"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Edgar [Allan] Poe, Tales/Contes, trans. Charles Baudelaire, ed. Roger Asselineau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1968)

Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire

Roger Asselineau, editorial assistant [Maureen Cobb Mabbott?]

Photocopy of book

The title page and notes on pages 372-375 for Baudelaire's translation of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" ["Double Assassinat dans la Rue Morgue"] in a 1968 edition prepared by Roger Asselineau, a notable French Whitman scholar. Asselineau provided notes for Baudelaire's translation of Poe's Tales [Contes], along with his own translation of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales for the volume.
     As the margin note to the left of Asselineau's note 15 suggests, the editor was attempting to clear up a mystery associated with "ferrades," a type of window shutter instrumental to Dupin's investigation of the crime scene (Madama L'Espanaye's apartment) in Poe's tale. Asselineau points out that the word "ferrades" never had currency in Paris. Asselineau adds that the type of window Poe describes in the tale, also instrumental to Dupin's investigation, is not of French but American design.
     This piece of information did not end up in the notes to Mabbott's version of the tale. However, he did include a footnote from Baudelaire's translation, this time by Baudelaire himself: "Do I need to point out that Edgar Poe never came to Paris?"

Thomas Ollive Mabbott's Research Files for the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Papers of Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries; "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 521-574.