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time enough 'to throw the body into the river before midnight.' This
assumption, then, amounts precisely to this--that the murder was not
committed on Sunday at all--and, if we allow L'Etoile to assume this,
we may permit it any liberties whatever. The paragraph beginning 'It is
folly to suppose that the murder, etc.,' however it appears as printed
in L'Etoile, may be imagined to have existed actually thus in the brain
of its inditer--'It is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was
committed on the body, could have been committed soon enough to have
enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight;
it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same
time, (as we are resolved to suppose,) that the body was not thrown
in until after midnight'--a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in
itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the one printed.
"
Were it my purpose," continued Dupin, "merely to make out a case
against this passage of L'Etoile's argument, I might safely leave it
where it is. It is not, however, with L'Etoile that we have to do, but
with the truth. The sentence in question has but one meaning, as it
stands; and this meaning I have fairly stated: but it is material
that we go behind the mere words, for an idea which these words have
obviously intended, and failed to convey. It was the design of the
journalist to say that, at whatever period of the day or night of Sunday
this murder was committed, it was improbable that the assassins would
have ventured to bear the corpse to the river before midnight. And
herein lies, really, the assumption of which I complain. It is assumed
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