Voltaire taught us the method of Zadig, and every good teacher of medicine or surgery exemplifies every day in his teaching and practice the method and its results.
—JOSEPH BELL
When Arthur sat down to create a scientific detective, he was not only joining the flourishing genre of crime fiction; he was also conjuring the latest incarnation of a persistent ideal in literature. Now and then across the millennia, amid the chaos and unfairness of society, a writer had imagined a just, rational hero whose eagle eye and respect for evidence enabled him to stride boldly free of bias and preconception. As Arthur well knew, Edgar Allan Poe was not the first writer to imagine the critical observation and rational analysis of evidence. Poe consciously sent Dupin following in the footsteps of distinguished predecessors, particularly a biblical prophet and a supercilious philosopher.
The biblical book of Daniel, dated by modern scholars to the second or third century B.C.E., comprises both legendary Aramaic court tales and visions of apocalypse. One of the former stories about Daniel—lion tamer, dragon killer, and prophet—describes his investigation of a crime. A man of noble heritage, Daniel is among the Hebrews exiled in Babylon. Like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” one of the Daniel stories is a locked-room mystery.
“Why do you not worship Bel?” demands the Persian king Cyrus of Daniel. The name Bel was actually a title, meaning roughly “master” or “lord,” and among the Hebrews it seems to have been associated particularly with Marduk, a Mesopotamian deity who later became the patron god of Babylon.
“Because I do not revere idols made with hands,” replies Daniel, “but only the living God who made heaven and earth and has dominion over all flesh.”
“You do not think Bel is a living god? Do you not see how much he eats and drinks every day?” Each evening twelve measures of flour, forty sheep, and six containers of wine were placed as offerings before the holy statue of Bel.
“Do not be deceived, O king,” Daniel says with a smirk and a laugh. “It is only clay inside and bronze outside; it has never eaten or drunk anything.”
The furious Cyrus calls for his seventy priests of Bel and offers an ultimatum: “Unless you tell me who it is who consumes these provisions, you shall die. But if you can show that Bel consumes them, Daniel shall die for blaspheming Bel.”
Daniel shrugs. “Let it be as you say.”
The priests make their preparations and inform Cyrus that they are leaving for the night. “You, O king, set out the food and prepare the wine. Then shut the door and seal it with your ring. If you do not find that Bel has eaten it all when you return in the morning, we are to die. Otherwise Daniel shall die for his lies against us.”
The priests depart. Cyrus places his offerings before the statue of Bel. With only the king beside him, Daniel instructs his servants to bring ashes from fires and to spread them across the floor inside the temple. Only then do they leave, with the king using his signet ring to seal the door behind them.
The next morning the king returns with Daniel, sees the unbroken seal, and asks rhetorically, “Are the seals unbroken, Daniel?”
“They are unbroken, O king.”
Cyrus himself opens the door and peers in at the now empty table that the night before had groaned with offerings, and he praises his god. “You are great, O Bel. There is no deceit in you.”
But Daniel won’t yet permit Cyrus to enter the room. From the doorway he indicates the dusting of ashes on the floor. “Look at the floor, and consider whose footprints these are.”
“I see the footprints of men, women, and children!” says the king.
Daniel examines the footprints and shows Cyrus that the priests were using a secret entrance under the offering table. Each night they had been entering the temple, with their wives and children, to feast upon the offerings. The furious king rounds up all his priests, who show Cyrus the secret door. He orders them all killed. Furious and disappointed, he turns the statue of Bel—indeed, the entire temple—over to the proto-detective. Daniel destroys them.
In his revelation of what actually happened behind the scenes, Daniel provides the kind of narrative satisfaction that would later draw readers such as Arthur Conan Doyle to this kind of story—a reconfiguring of the reader’s assumptions, the replacement of what seems to have happened with what actually happened. He also proves the value of diligent attention to physical clues.
More than two millennia later, in the late 1740s, the French philosopher and satirist François-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the nom de plume Voltaire, published Zadig, or, The Book of Fate. Although Voltaire presented Zadig as a Babylonian philosopher, the author’s satire was aimed straight at the inequalities and trumpery of mid-eighteenth-century Europe. In a life as engineered for rhetorical points as that of Candide, Voltaire’s later creation, Zadig encounters every kind of misfortune, from war to thwarted love. He remains strictly rational, so attentive to the overlooked clues around him that he seems to possess supernatural insight.
In Voltaire’s account, Zadig is strolling outdoors when he is accosted by a royal eunuch, who with his attendants is searching the thickets and fields. “Young man, have not you seen, pray, her majesty’s dog?”
“You mean her bitch, I presume,” replies Zadig with the kind of omniscient smugness that Edgar Allan Poe would later assign to Dupin.
“You are very right, sir, ’tis a spaniel bitch indeed.”
“And very small,” Zadig remarks. “She has had puppies too lately. She’s a little lame with her left forefoot and has long ears.”
The eunuch asks, naturally, which way the dog ran.
But Zadig replies that he hasn’t seen her, and that he didn’t even know the queen had such a dog until the eunuch mentioned it.
This comic routine plays out again when the king’s favorite horse escapes its groom and the huntsman asks Zadig if he has glimpsed it.
“No horse ever galloped smoother,” replies our hero. “He is about five foot high. His hoofs are very small. His tail is about three foot six inches long. The studs of his bit are of pure gold, about twenty-three carats. And his shoes are of silver, about eleven pennyweight apiece.”
“Whereabouts is he?” asks the relieved huntsman.
“I never set eyes on him.”
Naturally the eunuch and the huntsman think that Zadig is lying, for some obscure reason, because clearly he has seen both animals. They drag Zadig before a judge, who condemns him to be whipped. Before the sentence can be executed, both the dog and horse are found and returned to the king. Clearly Zadig is innocent. The judges rescind the whipping but charge Zadig with lying and fine him four hundred ounces of gold.
Zadig relents and divulges his detective-style observational method. First he noticed a small dog’s footprints in sand that showed a streaked pattern between them wherever the sand rose, indicating that it was a bitch with pendant teats, thus mother of a recent litter of pups. Slight brushings alongside the front paw prints suggested the presence of long ears. One consistently faint paw print indicated lameness. As for the horse, Zadig noticed its tracks in the road were equidistant, indicating that they were made by a trained galloper. In a lane only seven feet wide, the horse’s tail had brushed dust off each side, so its tail must be at least three and a half feet long. The philosopher saw leaves knocked off a tree at a height of five feet. The golden bridle and silver shoes had left marks on different kinds of stone.
The resulting notoriety attracts so much adoring attention that Zadig resolves to keep his mouth shut in the future.
Nine years before Voltaire died in 1778, Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier was born in France. He became one of the great zoologists, well known to Arthur as Baron Cuvier. Although he vehemently opposed the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck and others, who maintained that animals had changed slowly over time in response to their environment, Cuvier demonstrated that extinction had occurred—a revelation that dealt a major philosophical blow to the ecclesiastical view of a static and perfect nature.
In Arthur’s time Cuvier was honored mostly for his extensive work in the comparative anatomy of animals, living and extinct. One of his most influential contributions to natural philosophy was his discovery that to an educated eye a single bone can reveal much about the structure and behavior of the creature that once possessed it, because of the predictable correlation between various parts of animals’ bodies. Unearthing fossils in every direction, scientists used Cuvier’s discovery as the cornerstone of paleontology, and such similarities were part of what Darwin later reinterpreted as evidence of kinship.
“Today,” wrote Cuvier, “someone who sees the print of a cloven hoof can conclude that the animal which left the print was a ruminative one, and this conclusion is as certain as any that can be made in physics or moral philosophy.” Then he evoked Voltaire’s contribution to his thinking about scientific detective work: “This single track therefore tells the observer about the kind of teeth, the kind of jaws, the haunches, the shoulder, and the pelvis of the animal which has passed: it is more certain evidence than all of Zadig’s clues.”