The Purloined Letter

It was a gusty autumn evening in Paris, and my friend C. Auguste Dupin and I were sitting in his small library, smoking our pipes in silence, when the door was thrown open and in walked Monsieur G., the Prefect of the Paris police. He had come, he explained, to ask Dupin's opinion on an affair that was extremely simple and yet utterly baffling.

A letter of enormous importance had been stolen from the royal apartments. Its owner, a lady of the highest rank, had been reading it when the one person from whom it had to be kept secret walked in. With no time to hide it, she laid it on the table with the address uppermost. Then Minister D. arrived. He recognized the handwriting, noticed the lady's confusion and guessed her secret at once. He laid a similar letter of his own beside hers, and on leaving, he took hers instead. She saw it all, but she could hardly object in front of the very person who must not know. Ever since, the Minister had been using the letter to put political pressure on her.

For three months, the Prefect told us, his men had searched the Minister's house every night while he was out. They had taken the furniture apart, probing the legs of the chairs with long needles and examining every joint under a microscope. They had opened every book and measured every cover, lifted the carpets and inspected the tiles. Nothing had been found. And yet the letter had to be somewhere close at hand, since its power depended on his being able to produce it at a moment's notice.

Dupin's only advice was to search the house again. A month later, the Prefect returned, more depressed than ever, and admitted that the reward had recently been doubled. He would gladly pay fifty thousand francs, he said, to anyone who could help him. "In that case," said Dupin, unhurriedly opening a drawer, "you may write me a cheque for that amount. Once you've signed it, I'll hand you the letter." The Prefect stared at him, speechless, then wrote the cheque, seized the letter and rushed out of the house without a word of thanks.

Only then did Dupin explain. The police, he said, were clever, but only in one direction: they searched wherever they themselves would have hidden something. The Minister, however, was both a poet and a mathematician, and he had foreseen the search. Indeed, his frequent absences at night had been nothing but an invitation to the police to come and look. Had he concealed the letter in a secret drawer or inside the leg of a chair, it would certainly have been found. He had, therefore, not hidden it at all.

Dupin had then called on the Minister one morning, wearing green spectacles so that his eyes could wander freely about the room while he appeared to be listening. Hanging from the mantelpiece by a dirty blue ribbon was a cheap card-rack, and in it lay a soiled, crumpled letter, torn nearly in two, with a large black seal. It looked entirely worthless. On closer inspection, Dupin saw that it had been turned inside out like a glove, addressed again in a woman's handwriting and resealed. He deliberately left his snuff-box behind, which gave him an excuse to return the next day. During that second visit, a man he had paid fired a musket in the street below, and as the Minister rushed to the window, Dupin replaced the letter with a copy.

"The police were looking for a hiding place," Dupin concluded, knocking the ash from his pipe, "and the Minister knew it, so he simply refused to give them one. If you truly wish to hide something from a man who is searching, my friend, put it where he would never dream of looking: right under his nose."