G- says that the thief is none other than the Minister D-, a man 'who dares all things' (28).

The narrator says that the thief's power over the person who got robbed depends on that person knowing the identity of the thief, and he can't imagine that anyone would dare.

(This is all a really roundabout way of saying that the royal lady is being blackmailed.).

So, the person who has the document has power over the person he stole it from.Apparently, the document has information that would make its owner look bad in front of a certain other person whom Dupin doesn't want to name.G- says that whoever has the letter has lots of power.Translation: the letter contains some kind of scandalous gossip that would have caused a sensation if D- had let it out of his hands.G- also knows that the thief still has it, because if he'd sold it or given it away, there would have been obvious consequences.G- knows who took the document, because the royal lady actually saw the theft take place.An important 'document has been purloined from the royal apartments ' (20).Once you get through the vagueness, the situation is actually pretty straightforward: D- stole a letter and is blackmailing the royal lady. Shmoopers awake: this next bit (paragraphs 3-30) is kind of a brain-melt, because the players use a lot of double-speak and innuendo.G- sits back with his pipe to explain, but not before really piquing their interest by announcing that he could lose his job just for talking about the situation.The narrator asks him to explain the situation.Since this is a Poe short story, we're kind of wondering if we should take this seriously.

Actually, he says, 'Ha! ha! ha!-ha! ha! ha!-ho! ho! ho! Oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!' (15).

Before he even hears the puzzle, Dupin suggests that maybe they are missing the solution because it's too obvious.

G- wants Dupin's help solving a little mystery that's got him and his men stumped.

Their frenemy Monsieur G-, the prefect (chief) of the Paris police, stops by.You know they're good friends because they've been sitting together in silence for an hour. The narrator and his friend Dupin are smoking pipes and thinking.We'd like to know how much you have to pay to get an apartment in Paris that has room for a library.Our story begins in Paris, in the fall, in an unspecified year of the 1800s.

The case of the purloined letter