Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Notre-Dame de Paris in Two of the Tales,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 24-37 (This material is protected by copyright)

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2

NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS IN TWO OF THE TALES

A SINGLE PARAGRAPH in Notre-Dame de Paris by Hugo is the source of several elements of importance in two of Poe's tales: “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” of April, 1844, and “The Cask of Amontillado” of November, 1846. The elements themselves are varied and the evidence is to be drawn from both internal and circumstantial aspects of the tales as well as from Poe's criticism at the time (roughly, 1841-46). The paragraph in question must first be examined in Hugo's French, especially since one of the influences upon Poe resides in sangsue, the French word for “leech” that Poe used under pretence of its being a legitimate English term. Other words to be noted are tonneau and fortunate senex, taken from Vergil. The situation must be indicated: Archdeacon Claude Frollo, who has vainly pursued the gypsy dancer La Esmeralda with lustful passion and has finally denounced her to the ecclesiastical court as a witch, has offered her a chance to escape from the dungeon in which she has been languishing. Rejected by her again, he has watched her being taken to the gibbet in front of the cathedral, has assumed her execution as inevitable, and has wildly coursed through Paris, finally ending his day of frenzy at the house of assignation on the Pont Saint-Michel, the scene of his earlier encounter with Esmeralda. Now he spies on his young brother Jehan just before the latter comes out, and he throws himself to the ground in hope of escaping detection in the dusk:

In one standard translation this is rendered thus:

The italics are given in all of the many editions of the work that I have examined; they were, therefore, an aspect of the passage that could easily have caught Poe's eye, while he was reading and using Notre-Dame intensively during this period.

Several features of the passage which went into the two tales can be briefly indicated: the use of the word sangsue for “leech” in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” and, in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the name Fortunato, the basic idea of self-destructive drunkenness, and the word cask in both title and plot. The dungeon in this section of the novel is also important in Poe's developing the catacomb setting of the latter tale.

There is no doubt about Poe's knowledge of Hugo's novel at this time. I have presented in the preceding chapter in full both the evidence and the significance of his many allusions to the story during the 1840's. It may be concluded that Poe knew well the portion of Hugo's novel that contained the passage quoted above. The sangsue or leech played a critical role in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.”(3) It was the means by which Poe arranged for the demise of the Virginia protagonist, Mr. Bedloe, the counterpart of Mr. Oldeb, the British officer who had died in the insurrection at Benares of Cheyte Sing, as Poe tells it, through a poisoned arrow lodged in his temple. It was actually a passage of anecdotal description borrowed largely and almost verbatim from several passages in Thomas B. Macaulay's review of G. R. Gleig's three-volume compilation of the Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, First [page 26:] Governor-General of Bengal. Poe had read this in the October, 1841 Edinburgh Review. The plagiarism — for it is necessary to call it that bluntly — has been traced by Maurice Le Breton, who overlooks one piece of borrowing from this source which tells much about Poe's methods and his frank disdain for the literary culture or perceptiveness of his reading public.(4) I refer to Macaulay's reference to the very name which Poe gives to Mr. Bedloe, his main character. Since the mystic correspondence of events and of deaths — from 1780 to the date of the story, 1844, depends upon the palindrome in Bedlo-Oldeb, I must cite Macaulay's passage. He is discussing the shift in Hastings’ fortunes in India, when company officials were trying to wrest power from the Governor-General and almost everyone was turning against him:

William Bedloe had confirmed the false testimony of Titus Oates in the false charges against the Catholics in 1678, in consequence of which thirty-five men were judicially murdered.(6) It seems to me that Poe, reading this passage in Macaulay, was struck by the, almost palindromic effect of the phrase, “Oatses and Bedloes,” both names being of two syllables with prominent o's in reversed positions, equivalent e's, and t and d (the same sound, voiced and unvoiced). There is no need to underline Poe's musicality of ear or his love for word play. Since the entire story rests on the parallel of the visionary participation of Mr. Bedlo(e)(7) in the Benares revolt in which Oldeb is killed, this double borrowing from Macaulay is noteworthy.(8)

The weird correspondence is completed when we find Dr. Templeton, in attendance upon the ill Mr. Bedloe, seeking to [page 27:] relieve his neuralgia soon after his vision of the insurrection by bleeding him with leeches. “In a fearfully brief period the patient died, when it appeared that, in the jar containing the leeches, had been introduced by accident one of the venomous vermicular sangsues which are now and then found in the neighboring ponds” (Harrison, 5.176). Poe reports his death ingeniously through a Charlottesville paper and cites its putative “note” as an addition to the account: “N.B. The poisonous sangsue of Charlottesville may always be distinguished from the medicinal leech by its blackness, and especially by its writhing or vermicular motions, which very nearly resemble those of a snake.” We are earlier prepared for its appearance through the death of Oldeb from one of the Indian arrows: “These latter were very remarkable, and resembled in some respects the writhing creese of the Malay. They were made to imitate the body of a creeping serpent, and were long and black, with a poisoned barb.” The authoritative newspaper note, of course, is a sheer fabrication by Poe, for the lanceolate shape of the leech and its small size — under four inches — make such an error by a physician impossible.

Poe has created a nonce word in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives only this instance of the word (with a question mark). The amazing aspect of the usage seems to be that on the basis of Poe's text alone other dictionaries have recorded the word sangsue as a legitimate English expression for leech. At the same time, some hedge about the matter by saying “same as sanguisuge,” a word which dropped out of English usage in 1609.(9) If it be argued that Poe must have derived the term from some local usage, whether in Charlottesville, Virginia, or elsewhere, I must point out that no article on leeches mentions sangsue as an alternate name in English. The leech belongs to the family of the Hiru-dinea, under which term it is discussed by The Cambridge Natural History. In French, sangsue is the common term, as distinguished from Hirudinge, the family name in scientific parlance.(10) It derives from the Latin sanguisuga, or “blood-sucker.” [page 28:] It would appear that dictionary-makers, faced by a problem with regard to the word, are beginning to eliminate it.(11) One should also observe that the natives of Charlottesville, far from Creole country, could not possibly replace the common leech with so alien a substitute.(12)

Furthermore, a venomous quality imputed by Poe is specifically contradicted by articles on the creature; the Encyclopaedia Britannica asserts that no leeches are poisonous.(13) There was, to be sure, a tradition that they could by lethal, for the Cambridge Natural History speaks of the “familiar” term of old, “hirudo lethalis,” and also reports an account from Southeast Asia to the effect that one species attacks in large hordes, so “aggressive and poisonous” that they have been known to kill a man.(14) It is a secondhand and rather unscientific account. Poe's use of a Hindu setting in his tale, based on Macaulay, may have stirred in his memory just such a tale of virulent Asiatic leeches. Soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia have attested to their ferocity, if not their venomousness. It is difficult to think of their resembling a black snake in appearance or in motions.(15)

If this were one of the more customarily anthologized tales of Poe, the oddity of his inventing a new English designation for a type of leech would have struck curious readers before now. It is obvious that it is one of the more successful of Poe's hoaxes, since all he did was to borrow the French word, probably from the passage in Hugo to which we can be quite sure he was paying close attention. It can be argued that he could have derived it from other sources, but the nature of his reading in French, as Woodberry and Messac indicate, makes this unlikely.(16) In view of his interest in Hugo it is probable that he looked at both an English translation and a French original of Notre-Dame.(17)

The effect of the rest of the Hugo passage upon his story-writing was far-reaching, I believe. There is, first of all, the term tonneau which means, literally, “wine cask.” The image is a vivid one — “a leech full,” which has “dropped off a wine-cask” [page 29:] — although not very scientific. Hugo wishes, of course, to remind the reader of the bloated body of the creatures after they have gorged on blood, even though as parasites they always choose animals for their source of food. In the text of “The Cask of Amontillado” the word pipe is used repeatedly as a synonym for wine cask. Poe also uses cask and puncheon (Harrison, 6.167-175): “I have received a pipe of ... Amontillado” and “A pipe? Impossible” (6.168). As they proceed, the drunken Fortunato again asks about “the pipe.” They pass through walls of piled bones, “with casks and puncheons intermingling” (6.171). One might add that it is absurd of Poe to write about an ossuary as being gruesomely combined, at random, with the appurtenances of a wine cellar, but it is probably proof of his wizardry that readers do not question this irregularity any more than they do the description of a burial vault that goes far beyond the limits of one family.

The theme of the drunken Fortunato, however, is one of Poe's major debts to Hugo's passage. Hugo italicized the phrase “Fortunate senex,” as coming from Vergil's “First Eclogue,” specifically the passage in which Meliboeus is congratulating Tityrus, the old man, on his tranquil, pastoral life. Twice he addresses him thus: “Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt, / et tibi magna satis” (lines 46-47) and “Fortunate senex, hic inter flumina nota / et fontes sacros frigus captabis opacum” (lines 50-51). The passage of course has nought to do with being full of wine and is unlikely to have occurred independently to Poe's mind as a name-source for this short story. We know his willingness to borrow three other Latin expressions from Hugo's novel, as indicated above. The name itself was peculiarly apt for Poe's purposes. It is doubly ironic, as Professor Mabbott points out, meaning both “fated” and “fortunate.”(18) It is true that Poe might have been aware of Old Fortunatus by Dekker or at least of the excerpts published by Lamb in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare.(19) The plot of the play certainly has nothing in common with the tale of Poe. I do not hold it [page 30:] impossible for the two sources, if Dekker's work was one, to result in a single use by Poe; in view of the coincidence of so many useful and, I believe, used elements in the Hugo passage, this onomastic aspect as a contribution to the tale should not be ignored. It is noteworthy too that the “senex” part of Hugo's quotation from Vergil is indirectly carried into the story, for Montresor, who tells the tale, speaks of “the thousand injuries of Fortunate” and of his waiting “at length” (Poe's italics) to be “avenged.” A long time is implied in “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed” (6.170).(20)

The intoxication of Fortunato is a key element borrowed from Hugo's passage with its “ivre-mort.” Poe's victim literally becomes “mort” because initially “ivre,” hence not on his guard. The fact is established at the beginning: “He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much.” His eyes were “filmy orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication.” Montresor cleverly intensifies his dupe's drunken state by encouraging him to imbibe as a defense against “the damps” and leads him to the niche prepared for his immurement. His weeping when he realizes himself to be trapped shows that “the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off” (6.174). I do not claim that a complex work of art is without many sources. Poe certainly derived something also from the details of Headley's account, in Letters from Italy, of a man immured in the wall of an Italian church.(21) Headley, however, speaks of the antecedent physical tortures of the victim of a plot for revenge; he has been walled up above the ground. Part of the power of “The Cask of Amontillado” lies in the extraordinary unpleasantness of the crypts through which Montresor leads Fortunate to his doom, and this, I feel certain, comes largely from Notre-Dame.

In Hugo's novel after Esmeralda is tortured into a confession, she is condemned and is then led to the “subterraneous vaults” under the Palais de Justice. The heading of the chapter, “Lasciate Ogni Speranza,” epitomizes her incarceration [page 31:] and suffering, and the grim horror of the delicate girl's being buried alive makes this one of the most effective portions of the work. From the first paragraph, chapter iv of Book VIII becomes a sort of etude for “The Cask of Amontillado,” as a few details will show:

This matches Poe's stress upon the long, continual descent into the extensive vaults of the mansion, into the “inmost recesses,” and still “we passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt” of foul air. It is a crypt, four feet, by three feet, by seven, just such a “dungeon funnel” as Hugo describes; in fact, all the details correspond closely including the padlock by which Fortunate is “barred” out of the living world “to rot” forgotten, behind an “accumulation of stones.” There is further correspondence between the “mouldy stones” of Esmeralda's prison and the wet “flag-stones” and the “insufferably damp” vaults “encrusted with nitre” of Montresor's domain (Harrison, 6.169). Another detail in Hugo's gallery of horrors may have contributed to Poe's grimly ironic ending: “For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them [the bones]. In pace requiescat!” Twice Hugo uses a term which, in its italics, might have directed Poe's mind to this ending. Hugo says: “It [page 32:] was one of those low damp holes, in the oubliettes excavated by St. Louis in the in pace of the Tournelle, that ... they had deposited La Esmeralda ... a poor fly that would not have stirred the smallest of its stones” (p. 298) and “the vault of the in pace” (p. 299).

Perhaps not even all his French readers knew the origin and exact meaning of Hugo's term “in pace” to designate the cell of Esmeralda. The Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise, of 1863, defines it as a “very secure prison, in which the monks formerly put those of their brethren who had committed some grand fault.” Its origin lies in the Latin, of course, “by a cruel play of words on the peace of a prison.”(22) Hugo's application of a conventual term to the vaults under the Palace of Justice is a little surprising but can be shown to derive, I think, from a front-page article in Le Figaro on August 22, 1829, issued just while Hugo was in the process of writing Notre-Dame. The liberal political journal published “L’In-Pace” to emphasize the black repression of the government of Charles X, the year before the July Revolution. As justification, it uses the occasion of the publication of an anonymous old manuscript entitled Le Couvent de Baiano, with an eighty-page preface by P. L. Lacroix (in reality, the highly respected antiquarian P. L. Jacob). It cites Jacob's account of the in pace cells, which were found to contain the skeletons of the victims of monastic cruelty when the religious foundations were opened and sacked by the revolutionaries in 1789. Le Figaro drives home the point that the in pace resembled the “oubliette” of feudalism (the latter term was also used by Hugo in this passage). No reader could miss the implication of this article concerning the modern French police state, and Hugo was unquestionably a reader of Le Figaro.(23)

Thus, by a curious stream of association, the sardonic use of the monastic phrase through Hugo may have suggested to Poe the very real sarcasm of the double pun, at the end of “The Cask of Amontillado,” whereby Montresor asks that the bones be left “in peace” and in the place of perpetual imprisonment that he had so cunningly prepared for Fortunato. Poe, [page 33:] a lover of rare and new expressions, would have consulted a dictionary of French. As for the ingenious explanation — that by metathesis of personality Montresor has sacrificed his own peace forever, as symbolized by the ending, I find little justification for equating the two men with William Wilson and his double or for denying that this is indeed a tale of mad or obsessive vengefulness.(24) After the loss of the Broadway Journal, Poe's mood during 1846, when the tale was published, might have urged him to treat this very theme.(25)

Another phase of Poe's tale that leads me back to Hugo's total atmosphere in Notre-Dame concerns the many touches of France, and specifically of Paris, in the story. It would be convenient to think of the carnival as being Venetian, as does Mary Phillips in her book on Poe.(26) But Venice is obviously eliminated by the sentence, “We are below the river's bed” (6.171). Headley's Letters from Italy stresses the dry quality of the wall and the fact that it is on the main floor of the church. Poe himself tells us that the crypts are much like “the great catacombs of Paris” (6.172), a detail which I have not seen discussed by any commentator. Poe had apparently been reading an account of the rather new necropolis for the city of Paris, deliberately constructed out of the granite quarries which spread out under the Faubourg St. Jacques, finally imperiling the buildings of the district. In 1770 the kings ministers had decided to shore up the galleries and put them to some good use. The officials of both church and state eagerly embraced the plan of clearing out the overcrowded cemeteries and churches, piling the skeletal remains of three million former denizens of Paris along the walls of the renovated “catacombs.” These eventually became one of the tourist sights of Paris, and even today the guidebooks advise tourists to see them but to dress warmly against the infernal cold or, as Poe would have it, the “damps.”(27) Poe had read descriptions of the macabre aesthetic effects sought by the planners:

It was not long before the galleries of the catacombs became a morbid attraction, so that under the Second Empire, Nadar took photographs of them, by artificial light, of course. One of these, used as a frontispiece illustration for Paul Fassy's account of Les Catacombes de Paris, might well serve as an illustration for “The Cask of Amontillado.”(29) Poe correctly speaks of the “fashion of the great catacombs of Paris” and then states that “three sides of this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner” (6.172). As I have personally observed in Paris, there is an overwhelming effect of deliberate ornamentation through the geometric patterning of the figures and varied shapes produced by cementing skulls and the knobby ends of long hones all together to comprise the catacomb walls. Obviously the Montresor family alone could not produce the wealth of bones described throughout the tale, but the many churchyards of Paris could do so. Poe also speaks of the “circumscribing walls of solid granite” — the stone of the quarries of Paris.

I believe that I have found one of the specific sources for Poe's initial interest in the catacombs and for his ghastly idea of merging the burial vaults with the wine cellar of the Montresor family. In The Knickerbocker Magazine for March, 1838, the “Editor's Table” features a letter from a Paris correspondent on the catacombs of Paris. This feature of New York's leading periodical was read regularly by Poe, the “magazinist,” as he called himself.(30) He must have read the account, which I shall excerpt:

Here are many motifs of importance in the story: the guide, the taper, the descent, the chill, the skulls, the wine cellar, and the victims — strong evidence of a link between the “Table” and the tale.

There can be no doubt that Poe had a French setting in mind, although he is very casual about mixing Italian and French names. While this approach produces no real confusion and no ill effect upon the uncritical, spellbound reader, it serves to show us how strong was the pull toward a French mise-en-scene, a pull stimulated in part by Hugo's role in the inspiration. Montresor is the name of an eminent French family which included Claude de Bourdeille, comte de Montresor, a noted intriguer and memoir-writer.(32) By contrast Fortunato, in form, and Luchesi, in fact, are names with the aura of Italy. For the actual record, there was a celebrated General Lucchesi who endangered the impending victory of Frederick the Great at Niemen, December 5, 1757, by charging Driesen's cavalry unexpectedly.(33) Poe's mistaken spelling of the family “from Lucca” is interesting chiefly for its being a tacit admission of weakness in his Italian. In the earliest form of the tale, published in Godey's Lady's Book, November, 1846, the name appears as “Luchresi.” This is a strange spelling, since the h is phonically unnecessary and non-Italian, unlike the esi ending of the name. It matches Poe's strange notions of Italian pronunciation as evidenced in his “Sonnet to Zante” (see chap. vi). Someone must have told Poe of his error, for he altered the name throughout the copy that Griswold used for his printing — from “Luchresi” to “Luchesi,” a spelling which is equally incorrect in its lack of two c's. The relatively few changes for this tale, as well as their generally sound nature, would argue that Poe himself inserted them all into the copy that Griswold used, about which Harrison says: “The Griswold [page 36:] reading may be preferred to the Godey's; but as we have no positive evidence that Poe made these changes, the latter form has been followed in the text” (6.294). Professor Mabbott apparently credited Poe with the shift to “Luchesi” on two scores. First, he traced Poe's acquaintance in West Point with a Frederick Lucchesi, a piccolo-player. Second, he noted the similarity of the altered name to that of the Frenchman in “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling,” of 1840 (republished in the Broadway Journal of September 6, 1845 [2.128]). Therein the hero, Sir Pathrick O’Grandison spells out the Frenchman's calling-card name as “the Count, A Goose, Look-Aisy, Maiter-di-dauns.” Professor Mabbott believes that since “Look-Aisy” is a homonym for “Lucchesi,” Poe must have thought the name to be French.(34)

I am less confident about the provenance and nationality of Poe's names in this tale than of those attached to the wines in this story of drinking. The French atmosphere enters strongly into those with which Montresor plies Fortunato: “Medoc” (sic for Medoc) and “De Grave” (sic for Graves).(35) There are other French touches, such as the “flambeaux” which Montresor uses to light their passage and the “roquelaire” in which he wrapped himself.(36) Poe seems to have thought that amontillado was an Italian wine, as is clear in Montresor's saying, “I was skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could,” at the beginning before he speaks of buying a pipe of amontillado; Fortunato thinks this transaction unlikely, especially in the “middle of the carnival,” which would deplete the stocks of wine. This is unquestionably his buying of Italian vintages “largely.” Even if Poe had not made the error about the Spanish origin of amontillado, I fear that he would have found it difficult to differentiate between sherry and amontillado, everywhere defined as “pale dry sherry.”(37)

To return to our original passage from Notre-Dame — there is another small touch which makes me suspect that this is a mardi gras in Paris: Jehan leans over his brother, whom he believes to be “ivre-mort,” on the Pont Saint-Michel over the [page 37:] River Seine. We are told that the catacombs of Poe's tale lie under a river; since they owe their origin in Poe's imagination to Paris, the ambience of that great city thereby pervades “The Cask of Amontillado.” For both tales the passage has aroused a host of associations, most of them macabre, and all in keeping with Poe's intentions and with his demonstrated power. It is not in derogation of that power to claim a role for Hugo's great novel in directing its application to these two of Poe's stories: “The Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”