Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (59 page)

There can be little question that most of the marvellous rumors afloat about this affair are pure inventions, entitled to about as much credit as the story of Aladdin’s lamp; and yet, in a case of this kind, as in the case of the discoveries in California, it is clear that the truth
may be
stranger than fiction. The following anecdote, at least, is so well authenticated, that we may receive it implicitly.

Von Kempelen had never been even tolerably well off during his residence at Bremen; and often, it was well known, he had been put to extreme shifts, in order to raise trifling sums. When the great excitement occurred about the forgery on the house of Gutsmuth & Co., suspicion was directed towards Von Kempelen, on account of his having purchased a considerable property in Gasperitch Lane, and his refusing, when questioned, to explain how he became possessed of the purchase money. He was at length arrested, but nothing decisive appearing against him, was in the end set at liberty. The police, however, kept a strict watch upon his movements, and thus discovered that he left home frequently, taking always the same road, and invariably giving his watchers the slip in the neighborhood of that labyrinth of narrow and crooked passages known by the flash-name of the ‘Dondergat.’ Finally, by dint of great perseverance, they traced him to a garret in an old house of seven stories, in an alley called Flätplatz; and,
coming upon him suddenly, found him, as they imagined, in the midst of his counterfeiting operations. His agitation is represented as so excessive that the officers had not the slightest doubt of his guilt. After hand-cuffing him, they searched his room, or rather rooms; for it appears he occupied all the
mansarde
.

Opening into the garret where they caught him was a closet, ten feet by eight, fitted up with some chemical apparatus, of which the object has not yet been ascertained. In one corner of the closet was a very small furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and on the fire a kind of duplicate crucible—two crucibles connected by a tube. One of these crucibles was nearly full of
lead
in a state of fusion, but not reaching up to the aperture of the tube, which was close to the brim. The other crucible had some liquid in it, which, as the officers entered, seemed to be furiously dissipating in vapor. They relate that, on finding himself taken, Von Kempelen seized the crucibles with both hands (which were encased in gloves that afterwards turned out to be asbestic), and threw the contents on the tiled floor. It was now that they hand-cuffed him; and, before proceeding to ransack the premises, they searched his person, but nothing unusual was found about him, excepting a paper parcel, in his coat pocket, containing what was afterwards ascertained to be a mixture of antimony and some
unknown substance
, in nearly, but not quite, equal proportions. All attempts at analyzing the unknown substance have, so far, failed, but that it will ultimately be analyzed, is not to be doubted.

Passing out of the closet with their prisoner, the officers went through a sort of ante-chamber, in which nothing material was found, to the chemist’s sleeping-room. They here rummaged some drawers and boxes, but discovered only a few papers, of no importance, and some good coin, silver and gold. At length, looking under the bed, they saw
a large, common hair trunk, without hinges, hasp, or lock
, and with the top lying carelessly
across
the bottom portion. Upon attempting to draw this trunk out from under the bed, they found that, with their united strength (there were three of them, all powerful men), they ‘could not stir it one inch.’ Much astonished at this, one of them crawled under the bed, and looking into the trunk, said:

‘No wonder we couldn’t move it—why, it’s full to the brim of old bits of brass!’

Putting his feet, now, against the wall, so as to get a good purchase, and pushing with all his force, while his companions pulled with all
theirs, the trunk, with much difficulty, was slid out from under the bed, and its contents examined. The supposed brass with which it was filled was all in small, smooth pieces, varying from the size of a pea to that of a dollar; but the pieces were irregular in shape, although all more or less flat—looking, upon the whole ‘very much as lead looks when thrown upon the ground in a molten state, and there suffered to grow cool.’ Now, not one of these officers for a moment suspected this metal to be anything
but
brass. The idea of its being
gold
never entered their brains, of course; how
could
such a wild fancy have entered it? And their astonishment may be well conceived, when next day it became known, all over Bremen, that the ‘lot of brass’ which they had carted so contemptuously to the police office, without putting themselves to the trouble of pocketing the smallest scrap, was not only-gold—real gold—but gold far finer than any employed in coinage—gold, in fact, absolutely pure, virgin, without the slightest appreciable alloy!

I need not go over the details of Von Kempelen’s confession (as far as it went) and release, for these are familiar to the public. That he has actually realized, in spirit and in effect, if not to the letter, the old chimera of the philosopher’s stone, no sane person is at liberty to doubt. The opinions of Arago are, of course, entitled to the greatest consideration; but he is by no means infallible; and what he says of
bismuth
, in his report to the academy, must be taken
cum grano salis
. The simple truth is, that up to this period,
all
analysis has failed; and until Von Kempelen chooses to let us have the key to his own published enigma, it is more than probable that the matter will remain, for years,
in statu quo
. All that as yet can fairly be said to be known, is, that ‘
pure gold can be made at will, and very readily, from lead, in connection with certain other substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown
.’

Speculation, of course, is busy as to the immediate and ultimate results of this discovery—a discovery which few thinking persons will hesitate in referring to an increased interest in the matter of gold generally, by the late developments in California;
^*
and this reflection brings us inevitably to another—the exceeding
inopportuneness
of Von Kempelen’s analysis. If many were prevented from adventuring to California, by the mere apprehension that gold would so materially diminish in value, on account of its plentifulness in the mines there, as to render the speculation of going so far in search of it a doubtful one—what impression will be wrought
now
, upon the minds of those about
to emigrate, and especially upon the minds of those actually in the mineral region, by the announcement of this astounding discovery of Von Kempelen? a discovery which declares, in so many words, that beyond its intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes, (whatever that worth may be), gold now is, or at least soon will be (for it cannot be supposed that Von Kempelen can
long
retain his secret) of no greater
value
than lead, and of far inferior value to silver. It is, indeed, exceedingly difficult to speculate prospectively upon the consequences of the discovery; but one thing may be positively maintained—that the announcement of the discovery six months ago would have had material influence in regard to the settlement of California.

In Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise of two hundred per cent, in the price of lead, and nearly twenty-five per cent, in that of silver.

P
OE’S
tales abound in recondite references, some of which seem chosen primarily for their mellifluous obscurity. I have, in general, annotated only those allusions which seem to underscore themes in the tales. In preparing these notes, I have relied on the exemplary editions of T. O. Mabbott for Harvard and Patrick F. Quinn for the Library of America.

This early tale won a fiction prize from the
Baltimore Saturday Visiter
, where it was subsequently printed on 15 June 1833. It was collected in
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).

Qui n’a …
: ‘He who has only a moment to live no longer has anything to dissemble’; from Philippe Quinault,
Atys
, 1. vi. 15–16.

grabs
: small coasting vessels, with two or three masts.

Simoon
: literally sirocco, a hot desert wind; here, a tropical storm.

New Holland
: Australia.

sybils
: long-lived prophetesses.

Balbec … Persepolis
: famous ruined cities. Ba’albek, called Heliopolis by the Greeks, was a centre of sun-worship. Tadmor, also called Tamar and Palmyra, was built by Solomon. Persepolis was the capital of ancient Persia.

One of Poe’s earliest explorations of the death of a beautiful woman, this tale was published in the
Southern Literary Messenger
for March 1835. It was collected in
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).

Dicebant mihi
…: ‘My companions told me I might find some little alleviation of my misery, in visiting the grave of my beloved’; Poe’s English translation, from the Latin, of an elegy of second-century Baghdad poet Ben Zaïat. In the nineteenth century the name ‘Berenice’ had four syllables, rhyming with ‘icy’.

the treatise … impossibile est
: Curio’s
On the size of the Blessed Kingdom of God
, Augustine’s
City of God
, and Tertullian’s
On the Flesh of Christ
all deal with the mysterious relation between the material and the spiritual worlds. According to Tertullian’s famous paradox, ‘The Son of God has died, it is to be believed because it is incredible; and, buried, He is risen, it is sure because it is impossible.’

Mademoiselle Sallé… des idées
: in the eighteenth century Marie Sallé was said to dance so expressively that all her steps were feelings; the narrator adapts this praise to claim that all Berenicë’s teeth were ideas.

First published in the
Southern Literary Messenger
for April 1835, this early exploration of metempsychosis was collected in
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).

Sympos
.: at the climax of Plato’s
Symposium
(211
b
), Socrates recalled his teacher Diotima’s vision of unity as the ‘soul of beauty’. The translation is Poe’s own.

Presburg
: because of its ancient university, Pressburg in Hungary (now Bratislava in Slovakia) was rumoured to be a centre of black magic.

Hinnom became Ge-Henna
: Hinnom was, according to Jeremiah 19: 5, a place near Jerusalem where children were sacrificed to the pagan god Moloch. In its generalized form as ‘Gehenna’, the name means simply ‘hell’.

The mild Pantheism … mentioned them
: the paragraph alludes to various theories of the self. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) treated as substantial the consciousness that Kant had insisted was only a logical presupposition of thought. While not truly pantheistic, the resulting Fichtean ‘Ego’ was like God ubiquitous and omniscient. Fichte’s disciple Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) extended these theories, especially with respect to Nature. According to his theory of identity, subjectivity and objectivity together constituted the Universe, making the Real and the Ideal one in the Absolute. The Pythagoreans, followers of the Greek mathematician from the sixth century
BC
, believed among other things in
palingenesia
or reincarnation. The sentences on John Locke summarize arguments from Bk. 2, ch. 27 of
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690).

the Teian … Mecca
: the references imply the triumph of mortality. Unlike Morella, the Greek poet Anacreon of Teos sang optimistically of love’s victory over time. Pilgrims to Mecca were traditionally buried in clothes worn on their pilgrimage.

The greatest of the ‘women’ tales and Poe’s personal favourite among his short fiction, ‘Ligeia’ was first published in the Baltimore
American Museum
for September 1838. It was collected in
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).

Glanvill
: although the seventeenth-century Neoplatonist Joseph Glanvill believed strongly in the power of the will, the motto has not been found in his writings and may be Poe’s invention. The name ‘Ligeia’ is used variously by Virgil and Milton.

Ashtophet
: a goddess of the Sidonians related to Ashtoreth, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Venus.

There is one dear topic … astrologers
: in describing Ligeia, the narrator ranges widely through literature and myth. The most important allusions are to: Francis Bacon’s ‘Of Beauty’; the statue Venus de Medici, falsely attributed to Cleomenes; Democritus’ purported claim that truth is as deep as a well; and Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of the constellation Leda.

Lo!… Worm
: published on its own in 1843, the poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’ was two years later added to a revised version of ‘Ligeia’.

the fair-haired … Tremaine
: Rowena is the fairer of the two heroines in Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
.

First published in
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
for August 1839, this satire was collected in
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).

Pleurez, pleurez
…: Poe translated the motto, ‘Weep, weep, my eyes! It is no time to laugh | For half myself has buried the other half; from
Le Cid
, III. iii. 7–8. The ‘used up’ of the title can mean ‘badly treated’, as well as ‘exhausted’. The Kickapoo tribe was among those fighting in the Florida Indian Wars of 1839.

reasons
: pronounced ‘raisins’ in Poe’s joke.

quorum pars magna fuit
: ‘of which he was a great part’; from Virgil,
Aeneid
, ii. 6.

horresco referens
: ‘I shudder recalling it’; ibid. ii. 204.