THE DANTE CLUB Lost Chapters

This page contains a "lost chapter" of The Dante Club—a chapter or section that didn't make it into the final version of the novel. Some include plot elements and characters not present in the printed edition.

"Epilogue to The Dante Club"

IN an autumn evening of 1872, a fire raged in Boston. A stream of flames engulfed an astounding sixty-five acres of the city's downtown business districts, smothering the area bounded by Washington Street on the west side, Sumner Street on the south, the bay, Oliver Street, and Liberty Square on the east, and State Street on the north; afterwards, the skyline was no more, the downtown landscape was a crater of red-hot coals. When the yellow smoke first overtook the city, merchants scrambled to save their wares. Thieves looted any building too far gone to be guarded by the altered militia. Bystanders watched, too shocked to move. "I saw the fire eating its way straight toward my deposits," mourned the poet Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in a letter to his friend Mr. James Russell Lowell, who was stationed overseas as Ambassador to England. In fact, not just individual investments but over seventy-five million dollars worth of real and personal property was destroyed by the morning of November 11, 1872, when pillars of ashy mists still clung to the clouds over Boston. The warehouse district lost millions of gloves, stacks of laces, piles of clothing, carpeting (enough, it was imagined, to supply the whole city), thousands of top hats, bowlers and imported silk; the promenade between Sumner and Franklin Streets witnessed the demise of clothing factories, jewelry stores, photographers' salons, cigar shops, confectioners' stalls, eating-houses, barbers' shops, engravers' chambers, wholesale apothecary-shops, and paper-stores; few buildings were spared among Milk Street's clothing-houses, saddle-makers, thread-dealers, stationers, plumbers, printers, boot, shoe, and leather merchants, clock-makers, book-publishers, plated-ware manufacturers, wholesale millinery establishments, rubber-stores, wool-vendors, and sales-rooms for crockery, hardware, chemicals, and steam-engines.

For the twelve straight hours of the fire, the din around the city was remarkable. Boulders and windows from the eight-hundred destroyed buildings fell incessantly. Granite sparkled and cracked as if it were chalk. Walls crumbled into the streets, shaking the earth. Men shouted, steam engines buzzed and whistled. Firemen in rubber coats bellowed from behind barricades, where their tangled hoses were trampled under the feet of the fleeing and the curious. The wind shrieked through the broken towers left standing. This wind, indeed, was perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the event. The great heat of the unquenchable conflagration created strong currents of air, causing the winds to whistle through the corners and alleys, through the ragged towers, as fierce and cold as a January night. So fiercely did the wind blow, in fact, that it was difficult at times to stand up.

Boston looked very different by firelight. Deep corners and low stones on buildings and in alleyways were illuminated which had never before seen the light of the sun or of gas. The faces of men and women carried a ghastly incandescence. Flickering semi-shadows trembled on the sidewalks, the buildings, the trees.

The day after the fire, Reverend J. R. Cushing of Auburndale preached to his congregation in the Hanover Street Methodist Church, invoking the text of Heb. xiii. 14: "For here we have no continuing city; but we seek one to come." The preacher closed with the following practical suggestions still heeded by the city of Boston: "1. Build well. Put no Mansard roofs on character. 2. God requires fruits (material as well as spiritual) in their season. 3. He rebukes extravagant habits of living. 4. Earth is an unwise place to put treasure in. 5. 'Prepare to meet thy God.' It is a poor time to pray in a fire."

After investigation, marshals concluded that the fire began from a series of sparks around an empty warehouse at 83 Sumner Street, at which point the flames had spread in all directions. Contributing factors were considered and criticized by the public and the city officials: the narrow streets, the high buildings, the wooden Mansard roofs. But these are mere conjectures. The origins of our upheavals rarely reveal themselves.

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