Chapter 67

60 MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE rushes into mere assumption at the outset. ‘It is folly to suppose/ he says, ‘that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderer, to throw the body into the river before midnight. We demand at once, and very naturally, why? Why is it folly to suppose that the murder was committed within five minutes after the girl’s quitting her mother’s house? Why is it folly to suppose that the murder was committed at any given period of the day? There have been assassinations at all hours. But, had the murder taken place at any moment between nine o’clock in the morning of Sunday and a quarter before midnight, there would still have been time enough ‘to throw the body into the river before midnight.’ This assumption, then, amounts precisely to this — that the murder was not committed on Sunday at all ; and, if we allow ‘L’Etoile’ to assume this, we may permit it any liberties whatever. The paragraph beginning, ‘It is folly to suppose that the murder,’ etc., however it appears as printed in ‘L’Etoile,’ may be imagined to have existed actually thus in the brain of its inditer — ‘It is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was committed on the body, could have been committed soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight. It is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to purpose at the same time (as we are resolved to suppose), that the body was not thrown in until after midnight’ — a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the one printed. “Were it my purpose,” continued Dupin, “merely to make out a case against this passage of ‘L’Etoile’s’ argument, I might safely leave it where it is. It is not, however, with ‘L’Etoile’ that we have to do, but with the truth. The sentence in question has but one meaning as it stands, and this meaning I have fairly stated ; but it is material that we go behind the mere words for an idea