasons?
Was Baudelaire privy to the scheme? Or was it carried out without his knowledge, long after his death (he died in 1867, in hospital in Paris, in the arms of his long-suffering mother).
•
So many questions, so few answers.
Does the document itself offer us any clues?
Poe’s story “The Gold-Bug,” with its ingenious pioneering account of the science of cipher-breaking, might perhaps offer us a way in.
First of all, let’s scrutinise the letter of the text a little more closely. There are certain details which don’t appear to fit exactly. Take the underlinings, for instance:
- No problems here. It’s natural enough to underline the name of a magazine, and the author does it throughout.
- underlining for emphasis – again, natural enough. Note the figure is spelt out, rather than written as a number, though. More on that below.
- Note the double-entendre on pressée: “pressed” or “urgent.” Something is urgent (the word is in fact misspelt as “urgnte” in the quotation above: another way of drawing attention to it?)
- My interest here is not so much in the substance of what is being said, as in the alternation of numbers. “Ten” is spelt out. “4” and “3” are given as figures. Why? And why in that unusual order? One would normally say “three or four days.”
- The French editors of the letter italicise – and correct – the words Revue suisse, ignoring (for the sake of economy?) the fact that Baudelaire in fact underlines “de Genève” as well.
- The notes explain (or pre-empt discussion by saying?) that the word “cirque” [circus] here refers to a theatre which would be renamed “théâtre du Châtelet” in 1862. In other words, an institution virtually untraceable under its original name.
- If this is indeed the code-name for a letter-drop (which appears likely from the fact that the writer only mentions it in that connection), then this is probably as good a way of any to advertise that its confidentiality has been blown.
- More numbers. Two letters were left for the writer to find at the Revue française, of which the second is singled out for favourable mention. Two numbers will come in reply, blow after blow, of which one will contain all the rest of … something.
- Dieppe / Amsterdam. Two ports, one in France (in Normandy, actually, where the director of the “Cirque” is holidaying), the other in Holland (Baudelaire would spend much of the next six years in exile in Belgium, roughly in between these two destinations).
J’ai trouvé tes deux lettres à la Revue française
I found your two letters at the Revue française
J’ai payé mille francs de dettes urgentes
I’ve paid a thousand francs of urgent debts
même ton cidre (qui n’est pas une chose pressée)
even your cider (which is not an urgent thing) – or: (which has not yet been pressed)
Les dix derniers jours (car je ferai en sorte de revenir au commencement d’août, et je te préviendrai 4 jours ou 3 jours d’avance)
The last ten days (because I will try to arrange things so that I return at the beginning of August, and I’ll warn you 4 days or 3 days in advance)
une Revue Suisse, de Genève
A Swiss review, from Geneva
Le futur directeur du Cirque est malheureusement en Normandie
The future director of the Cirque is unfortunately in Normandy
Il y a eu des malheurs à la Revue française
There have been some problems [mishaps? misfortunes?] at the Revue française
tu vas recevoir coup sur coup deux numéros, dont l’un contiendra tout le reste de mon Salon
you are going to receive, one after the other [blow by blow] two numbers, of which one will contain all the rest of my Salon
Je demeure jusqu’à la fin du mois: hôtel de Dieppe, rue d’Amsterdam
I remain till the end of the month: Hotel Dieppe, rue d’Amsterdam
It doesn’t add up to anything very impressive. That much should be admitted straight away. A few suggestive details at most, mainly concerning odd ways of expressing numbers:
two letters / three or four days / a thousand francs / 20 or 30 francs / your second letter / the last ten days / 4 days or 3 days / the third time / two numbers / one of which will contain …Three or four days (words) is reversed into 4 days or 3 days (figures).
“Your second letter” is followed by the (rather odd in context) third time; then by the one which will contain … Is it money which is changing hands, or something more important?
Il s’agit de la grosse affaire [It concerns the most important matter]This sentence seems rather inadequately glossed by the editors as making reference to the “Drame” [Play – or Drama?] which they say is his never-produced “Marquis du 1ère Houzzards.” It sounds to me as if it refers to something far more momentous than that, especially coming, as it does, just before his brief summary of contemporary politics.
Tu ne peux te faire une idée du désordre créé par l’empereur dans tous les esprits et de l’effet désastreux causé par la Conclusion de la Paix [You can form no conception of the disorder created by the Emperor in every spirit and of the disastrous effect caused by the conclusion of the Peace].It seems a little surprising that that last sentence got by the Government censors. The “Peace” in question, we are informed by our helpful editors, was the Treaty of Villafranca (signed on 17th July, 1859), which ended the Franco-Austrian war in Northern Italy. Interestingly, it also contains a crossing-out: créé [created] was originally causé [caused]. This might be explained by the necessity to eliminate a redundancy (two “caused’s” in once sentence), or to avoid attributing the “disorder” too directly to the Emperor’s actions.
It’s worth noting, in fact, that there are exactly four crossings-out in the letter as a whole:
paragraph 2:They form no very obvious pattern to the naked eye – beyond the (possibly coincidental) 2 x 3 = 6, 2: 3 + 3 = 6 alternation – but clearly could be used to draw attention to particular words or sentences.
réellementobligécontraint
[reallyobligedconstrained]
paragraph 3:
mondésirenvie
[mydesirewish]
paragraph 3:
si les dépenses monstrueuses mefatiguenttourmentent
[if the monstrous expensesfatiguetorment me]
paragraph 6:
désordrecausécréé
[disordercausedcreated]
3 – Protocols of the Elders of Zion
In the autobiography which he wrote in 1870 Maurice Joly has described how, strolling one evening by the Seine in Paris, he suddenly conceived the idea of writing a dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli. Montesquieu would present the case for liberalism, Machiavelli the case for a cynical despotism. It was forbidden to criticize openly the régime of Napoleon III; but in this way it should be possible … to present the Emperor’s motives and methods stripped of their usual camouflage of humbug. … [6]
So Norman Cohn, in his terrifying exposé Warrant for Genocide: The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1967). Joly, he goes on to say, considerably underestimated the efficiency of the Emperor’s secret police. Although his pamphlet Dialogue aux enfers [Dialogue in Hell] was printed in Belgium, the moment it was smuggled across the border it was seized and destroyed, and its author tried and imprisoned for fifteen months as a consequence.
These events occurred a couple of years after Baudelaire’s own 1857 trial for obscenity, more or less around the time his letter was written, in 1859. The story might therefore serve to convey to us a little of the atmosphere of intellectual life in France under Napoleon III.
Its true historical significance is somewhat greater than that, however. The speeches attributed to Machiavelli in Joly’s uncomfortably prescient little book were later extracted and modified by an anonymous plagiarist (possibly, Cohn suggests, by Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, the head of French branch of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police) to form the basis of the world-famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These “protocols” were the alleged blueprint of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, whose “authenticity” was used as by the Black Hundreds as justification for their innumerable pogroms in Russia, and (somewhat later) as the base text for the Antisemitic Völkisch movement in post-First World War Germany.
Distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies throughout the world, in multiple translations, the book is still in print sixty years after the holocaust.
What seems like a trivial impulse may have unforeseen, far-reaching consequences. Joly’s pamphlet has achieved an immortality far beyond its deserts or his desire. A piece of pleasant, liberal-minded satire can be said to have been directly responsible for millions of deaths.
•
I see myself as the King of a rainy landAll this could, of course, be mere fantasy: idle scrutiny of a document which has no meaning beyond its surface significance to the poet Baudelaire and his doting mother. Clearly (in either case) the choice of words and numbers, as well as all the crossings-out could only have been accomplished at the time of composition, in (presumably) July 1859.
young but decrepit, rich but not a man
despising all his tutors, frankly bored
with his old hunting-dogs, an idle Lord
whom nothing can amuse: hawks hunting blood
the sight of his people dying in the mud
the songs & antics of his licensed clown
are powerless to interrupt his frown
his lily bed has turned into a tomb
those ladies who adorn a Prince’s room
& who’d feel proud to spread their legs for him
no longer can dress scantily enough
to interest this skeleton in love
the alchemist who turns lead into gold
cannot melt down his Master in his mould
& in those baths where the Romans cut their veins
sole remedy for age’s acid pains
he can’t reboot the heart of this cadaver
whose blood has thinned to Lethe’s slime-green water
– Charles Baudelaire, “Spleen” (c.1851) [7]
In theory, however, at least some of the underlinings could have been managed later, by the forgers of extra copies (and we know for certain that there were such forgers; what’s more, that this was the only letter they chose to reproduce in this fashion).
Let’s acknowledge, too, that there’s little or no evidence to suggest Baudelaire’s being prominently involved in any conspiracies or secret societies. J. M. Roberts’ classic book The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) offers an excellent summary of the “spectre that haunted Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the bogy of the revolutionary conspiracy of the secret societies.” [8] Roberts leads us expertly through the murky twilight world of the Illuminati of Bavaria, the Templars, the Freemasons of the Scottish Rite, the Italian Carbonari. Suffice it to say that a man who dyed his hair green to shock his own publisher is hardly likely to be one’s first choice to take part in an immense underground conspiracy!
Unless, of course, the very flamboyance of his disguise is in itself proof of something to hide (cf. Dupin, “The Purloined Letter”:
the radicalness [of opinions and attitudes] … which was excessive [my italics] … [was] suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the [in this case, person] …)Baudelaire, the eternal flâneur, the idle dandy, determined at all costs to épater le bourgeois [shock the middle-classes] figures in no lists of secret initiates. The famous succession of “Grand Masters of The Priory of Sion” from the Dossier Secret [9] in the Bibliothèque Nationale does not contain his name:
Charles Nodier (1801-1844)And yet, what a smoke-screen that list has always seemed. It’s as if someone had chosen, at random, four of the best-known – and longest-lived – artists of modern France, and yoked them arbitrarily together. Four names to take us from 1801 to 1963! The very law of averages would suggest that one or more of the masters would have died prematurely, and yet that never happened, in the whole history of the “Priory,” all the way from Jean de Gisors (1188-1220) to Pierre Plantard (1981-?). 28 names (including such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci an Isaac Newton) suffice to take us through 800 years of history – an average of c. 28.5 years each, far surpassing any historical dynasty of kings.
Victor Hugo (1844-1885)
Claude Debussy (1885-1918)
Jean Cocteau (1918-1963)
•
Up until now I’ve been taking it for granted that Scott himself was the innocent victim of a ruse, rather than a co-conspirator. And yet, as a committed revolutionary socialist, he is himself unequivocally a member of a secret society. How deeply did he intend me to plumb the depths of the letter?
His original proposal was that I should translate, edit and publish it – in facsimile – in the literary journal brief which I was editing at the time. I’ve now handed on the editorship. To – as it happens (again coincidence?) – Scott Hamilton.
Was the idea that I should, unwittingly, help to propagate and broadcast this strange faked document, whose true meaning remains obscure to me?
Two words – désordre and coupé – have been glossed by another hand (clearly not Baudelaire’s) on the third page of the letter. It wasn’t me. Was it Scott? Or someone else? “Disorder” / “cut” – cut what? Ties with headquarters, with the parent organisation? The “disorder” promised by the text lies all around us – in Sulawesi, Indonesia, three Christian girls beheaded in the street this morning (31/10/05) as they walked to school …
•
It was late in the afternoon when I found the text of the purloined letter in the relevant volume of Baudelaire’s collected letters in Auckland University Library. As a teacher at a rival institution (Massey’s Albany campus, across the harbour bridge), I no longer have access to its shelves. That is to say, I can look at the books, but can’t take them out (this despite being an M.A. graduate, alumnus of the institution!). I could, of course, have copied it out into my notebook, but time was short, accuracy of the essence, and – in any case – the place is full of photocopy machines.
I approached a student working at his desk. Could he lend me his photocopying card? Just for a moment? I was quite prepared to pay … no dice. I went up to another. She didn’t have her card with her either. Yet another. Sorry, no. Do Auckland students ever photocopy anything? I was in despair. I held the letter in my hand, but was quite unable to record its information.
At this moment, providentially, I met a writer friend. I was trooping sadly out of the library when she called out to me. “Jack! What are you doing here?” What’s more, she had her card with her. What’s more, she was willing to lend it to me – to get the book out for me, in fact! My guardian angel – I felt so grateful to her.
So all that, too, was just coincidence? All coincidence, not a single student in the whole, half-empty library equipped to use the photocopier (or – at any rate – prepared to acknowledge the fact to me)? Mere coincidence, meeting at the precise moment I left the stacks the one friend who could help me get the book out? What are the odds on such “coincidences”?
Plot and counter-plot. Was it planned that I be unable to locate the text of the letter – that it be kept from me, inaccessible? Was my friend there by accident or design? Was her trajectory set in motion by some letter-drop, some hint in a hidden communiqué, the ramifications of her actions unclear even to her?
Was she working with Scott or against him? I lay the letter of my researches before you, hoping you will be able to make better sense of them than I.
From birth onwards, each of us is at the mercy of invisible forces, engaged in a shadowy struggle whose larger purposes remain obscure to us. So much is undeniable. All we can hope for is that our actions somehow, in some way, will do battle for the light rather than darkness.
The crusading journalist Maurice Joly hoped to awaken his contemporaries to the menace of despotic rule. His innocent words were twisted – for obscure, contingent reasons – into the script for the most monstrous conspiracy theory in human history. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion might as well have been inscribed on the walls of Auschwitz, since they motivated all that went on there.
I fear such consequences arising from my own too facile pen. Truth, one is forced to admit, does not always drive out falsehood. No writing is exempt from it. “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, I: iii. l.94). I have no way of knowing just what I’ve done by sharing this information with you, providing you (once again) with the text of this banal, much-copied letter.
“The King of a rainy country ….” Have I, too, succumbed to spleen, to mere boredom? Do I see as banal those things we ought to cherish? Must I be friend to terror because it wakes us up to life? To life and all its mysteries? Like the Chevalier Dupin, I too would wish to live without fear of the strange, to go out “seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.” [10]
Notes:
[1] Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. 2 vols. 1973. Rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), I: 588-89.
[2] My translation.
[3] Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Stuart & Susan Levine. Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1977), 175-97 [179].
[4] G. K. Chesterton, "The Sign of the Broken Sword". The Father Brown Stories: The Innocence of Father Brown; The Wisdom of Father Brown; The Incredulity of Father Brown; The Secret of Father Brown; The Scandal of Father Brown. 1911, 1914, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1935, & 1936. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1974), 143-57.
[5] "The Purloined Letter." The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 225-36 [235].
[6] Norman Cohn. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 73.
[7] Charles Baudelaire, "Spleen". Oeuvres. Ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1. 1934 (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 87. [My translation]
[8] J. M. Roberts. The Mythology of the Secret Societies. 1972. A Paladin Book (Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1974), back-cover blurb.
[9] For more on this list, see the "Priory of Sion" entry on Wikipedia.
[10] "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 180.
Matt Kelly: Cover design: brief #35 (2007)[5-31/10/2005]
[5246 words]
[Published in brief #35 – A Brief World Order (2007): 14-33;
Kingdom of Alt (Auckland: Titus Books, 2010): 63-79]
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