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The Black Cat
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.
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The Minister D____ Character Timeline in Poe's Stories
The timeline below shows where the character The Minister D____ appears in Poe's Stories. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The Purloined Letter
...the person with the letter great power. The Prefect reveals that the thief is a Minister, who snuck into the royal bedroom and accosted the royal lady and seeing the contents...
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...on the police’s habitual thorough investigations. The prefect says it was necessary to search the Minister’s apartment, and this could be quite conveniently done because of the Minister’s frequent absence at...
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...that it might be possible for the letter to be hidden somewhere other than the Minister’s apartment but the prefect is sure that it is not, because the letter holder’s power...
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Dupin thinks they should have known that the Minister would be too clever not to expect to be stopped and searched. The prefect says...
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...a kind of average, Prefect-like intelligence and not of the more unusual kind of the Minister. Their problem is they never adjust their approach, they only exaggerate it, as they did...
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The Prefect’s short sightedness is also down to his perception of the Minister as a fool, because he is a poet. All fools are poets, says Dupin, but...
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Dupin returns to the Minister. He knows that, because the minister has fooled the Prefect, he has the abilities of...
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The more Dupin considered the intelligence of the Minister, the more he believed that the best way he could invent of concealing the object...
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Dupin mentions that if you saw the Minister at home, you’d think him one of the laziest men in the world, despite his...
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Dupin purposely left a gold snuff box on the Minister’s table so that he could return to retrieve it the next day. During this second...
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...unclear why Dupin replaced the letter, rather than just stealing it. Dupin explains that the Minister is a bold man with a lot of support around him, so he may have...
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Dupin is, however, curious to know how the Minister will react to the replacement letter, which he filled with a message. He explains now...
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