THE PURLOINED LETTER

One dark, windy evening in the autumn of 1825,1

was sitting in the Paris library of my friend, C.
Augustine Dupin. We were smoking in a friendly
silence and thinking about adventures we had had
together. Suddenly, the door opened, and the head
of the Paris police, Monsieur G-, came in. Iv
We were glad to see him, and Dupin rose to light a
lamp. But when G- said that he had come to ask our
advice, or rather our opinion, about something that
was troubling him, Dupin sat down again. He liked
to think in the dark.
G- began to tell us about his problem. “The business is very simple, indeed, and I
am sure that the police can manage it quite well. But I thought that Duping would
like to hear about it, because it is so unusual. ”
“Simple and unusual?” said Duping.
“Why, yes; and not quite that, either. >Wc have been puzzled because the affair is
so simple, and yet it confuses us altogether.’
“Perhaps the very simplicity of the thing bothers you,’ said my friend. “Perhaps the
mystery is a little too plain.”
G- was amused by such an idea. But he began to tell us what
had happened.
“First, 1 must tell you that this is an extremely secret affair, and I would lose my job
if it were known that I had told anyone.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Or don't, if you ought not to,” said Dupin.
“Well, Then; 1 have received information from a very important person that a
certain paper of the greatest importance was purloined from the royal palace. The
person who look it is known; he was seen taking it. It is also known that he still has
it.”
“How do you know?” asked Dupin.
“We know,” replied the police chief “from the nature of the paper and from the fact
there has been no scandal, as would have happened at once if the letter had left the
robber's possession. I f he had done what he must intend to do with it, we would
know at once.”
I said I didn't understand.
“Well,” G- said, “the paper gives the holder power over a certain important person-
in a way that makes that power very valuable.”
“1 still don't understand,” said Dupin.

“Well, if this paper were shown to a third person, -whose name I must not
mention-the paper would ruin the honor of the very important lady whose honor
and peace are in such great danger.”
But,’ I said, “The robber could have this power only if he knew that the important
lady knew that he had taken the paper and that he had it. Who would dare to do
such a thing?”
“The thief,” said G- “is the Minister, D-. He will do anything. And the way he stole
this paper is a clever as it was bold. The paper-a letter, to be honest with you-was
received by this important lady when she was alone in her sitting room. While she
was reading it, the other important person suddenly came in. She wanted to hide it
from him. She tried hurriedly to slip it into a drawer but there was not time. So she
was forced to put it, open as it was, on a table. But only the address showed, and
the other important person did not see what was written on the other side of the
page.
“At this moment, D- enters. His sharp eyes at once see the paper. He recognizes
from the handwriting who wrote the letter; he sees how worried and confused the
lady is. He knows her secret. She has received a letter that she wants to hide and
she has had to leave it on a table in plain view of everyone!
“After some talk about business matters, he takes out a letter like the one on the
table, opens it, pretends to read part of it to the others, and places it next to the one
he wants. Again he talks for some fifteen minutes about general subjects. Finally,
when he leaves, he takes up a letter from the table-of course, the letter that is not
his. Its rightful owner sees him, but she does not dare tell him to put it down, not
with the other important person standing beside her. The Minister leaves. His own
letter, one of no importance, is still lying upon the table.”
“Here, then,” said Dupin to me, “You have what you felt would make the power of
the Minister complete. He knows that she knows that he has her letter.”
“Yes,” the chief replied. “And for several months he has used his power very
dangerously. Every day the important lady he robbed is more determined than
ever that she must get her letter from him. But she cannot get it openly. In despair,
she has asked me for help.”
“So,” I said, “it is clear that the Minister still has the letter. And having it gives him
power over her. If he were to show it to her husband, his power over would be
gone.”
“True.” G- answered. “So I thought that I had time to search his house carefully and
thoroughly. I had to do it without his knowledge. The lady especially warned me of
the danger of letting him know we were hunting for the letter.
“Now, we have had lots of practice in searching for things. The Minister is often
away from home all night. His servants sleep in another part of the house. I have, as
you know, keys that will open any door in Paris. So for three months I have spent
every night going though the D- house. There is a huge reward - and my honor is
concerned. So I have kept searching until 1 was sure that this thief was a cleverer
man than I am.”
“I wonder,” I suggested, “Whether the Minister may not have hidden the letter in
some other place besides his own house?”

Dupin thought this was not likely to be the case. It would be important to the
Minister to have the letter ready to show at a moment s notice.
The police chief had made sure that the Minister did not carry the letter with him.
D- had been twice robbed, as if by the thieves, and his clothes had been searched.
No, D- was not keeping the mysterious letter on his person.
“The fact is, “G- continued, “we took our time and searched everywhere. I took the
whole building, room by the room, giving a whole week to each room. First, we
examined the furniture. We opened every drawer and I am sure that you know
that, to a trained police agent, there is no such thing as a 'secret' drawer. It is so
easy to find such a thing! There is a certain amount of space that must be
accounted for in every piece of furniture. When there seems to be more space than
small bookshelves or drawers need, we are sure that a secret drawer is behind
them. After that, we examined the chairs. We stuck all the pillows with long pins.
We took the top from the tables. Sometimes, you see, the top of a table is removed,
the leg is hollowed out, the thing is put inside the hollow leg, and the top replaced.
The bottoms and tops of bedposts are used in the same way.”
I asked whether he could not tell at once that a table leg was hollow by striking it.
“No, not if cotton had been wrapped around the article when it was put in the
hollow leg. Besides, when we searched at night we couldn't make any noise.”
I said, “But you could not have taken to pieces all the furniture that could have
been used to hide the letter. It could have been rolled and put into the rung of a
chair.”
G- said: “We didn't take all the chairs to pieces. We looked at each piece of
furniture through a powerful microscope. If there had been any disturbance of any
joint of any of these pieces, we'd have known it at once. Any grain of dust from a
saw, any change in glue, any change - we would have seen it at once.”
“I suppose that you looked behind the mirrors, behind the pictures, that you looked
into the beds and bedclothes, the curtains and rugs,” I said.
“Of course,” he answered. “When we had examined every bit of furniture in this
way, we searched the house itself. We divided its entire surface into parts; we
numbered those parts. Then we searched every square inch throughout the house,
including the two houses on each side, with the microscope, just as we had done
with the furniture.”
I exclaimed, “The two houses on each side! You took a great deal of trouble.”
“We did, but the reward is great.”
I continued, “You searched the ground around the houses?”
“All the ground is covered with stone. We looked at the earth between the stones
an found it had not been disturbed.”
I Said: “You looked among D-'s papers, of course, and into all the books in his
library?”
“Certainly. We opened every package; we not only opened every book, but we
turned over every leaf, not just shaking the books, like some police officers. We
measured the thickness of every book cover, and looked at every book under the
microscope.

If anything had been put into a book cover we would have known it. Five or six
books, just back from the binder, we examined with our long pins.”
“You looked at the floors beneath the rugs?”
“Yes. We took up every rug and looked at the wood of the floors with the
microscope. We examined the paper on the walls, and we searched the
foundations.”
“Then,” I said, “You arc mistaken. The letter is not in the house, as you suppose.”
“I am afraid you are right.” And turning to Dupin, the policechief asked, “What shall
I do?”
“Make a thorough search of the house,” advised Dupin. G- answered: “That is
absolutely needless. I am perfectly sure that the letter is not in the house.”
“Well, I have no better advice to give you,” Dupin answered. “You have, of course, a
complete description of the missing letter?” The chief then read us a careful
description of what was written in the letter and of its appearance. Then he left us,
more unhappily than 1 had ever known the good gentleman to be.
About a month later, he visited us again. We were sitting smoking as before. He
began to talk about other things. Finally, I said: “Well, G-, what about that
purloined letter? Did you give up trying to find it?”
“Yes, I re-examined the house, as Dupin suggested. But it was time wasted, as I
knew it would be.”
“How much the reward was, did you say?” asked Dupin.
“Why, a very great deal. I don't like to say how much; but I will say that I would
give my own check for fifty thousand francs to anyone who could find the letter for
me. It is becoming more and more important every day to the lady, and the reward
has been doubled. But if she offered me three times as much as she has offered, I
could not do more than I have done.”
“Well, yes,” said Dupin. “Really, G-, don't you think that you might do a little more?”
“How? In what way?”
“Do you remember the story of the very rich man who wanted to get help from a
doctor without paying for it? He went up to the doctor and began to talk, saying
that a friend of his felt this and that sort of pain. Finally, he asked what the doctor
would tell his friend to take. The doctor said: 'Take advice, to be sure.'”
The police chief was a little disturbed. “I'm perfectly willing to take advice and to
pay for it, too. I would really give fifty thousand francs to anyone who would help
me.”
“In that case,” Dufiin replied, opening a drawer and taking out a checkbook, “write
me a check for fifty thousand francs. When you have signed it, I will give you the
letter.”
G- was absolutely astonished. He sat for some minutes. Then rushed he took a pen,
and finally wrote and signed the check and gave it to Dupin. Dupin looked at it
carefully and placed it in his pocket. Then, unlocking a desk, he took out a letter
and gave it to G-. full of joy, he opened it, looked quickly at it, and from the room
without saying a thing.

Dupin then begain to explain it all to me.

“The Paris police are thorough and they work long and hard. So, when G- told us
that he had searched D-'s house, I felt that he really had searched it thoroughly - so
far as he had gone. If the letter had been hidden where they looked, these men
would have found it.
“You see,” he continued, “G- is wrong because he thinks too little or too much for
the problem he works on. Many a schoolboy can reason better than he.
“1 knew an eight-year-old boy who could play a very simple game called 'even-
odd.' One boy holds several small stones in his hand and another boy guesses
whether he is holding an even number or an odd number of stones. If the other boy
guesses right, he wins a stone; if he guesses wrong, he has to give a stone to the
other boy. Well, this eight-year-old boy won all the stones in school. He had a
system. If a very foolish boy was playing the game with him and asked our clever
boy 'Arc they even or odd?' he might say 'odd.' And he might lose. But he would
always win when he guessed again. The dull boy would have held an even number
during the first question. He would have just enough sense to choose an odd
number for the second. And our clever boy would guess 'odd' and win the second
time. Now, suppose the boy playing with our clever boy was less dull. He had asked
our boy how many stones were in his hand, and our boy had answered 'odd' and
lost. Our boy would know that this other boy was a bit smarter than the first. He
would reason thus: 'This boy finds that I have guessed 'odd.' He will think that if he
changes his number from even to odd for the second guess, it will be too simple. So
he will decide on an even number, just as before. I will guess 'even'. And our clever
boy always won. Was he lucky or was he using a special kind of reasoning?”
I answered: “The boy only compared his mind with that of the boy he played
against and tried to think as the other boy would have thought.”
Dupin replied, “Yes. Thinking like the person you are playing against is the way you
win. Of course, you have to judge just how smartthe other person is - and judge
right.
“What have the boy and his stones to do with the purloined letter? First, the police
chief only thought of the letter being hidden in places where he himself would have
hidden it. So, he searched all those places. And , even with the promise of a great
reward, all he could do was try to search the same places again and again. He never
thought of anything new; he never considered another way of hiding the letter.
What did all this dividing the building into square inches, and sticking chairs with
pins, and looking at cracks with a microscope mean? Only that the police were
using all their strength to carry out only one kind of search. G- thought that
everybody would hide a letter in a table leg.
“But don't you see that only ordinary minds think of such things? A clever man
knows that everyone will look in a table leg or under a rug and that anything
hidden there will be found if the searchers work hard enough. So you see what I
meant when I said that the letter would have been found if it had been anywhere
within the limits of G-'s examination.
“Now, I know D-. He is a thinker who is very clever and very bold. Such a man
would not think in an ordinary way. He would know that his house would be
searched. In fact, I think that all his trips away from home at night were just
excuses to give the police a chance to search and to find nothing. He also knew that
he would be stopped and robbed. He knew just how the police would think.

And he would be sure to avoid all the places where they would look for his letter.
He would see that any place that he could find in his house would be tested by pins
and microscopes. So, he would have to avoid a difficult hiding place for the letter.
He would be driven to simplicity. Remember that I said to G- on the first night he
came here that the might be a little too plain.
“Well, you remember that our good Monsieur G- never once thought that D- might
hide letter right beneath the nose of the whole world as the best way of preventing
the world from seeing it.
“Now I knew that D-, being both a political man and a poet, was both bold and
clever. I also know that he would want the letter near him, so that the could use it
whenever he wanted to do so. As it was not hidden where the police could find it, I
was sure that D- had hidden the letter by not trying to hide it at all.
“So yesterday I called at D-'s house. I was wearing very dark glasses and
complaining of my weak eyes. Behind the glasses I looked carefully around the
room, while pretending to listen to D-'s talk. And he, too, was pretending. He
complained of being bored, yet he is the quickest man alive - when nobody sees
him.
“While we were both fooling each other, I noticed a large writing table near him.
Some letters and other papers and a few books lay on it. I didn't really find
anything unusual there. But, in letting my eyes go around the room, I saw a little
card - rack made of paper, hanging by a dirty ribbon from a nail in the middle of
the mantelpiece. This little rack had five or six visiting cards in it - and one letter.
This letter was dirty and crushed, and was almost tom in two. It seemed that
someone had been about to tear it up and had suddenly decided to keep it. The
letter was addressed to D- himself in a woman's writing. It was placed very
carelessly in one of the upper parts of the rack.
“At once I knew that this was my letter! It was different from the description that
G- had given us. That description said that the handwriting was that of a man and
the address was that a certain royal lady. Only the size of the two letters was the
same. But how different these two letters were! D- is very neat in his habits. Would
he keep a dirty, tom, crushed piece of paper? It seemed as though everything had
been done that could be done to make the paper seem worthless. And the paper
was in the most open place possible for it to be.
“Well, I stayed there as long as I could, talking to D- about something that always
interested him. I kept my eyes on that card-rack, and finally discovered something
that made me sure that this was the purloined letter. The edges of the paper
seemed broken. They seemed to be edges of a stiff paper that has once been folded
in one way, and then pressed out and folded in the other direction. Like a glove, the
letter had been turned inside-out, readdressed, and re folded. When I saw this, I
said good morning and went away, leaving behind my walking stick.
“Today I called and asked for the stick. We began to talk again about the things that
had interested him so much the day before. Just then, there was a loud noise under
the window. Women began to shout. D- ran to the window and looked out. I
stepped to the card- rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a
letter that I had carefully prepared last night, as much like the other as I could
possibly make it.
“The disturbance had been started by a man with a gun. He had fired it among a
crowd of women and children. But it wasn't loaded with real bullets, and he was
allowed to go away.

So D- came away from the window, where I had followed him as soon as I had
taken the letter. Of course, I had paid that man to fire the gun.”
I wanted to know why Dupin had not openly seized the letter and left the room.
“D- is cruel and unprincipled,” replied Dupin. “His house is full of servants who are
devoted to him. I might never have left the room alive if I had done as you suggest.
”1 pitied the lady who has been in D-'s power for eighteen months. Think, he is
now in her power! He does not know that the letter is gone. He will continue to
treat her as though the letter were still in the card-rack. And this will lead to his
ruin. I have no pity for him, for he is a man of genius without any morals. But I'd
like to know what the thinks when this lady, called 'a very important person' by
our friend G-, dares him to show the letter to her husband and the opens the letter
that I left for him in the card-rack.”
I wanted to know if Dupin had put anything in this false note. “Yes. It was not right
to leave the letter with nothing in it; that would have been unkind. D- once tricked
me in Vienna, and I told him then that I would remember him. So I wrote in the
letter enough to let him know who had guessed his secret. He knows my writing. I
just said: “A deed like this isn't worthy of me, but it is worthy of you.”

TITLE: THE PURLOINED LETTER

Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Grade/Specialty: INITIAL EDUCATION SPECIALTY Section/Cycle: NINTH
CYCLE
Name and surname: ROSY TAHIANA LUDEÑA HILARIO

A. NEW WORDS AND SENTENCES

Discuss the meanings of each of the words and phrases in class. If there are some
meanings which are not clear to you after the discussions, look them up in the
dictionary and report your findings to the class. Use the new words in sentences:

1. Dark a, having little or no light

The back room is dark.

2. Affair n. business operation, any small mater, romantic attachment.

The commercial scare that will tell you will bear fruit.

3. chief n. head or principal person.

The head of the company is sick.

4. despair v.t. lose all hope.

In the wake I lost my wallet.

5. pillow n. woven fabric.

The love that I bought is soft.

6. rang n. part of a thing made to hold it by.

The door of my house was a corner.

7. search n. look over or through in order to find something: probe into,

explore, look for something.

We are going to look for the headband in the room.

8. odd a. that is one in addition when the rest have been divided into two
equal groups; not even, strange; b. a number not divisible by two.

You stayed with an inpar shoe.

9. purloined n, color between crimson and violet.

The car was stolen by recyclers.

10.rack v.t stretch or strain.

The grid of the house is to change.

11.bullet n. metal ball discharged from a rifle, pistol, etc.

The bullet fell to the police on his arm.

12.dare n. venture, have the courage (to) defy.

 Dare to change your routine.

B. COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
After you have read the text, answer the following questions:

1. Who stole the letter?

2. Why was the letter so important?

3. What had the head of the police done to try to get the letter back?

4. How was the letter hidden?

5. How did Monsieur Dupin get the letter?

6. Why did Monsieur Dupin complain to D-about his weak eyes?

7. What happened to Aladdin at the end?