Without saying it, we can imagine the queen has a lover other than the king, which is not only infidelity, but treason.
Poe’s audience would likely know from the papers that Caroline Princess of Wales wrote a letter to her husband King George IV over marital difficulties that got into the wrong hands, and it became a political scandal. When the king arrives, the minister, recognizing the handwriting of the letter and seeing his chance to blackmail the queen, puts another letter down by the first, then picks up the queen’s letter and leaves, all while the king is there so the queen can’t say anything.Ĭlearly, like Mary and Marie, the queen is up to something, or someone. Much as the word rape was absent from the second story, with many suggestive words with more syllables, such as “ manhandle” or “maltreat” in its place, the chief tells us in so many indirect words that Minister D, what we are told of his name, entered the royal apartments and saw the queen reading a letter she tried to hide but couldn’t, so she left it on a table in plain sight. Dupin says maybe the case is too simple for them, as he said about the case and cops in the first story, and the chief laughs at this impossible suggestion, and says it is quite complicated, as someone in a high quarter had a document stollen from the royal apartments.
The chief says the case isn’t a killing like the last two, but something simple that the cops can handle but Dupin might find interesting, as the case is odd, like Dupin himself. The narrator says it is quite a coincidence, but not if Dupin knows the chief is coming. Dupin and the narrator are smoking pipes by the fire discussing the two previous cases, “meditation and meerschaum,” as the narrator says, when the police chief, who pleaded with Dupin to take the case of Marie Roget, returns to ask him to take another case that he is charged to solve personally and can’t. Like the Rue Morgue, Poe returned to a fantastic, imaginary case after worrying about his reputation in misjudging the case of Mary Rogers a bit. Different critics have praised each of the three stories as the best, but Poe himself said that the last, The Purloined Letter, was his best, and it is both brilliant and half the length of the other two tales, which may make it more profound according to Dupin.
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