61 pages • 2 hours read
Robert W. ChambersThe King in Yellow
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 5 Summary: “The Demoiselle d’Ys”
This story opens with two epigraphs. The first is a quote from Pantagruel, by Rabelais (1471-1553), and translates as: “I will seek out the resolution even unto the bottom of the undrainable well where Heraclitus says the truth lies hidden.” The second epigraph reads:
There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: ‘the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid’ (The Bible, KJV), from Proverbs: 30:18-19.
The first-person narrator, Philip, is an American tourist in France. He has wandered away despite the protests from his guide and is lost in the Breton moors. He resigns himself to sleeping in the wilderness and then he sees a falcon attack a rabbit in the brush. He realizes it is a trained falcon when he sees a leather leash on its talons. A moment later, a beautiful girl appears from nowhere. She is shocked and momentarily afraid to see another person. Then she invites him to her manor for the night. She warns him that “to come is easy and takes hours; to go is different—and may take centuries” (73).
The girl’s name is Jeanne d’Ys, and she is the mistress of the manor Chateau d’Ys. The chateau appears, as if rising out of the mists. Jeanne and her two companions welcome Philip in an antiquated ritual of hospitality. He notices that they all speak in an old form of French as well.
The next morning, Philip awakes to find antiquated, medieval clothes laid out for him. He sits with Jeanne for breakfast and flirts with her, before confessing “like a man who pronounces his own doom” (79) that he loves her. Jeanne does not speak, but Philip reads in her expression that she is urging to try to “win” her.
Jeanne speaks of her life—growing up in the manor, and never seeing anyone besides her nurse and her companions. Her nurse used to tell her stories of people wandering into the moors never to be seen again. They go for a walk in the gardens where Jeanne teaches Philip about falconry, and Philip employs it as a metaphor for his love. Jeanne says she loves him as well.
Suddenly, they see a snake among the rocks. Philip kisses Jeanne as he shields her from the snake. The snake bites his ankle. He tears it away and crushes its head with his boot, then passes out. When he awakens, Jeanne is gone, and the manor is now an ancient ruin. Philip finds a shrine that states that Jeanne d’Ys died “in her youth for love of Philip, a Stranger” (83) in 1573.
Story 6 Summary: “The Prophets’ Paradise”
If but the Vine and Love Abjuring Band
Are in the Prophets' Paradise to stand,
Alack, I doubt the Prophets' Paradise,
Were empty as the hollow of one's hand (84).
Rather than a short story, “The Prophets’ Paradise” is a brief series of short prose poems built around repeated phrases and ominous dialogue.
In the first prose poem, “The Studio,” a voice labeled “he” asks the unnamed narrator who he waits for, and the narrator responds that he will know her when she arrives. This question-and-answer sequence repeats with the cadence of a chant. The second, “The Phantom,” is very brief, and uses two repeated lines: “The phantom of the Past would go no further,” and “if it is true [...] that you find in me a friend, let us turn back together,” with only a few variations in between.
The third poem, “The Sacrifice,” likewise employs a small handful of repeated sentences. In this one, the narrator walks into a field of flowers “whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold” (85). There he hears a woman far away cry out that she has “kill him I loved” (85) and watches her pour blood onto the flowers.
In the fourth, “Destiny,” the narrator is invited to pass over a bridge that few are allowed to cross, but decides to wait, declaring that “there is time” (85). A group of people come to the bridge and are refused passage. Tired of their noise, the narrator walks up to the bridge again. The people tell the narrator he is too late, but the bridge keeper lets him pass and closes the gate behind him.
“The Throng” is the fifth poem, in which the narrator stands amid a crowd that watches him and laughs as he speaks with a Pierrot (a French pantomime character with a white painted face; a sad clown). The narrator finds his purse has been stolen and cries out for help. Meanwhile, Truth appears with a mirror. The Pierrot says that “Truth is an honest thief” and the narrator demands: “arrest Truth!”
The sixth poem is “The Jester,” in which the narrator continually questions: “was she fair?” He” (the jester), answers that she was stabbed, adding: “think how he wandered, for her sake, year after year, through hostile lands” (86).
In the seventh poem, “The Green Room,” a Clown asks who can compare to the beauty of his white mask, only for Death to respond “who can compare with me? [...] for I am paler still” (87). And in the final prose poem, “The Love Test,” Love commands that if a person loves, “then wait no longer,” to which the narrator says: “Teach me to wait—I love you,” and the response comes again: “Then wait, if it is true.” (87).
Stories 5-6 Analysis
Following the four opening stories, which feature the mythos of The King in Yellow play, the other six stories of the collection are not directly related to the play. Stories five and six, however, keep some elements of the eerie and supernatural that prevailed in the earlier four, as if transitioning into the more positive mode of the last four stories.
The fifth story in the collection, “The Demoiselle d’Ys” is a time travel love story in which Philip the protagonist pieces together the uncanny truth of his experience at the end of the story. From the beginning, however, the story prompts the reader to doubt the fac-value reality of Philip’s experience, through a series of clues. These clues include the fact that Philip could not find any signs of human life while lost on the moors before the girl, Jeanne d’Ys, appears out of nowhere. Likewise, the manor Chateau d’Ys appears as if formed out of the mist. In addition, the people of the manor use “the sweet forgotten language” of the French spoken centuries before Philip’s time and the clothes they give to Philip are medieval French in style (94). Though the story does not specify what year Philip is from, he seems to be contemporaneous with the writing of the story and the acknowledged strangeness of the Philip’s leap back in time supports this: this world is “quaint” and “strange” to him. The suggestion of time travel are confirmed when the girl and the manor disappear, leaving only Jeanne’s memorial declaring her death in 1573. Multiple readings are plausible: the magical kingdom was a real experience, or a dream inspired by the memorial, or a combination of the two.
The first epigraph hints at the “hidden” nature of the chateau and the “truth” of the girl Philip has fallen in love with, and prefigures the 16th century setting of the magical world. The story draws heavily on the chivalric, Arthurian tradition of French literature, and on the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with its motifs of a man lost in the landscape, female hospitality, and magic. The figure of Jeanne, like many women in chivalric literature combines an apparent lack of agency in the real world with a magical power. The second epigraph links the premise and imagery of the story, presenting connections between the falconry Jeanne teaches to Philip, the snake that bites him, and the doomed love between them. From the Bible, it echoes the biblical imagery of the snake, woman, and temptation in the Garden of Eden, drawing out the similarities between this story and The Yellow Sign, where a beautiful woman causes a man to lose himself. This again plays into the theme of The Recklessness of Desire.
The setting of “The Demoiselle d’Ys” makes it an outlier from the rest of the book, although the magical elements of time travel and tragic ending bridge the gap between the supernatural horror of the first four and the melancholic romance of the last four. Like the stories before it, it plays with ideas of reality and imagination, Interpretations of Reality, and with a dreamlike state which allows for multiple readings.
The sixth story, “The Prophets’ Paradise,” has little resemblance to the other stories. The story—if it can be described as one—is a series of prose poems constructed through the use of surreal imagery and repeated phrases. The epigraph of this story, another quote from Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, seems only to provide the title, although the line “empty as the hollow of one’s hand” may indicate an inherent emptiness of meaning in each of the short entries. These poems do echo the hallucinatory atmosphere of the first four stories. They are similar in tone (but not content) to the dialogue and descriptions attributed to Cassilda and Camilla in the fictional play, The King in Yellow. The prose poem titled “The Green Room,” has the only concrete connection to the previous stories in the white mask of the Clown and Death, which mirrors the Pallid Mask image from The King in Yellow play. The poems’ relevance is not made explicit and, as with much of the book, they appear to challenge the reader to find meaning in the strange and dislocated association of ideas. The precise meaning of each entry is difficult to determine, which may confirm their general “emptiness.” They are oddities of imagery and rhythm and turns of phrase. However, there are some commonalities with the stories, such as the motif of women who are objects of longing and desire, mingled with despair.
