The
story surrounds a baffling double
murder where Madame L'Espanaye
and her daughter are brutally murdered in the Rue Morgue, a street in
Paris. Newspaper
accounts of the murder reveal that the mother's throat
is so badly cut that her head is barely attached and the daughter,
after being strangled, has been violently stuffed into the chimney.
The murder occurs in a seemingly inaccessible room on the fourth floor
that is locked from the inside. Neighbors who hear the murder give very
contradictory accounts, each claiming they hear the murderer speaking a
different
language including French and Spanish. The speech is unclear,
they say, and they admit to not knowing the language they are claiming
to have heard.
Paris natives Dupin and his friend, the unnamed narrator of the
story, both read these newspaper accounts with interest. The two live
in relative isolation, living in seclusion and allowing no visitors.
They have cut off contact with "former associates" and venture outside
only at night. "We existed within ourselves alone", the narrator
explains. When a man named Adolphe Le Bon has been imprisoned though no
evidence exists pointing to his guilt, Dupin is so intrigued that he
offers his services to "G–", the prefect of police.
Because none of the witnesses can agree on the language the murderer
spoke, Dupin assumes they were not hearing a human voice at all. He
finds a hair at the scene of the murder that is quite unusual; "this is
no human hair", he concludes. Dupin decides to put an advertisement in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an "Ourang-Outang".
The ad is answered by a
sailor who comes to Dupin at his home. The
sailor offers a reward for the orangutan's return; Dupin asks for all
the information the sailor has about the murders in the Rue Morgue. The
sailor reveals he had a wild
orangutan whose companion had recently
died. The animal had escaped and stolen the sailor's shaving straight razor. When he pursued the orangutan, it escaped by scaling a wall and climbing up a lightning rod, entering the apartment in the Rue Morgue through a window.
Once in the room, the surprised Madame L'Espanaye could not defend
herself as the orangutan attempted to shave her in imitation of the
sailor's daily routine. The bloody deed incited it to fury and he
squeezed the daughter's throat until she died. Suddenly feeling guilty,
it attempted to hide the body by stuffing it into the chimney. The
sailor, aware of the "murder", panicked himself and ran away from the
scene, allowing the orangutan to escape. The prefect of police, upon
hearing this story, sarcastically mentions that people should mind
their own business. Dupin responds that G– is "too cunning to be
profound."
More reviews about the Murders in the Rue Morgue