A cunning criminal in "The Purloined Letter" who is both a poet and a mathematician and appears. This dual sensibility allows him to completely baffle the Prefect and the police. He meets his match in Auguste Dupin, whom he once wronged and solves the case as a kind of revenge. The Minister D____ and Dupin are actually very similar, and suggest a split personality, doppelganger theme, if a bit more subtly than some of Poe’s other tales.