"The  'Gazette/  "  he  replied,  "has  not  entered,  I
fear,  into  the  unusual  horror  of  the  thing.  But  dis
miss  the  idle  opinions  of  this  print.  It  appears  to
me  that  this  mystery  is  considered  insoluble,  for  the
very  reason  which  should  cause  it  to  be  regarded  as
easy  of  solution — I  mean  for  the  outre  character  of
its  features.  The  police  are  confounded  by  the
seeming  absence  of  motive — not  for  the  murder  it
self — but  for  the  atrocity  of  the  murder.  They  are
puzzled,  too,  by  the  seeming  impossibility  of  recon
ciling  the  voices  heard  in  contention,  with  the  facts
that  no  one  was  discovered  upstairs  but  the  assassi
nated  Mademoiselle  L'Espanaye,  and  that  there  were


The  Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue     219

no  means  of  egress  without  the  notice  of  the  party
ascending.  The  wild  disorder  of  the  room;  the
corpse  thrust,  with  the  head  downward,  up  the  chim
ney;  the  frightful  mutilation  of  the  body  of  the  old
lady;  these  considerations,  with  those  just  men
tioned,  and  others  which  I  need  not  mention,  have
sufficed  to  paralyze  the  powers,  by  putting  com
pletely  at  fault  the  boasted  acumen,  of  the  govern
ment  agents.  They  have  fallen  into  the  gross  but
common  error  of  confounding  the  unusual  with  the
abstruse.  But  it  is  by  these  deviations  from  the
plane  of  the  ordinary,  that  reason  feels  its  way,  if
at  all,  in  its  search  for  the  true.  In  investigations
such  as  we  are  now  pursuing,  it  should  not  be  so
much  asked  'what  has  occurred/  as  'what  has  oc
curred  that  has  never  occurred  before/  In  fact,  the
facility  with  which  I  shall  arrive,  or  have  arrived,
at  the  solution  of  this  mystery,  is  in  the  direct  ratio
of  its  apparent  insolubility  in  the  eyes  of  the  police."

I  stared  at  the  speaker  in  mute  astonishment.
