The King in Yellow

In an alternate 1920 New York, Hildred Castaigne describes a prosperous, heavily militarized United States shaped by centralized executive power and exclusionary racial and immigration policies. He witnesses the opening of a government Lethal Chamber where people may choose to end their lives. The sculpture of the Fates outside the chamber is attributed to Boris Yvain, said to have died in Paris at twenty-three. Four years earlier he fell from a horse and was confined by Dr. Archer for treatment of what Archer considered insanity. Hildred insists that he was never insane and says that after leaving the asylum he became intensely ambitious. During his recovery he read the forbidden play The King in Yellow through its second act, despite first trying to throw it into the fire, and he remains obsessed with Carcosa, the Pallid Mask, and what he believes the play revealed.

Hildred visits Hawberk, an armourer, and Hawberk's daughter Constance before going upstairs to see Mr. Wilde. Wilde calls himself a Repairer of Reputations and claims to control a large network through information, intimidation, and blackmail. Hildred repeatedly studies Wilde's manuscript, "The Imperial Dynasty of America," which presents an elaborate genealogy connecting Hildred and his cousin Louis to a supposed royal succession. Hildred accepts the genealogy as proof that he is entitled to a crown and regards Louis's relationship with Constance as a threat to that claim.

Louis later tells Hildred that he and Constance will marry the next day before his regiment leaves for San Francisco. Hildred returns to Wilde, where Wilde uses Osgood Oswald Vance's criminal and financial secrets to coerce him. Hildred and Wilde give Vance a knife, a plan of Hawberk's rooms, and an execution order aimed at removing Hawberk and Constance. At midnight Hildred makes Louis read the dynastic manuscript, demands that he renounce the supposed crown and never marry, and claims that he has already killed Dr. Archer. Hildred then sees Vance run into the Lethal Chamber and assumes that Hawberk and Constance have been killed.

Hildred flees to Wilde's rooms, dresses himself in a robe marked with the Yellow Sign, and puts on the crown he believes confirms his kingship. He then finds Wilde mortally wounded after another attack by Wilde's cat. Police seize Hildred while Hawberk, Louis, and Constance are present and alive, contradicting Hildred's assumption that Vance had killed the Hawberks. An editor's note states that Hildred Castaigne later died in the Asylum for Criminal Insane.

Boris Yvain demonstrates to his friend Alec a chemical solution that instantly turns living things into marble, first using a lily and showing him a previously transformed goldfish. Boris refuses to publish the formula because he fears what it would do to art. Alec has long loved Boris's partner Geneviève, but after she chose Boris, Alec remained close to both of them while concealing his pain. A pool in the house contains a larger quantity of the dangerous solution.

One evening Geneviève plays melancholy music while Alec sleeps nearby. Startled when he calls her name, she falls and apparently sprains her ankle. She subsequently develops a high fever. Boris experiments again with the solution, while Alec briefly opens The King in Yellow and recoils from it. In her delirium Geneviève declares her love for Alec. Boris responds without blaming Alec, but their former relationship is disrupted. Alec himself becomes gravely ill and experiences fever visions involving the play.

After Alec recovers, Jack Scott tells him that Geneviève plunged into the solution-filled pool and was transformed into marble, whereupon Boris shot himself through the heart. Jack drained and washed the pool, destroyed the formula and experimental apparatus, and helped conceal the circumstances of the deaths. Geneviève's marble body was placed in the marble room beneath Boris's Madonna sculpture. Boris's will leaves the property to Geneviève, with Alec and Jack given responsibilities if she dies without children. Alec leaves Paris for two years.

After Alec returns, Jack suffers persistent troubling dreams and urges him not to leave the house. Alec finally enters the marble room and sees Geneviève's petrified body. Soon a servant reports that the marble rabbit and two marble fish have been replaced by living animals; Alec also discovers that the petrified lily is fresh again. Realizing that the transformations are reversing, he rushes back to the marble room and sees Geneviève open her eyes and lift her living face.

An unnamed narrator attends the Church of St. Barnabé in Paris seeking relief after three nights of physical suffering and mental distress caused by reading The King in Yellow. During vespers and before the sermon, the organ music sounds uncharacteristically discordant and menacing to him. He sees a pale, black-clad organist leave the west gallery, then apparently repeat the same departure almost immediately. On the second passage, the man directs a look of intense hatred at him. The narrator attempts to explain away the apparent impossibility and his own fear.

The narrator feels an impulse to mock the service and leaves the church. Outside, he repeatedly encounters the same man in different parts of Paris. The figure's apparent pursuit awakens a sense of forgotten personal guilt, and the narrator flees across the city. He eventually returns to the Court of the Dragon, where he lives, but finds the man approaching him again. He retreats toward the Rue du Dragon exit, only to discover the great gates shut, and braces himself against them as the pursuer closes in.

The scene then returns abruptly to St. Barnabé, where the narrator appears to have slept through the sermon. He questions whether the pursuit was a dream, but sees the organist again and recognizes him as someone his own earlier weakness had sent to death and the abode of lost souls. The narrator believes the man has hunted his soul while his body remained in church. As the organ sounds, his surroundings dissolve into a vision of the black stars, the Lake of Hali, and Carcosa. The story ends with the King in Yellow whispering a warning about falling into the hands of the living God.

An artist identified as Mr. Scott notices a pale, repulsive watchman in the churchyard adjoining his studio on Washington Square. After looking at the man, Scott finds the colors of a painting of his model Tessie Reardon turning sickly and finally ruins the canvas in frustration. Tessie tells him of a recurring dream in which a black-plumed hearse passes her window, with Scott alive inside its coffin. She recognizes the watchman as the hearse driver. The next morning, Scott's bell-boy Thomas says that when he once struck the watchman, the man's hand felt cold and soft and a finger came off.

Scott later has a matching dream of lying trapped in a coffin while Tessie watches from her window. When he tells her, she breaks down and admits that she loves him. He impulsively kisses her, then privately considers the responsibility he has assumed, aware that he still longs for Sylvia, a woman connected with his past in Brittany. He resolves to treat Tessie kindly without promising marriage. After a late evening with actress Edith Carmichel, he again encounters the watchman and recalls the man's question about whether he has found the Yellow Sign. Tessie subsequently gives him a black onyx clasp with an unfamiliar gold symbol, which she found on the same day as her first hearse dream.

The following day Scott injures both wrists and cannot paint. He unexpectedly discovers a copy of The King in Yellow in his library, though he has deliberately avoided the play because he knew the young Castaigne whose fate is associated with it. Despite his warning, Tessie reads through the second part. Scott finds her stunned, then reads the book himself. As they discuss its disturbing contents, they recognize that the design on his clasp is the Yellow Sign. Tessie begs him to remove it, but he finds himself unable to do so.

At midnight the sound of a hearse approaches. The watchman enters despite Scott's bolted door and, though Scott cannot initially see him in the room, seizes him, tears away the clasp, and strikes his face. Tessie dies, and Scott writes his account while a doctor and priest attend him as he lies dying. He reports that the other corpse found in the room was the watchman and that the doctor could not explain how a man apparently dead for months had been present.

Philip, an American visiting Brittany to shoot game, loses his way on the desolate moors far from Kerselec. Near nightfall he sees a trained falcon bring down a hare and meets its handler, a young woman who later introduces herself as Jeanne d’Ys. She tells him there is no shelter nearby and warns that leaving the moors may take centuries. After summoning attendants, including the falconers Raoul and Hastur, she offers Philip hospitality at her secluded Château d’Ys.

The following morning Philip hears the household preparing a hunt using unfamiliar medieval French and falconry terms. His wet clothes have been replaced with old-fashioned hunting garments by Jeanne's nurse Pelagie. At breakfast he realizes he loves Jeanne, and he understands her to return his feelings, though the exchange he describes occurs without spoken words. Jeanne tells him she is nineteen, her parents are dead, and she has never left the moors or known anyone beyond the household. She has heard that the land may be enchanted. Philip agrees to stay for a week and promises to return to her after leaving.

Jeanne shows Philip her falcons and explains how they are trained. Their affection becomes explicit when she asks him to win her. A venomous viper appears near the birds; as Philip embraces and kisses Jeanne, the snake bites his ankle. He lifts Jeanne away from the danger, kills the viper, and collapses from the bite. His last sensation before losing consciousness is Jeanne holding him.

When Philip regains consciousness, Jeanne, the falcons, and the château have vanished. The stream and dead viper remain, but the house is a mass of ancient ruins. He kneels before a crumbling shrine whose inscription asks for prayers for Jeanne d’Ys, who died young for love of Philip, a stranger, in 1573. On the stone lies her glove, still warm and fragrant. The ending suggests an encounter across centuries without explaining how it occurred.

This sequence consists of eight brief, separately titled, allegorical prose pieces rather than one continuous narrative. In "The Studio," a speaker refuses a visitor's demand to seek a woman beyond his studio, insisting that his whole world lies inside it. The visitor and even the voice of the hearth suggest that the familiar song in the street belongs to voices and footsteps changed or lost with time, but the speaker keeps waiting.

In "The Phantom," a speaker struggles to hold on to the Phantom of the Past, who asks to turn back and insists she can go no farther. In "The Sacrifice," a woman repeatedly declares that she has killed the person she loved and pours blood from a jar inscribed with a thousand names over white flowers, saying the thirsty world may drink. In "Destiny," a keeper twice invites a speaker to cross a bridge accessible to few; the speaker initially delays, saying there is time, while others are refused. The keeper admits the speaker on the later visit despite the crowd's claim that it is too late.

In "The Throng," a speaker stands beside Pierrot as a crowd laughs that someone has stolen his purse. Truth appears with a mirror, and Pierrot calls Truth an honest thief; the exchange leaves the speaker confused about the mirror, his missing purse, and whom to accuse. In "The Jester," a jester responds to repeated questions about a woman by describing a long and dangerous journey, a kiss at a gate, a brother's welcome, and a stabbing, without making the circumstances explicit.

In "The Green Room," a white-masked Clown claims beauty in his pallor, but Death says that he is paler still. In "The Love Test," Love urges a speaker to give his beloved jewels that would dishonor her. She tramples them, asks to be taught to wait, and declares her love. Love's final instruction is to wait if that love is true. Across the pieces, repeated statements and symbolic exchanges address attachment to the past, sacrifice, delayed action, uncertain truth, death, and love.

Severn, a painter living alone in Paris's Street of the Four Winds, welcomes a thin, neglected white cat into his studio and feeds her milk and bread. She wears an embroidered rose-colored silk garter with a silver clasp around her neck. Talking to the cat, Severn imagines that her mistress is a beautiful woman with golden hair and blue eyes. His account is fanciful rather than knowledge of the cat's owner.

After Severn goes out to buy food for himself and the cat, he reports what he learned from the janitor and neighborhood shopkeepers. The cat's mistress lives in the north wing of his building, which he thought was uninhabited. Some neighbors speak badly of the woman, but a sculptor who has seen her once defends her. Severn then discovers the name Sylvia Elven engraved on the garter's clasp. Both names affect him: he once encountered an unhappy fate in the Breton town of Elven, and he associates that experience with a woman named Sylvia. He nevertheless tells himself that the cat's Sylvia cannot be his Sylvia, since the names need not identify the same person.

Carrying the cat through the building, Severn reaches a closed door in the north wing. He knocks for a long time before hearing movement and entering a dark, richly furnished room. The cat slips out of his arms. He lights a candle and sees a matching rose-colored garter among a woman's discarded clothes, then draws back the bed curtains. The woman lying there has golden hair and open, smiling eyes. Severn recognizes her and twice whispers, "Sylvia, it is I." Realizing that she is dead, he kisses her mouth. He remains there through the night with the cat purring in his lap. The story does not explain the circumstances of Sylvia's death or the intervening history between her and Severn.

During the Prussian siege of Paris in December 1870, American painter Jack Trent lives with his young wife, Sylvia, in the Latin Quarter. Sylvia is frightened by the bombardment and begs him not to go out. Trent visits his fellow artists, including the impoverished sixteen-year-old Braith and sculptor West, who has little food but shares what he has with Colette. Trent gives Braith money and later reprimands the more extravagant Fallowby while helping him financially. West, newly engaged to Colette, also confronts Hartman, an American claiming to be an artist, over his suspicious conduct and his pursuit of Colette.

Captain Southwark of the American Legation tells Trent that Hartman has been arrested on suspicion of espionage and for obtaining food rations fraudulently. Hartman faces execution, and the Legation may require Trent to identify him as an American artist. At a dinner celebrating Sylvia's nineteenth birthday and West's engagement, Trent proposes that he and his friends volunteer for the American Ambulance during an impending French sortie. When an official message summons him to identify Hartman, Sylvia faints. Alone with Trent, she confesses that Hartman seduced and mistreated her before she met Trent, and that she has a child by him. She fears Trent will leave her and pleads for Hartman's life for the child's sake. Trent struggles with anger and shame but recognizes that he loves Sylvia and refuses to abandon her.

At the prison Trent identifies Hartman, helping prevent his immediate, summary execution without establishing Hartman's innocence. Trent privately asks Southwark to retrieve Sylvia's child from Hartman's rooms and bring the child to Trent's apartment, promising to care for the child if Hartman is executed. Distressed by the encounter, Trent wanders toward the Arc de Triomphe instead of going straight home. At dawn he finds French troops departing on a sortie. Though he had intended to help the ambulance, he impulsively takes the equipment of a soldier unable to fight and joins the infantry. The battle becomes a confused slaughter. Trent kills a Prussian soldier with his bayonet, fights desperately around a cannon, loses consciousness, and retreats with survivors. He tries to help wounded comrades, including a fellow student with a shattered jaw and Philippe, but both die.

As the defeated troops return, German shells strike the Latin Quarter. West, Braith, and Colette shelter from looters in a cellar and escape through a manhole as the door gives way. On the riverfront they see Hartman marched into barracks under guard and hear a firing volley. Trent encounters his friends among the retreating soldiers and, learning that the Quarter is under bombardment, hurries home. Near his street he sees a boy writing that the first shell fell there. He finds severe damage to the building and dead people inside, then reaches his apartment and discovers Sylvia alive. The child Southwark arranged to bring is beside her. When Sylvia calls the child hers, Trent embraces them both and answers, "Ours."

Newly arrived in Paris to study painting, the young American Hastings is placed by the Reverend Joel Byram in Madame Marotte's respectable pension on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Byram is determined to protect his inexperienced charge from the Latin Quarter's supposedly immoral influences. Homesick, Hastings befriends fellow lodgers Susie Byng and her mother, who recommend the Luxembourg Gardens. There he meets an artist he knows, Foxhall Clifford, who introduces him to Valentine Tissot before leaving for an appointment.

Valentine is familiar with the artists of the Quarter, but Hastings does not understand what her freedom to meet men alone may signify in that setting. When she tries to kiss a child in the gardens, the child's nurse pointedly rejects her, although Hastings interprets the incident as mere rudeness. Hastings asks to visit Valentine's family, and she tells him that her parents are dead and that he cannot come to her home. She asks him not to discuss her with Clifford or anyone else. Hastings agrees, pleased that they can continue meeting in the gardens and unaware of why she insists on secrecy.

At the painting studio, other students mock Hastings's innocence and suggest that his assumptions about women in the Quarter are naive. Clifford defends him, introduces him to friends, and privately worries that Hastings does not understand Valentine's reputation. Clifford is himself an unfaithful admirer of Cécile and has been pursuing Valentine. When Valentine meets Clifford privately at a restaurant, she rejects his romantic overtures, criticizes his treatment of Cécile, and begs him not to reveal what he knows about her to Hastings. She fears that Hastings will turn away if he learns how she is regarded by others. Clifford agrees to trust her promise that he need not warn his friend.

Over the next month Hastings becomes more familiar with the artists' social circle, though their conduct continues to trouble him. He joins Clifford, Elliott, Rowden, Cécile, Colette, and Jacqueline on a fishing excursion to La Roche, enjoying the outing while noticing their open flirtation and longing to return to Valentine. The following Sunday he finds Clifford drunk in his studio and Elliott similarly incapacitated in the Luxembourg Gardens, strengthening his unease about his friends' habits.

Valentine unexpectedly meets Hastings in the gardens that morning, saying she could not sleep. He asks her to spend the day with him, and she agrees, though she speaks of doing so only this once. After breakfast they board a train intending to visit Saint-Cloud. Excited by the journey, Valentine leans far out the window until Hastings draws her close and kisses her. She protests in distress, says she is unworthy, and hints that he must understand more about her, but Hastings does not grasp the implications. She finally accepts his affection and says she has broken her word to someone who trusted her. The story closes during the journey, with Hastings imagining their happiness and Valentine seeing the world anew; her unspoken past and the consequences of their attachment remain unresolved.

Newly arrived in Paris, the American art student Selby begins working at the Académie Julian and befriends the sociable Foxhall Clifford, who helps him negotiate the studio's teasing customs. Clifford introduces Selby to his friends Richard Elliott and Stanley Rowden. They explain that a blue-eyed young woman admired by the Latin Quarter's artists is known only as "Rue Barrée," after the street barrier near her residence; her actual name is unknown to them. She carries a music roll, from which they infer she may be a pianist, and usually acknowledges admirers only with a formal bow. Clifford has unsuccessfully courted her, as have Elliott and Rowden.

At the flower market Selby sees Rue Barrée unable to afford a fifty-franc rosebush she wants. After she buys inexpensive pansies and leaves, he impulsively buys the rosebush for her and orders the gardener to deliver it with her flowers without revealing the donor. Selby also buys so many other flowers that they overwhelm his small hotel room. Clifford visits, notices the excess, and begins to suspect what Selby has done after Elliott and Rowden mention seeing flowers delivered to Rue Barrée's building.

Rue Barrée takes pleasure in the gifted rose and wears one of its blossoms. Clifford, unaware of her private happiness, approaches her in the Luxembourg Gardens. He offers marriage in a moment of excited infatuation, although the narration makes clear that even he knows infatuation is not the same as love. She thanks him seriously, telling him that no man has offered to marry her before. She describes her poverty, loneliness, and fear that relationships offered to women without resources end in abandonment. Touching the rose at her breast, she declines his proposal. Clifford feels both wounded and relieved, while Rue Barrée thereafter responds to him more warmly.

Selby becomes jealous of Clifford's perceived closeness to her. The two men spend an evening drinking together, and Selby leaves alone, heavily intoxicated. Wandering through Paris, he reaches the blocked street that gives Rue Barrée her nickname and decides to scale the building toward its only lighted window. She opens it and, visibly shaken, steps back as he enters her modest, meticulously clean room. Neither speaks. As he sobers, Selby catches sight of himself in a mirror and feels ashamed of his intrusion. He chooses to leave without making an advance. Rue Barrée takes a rose from a glass, kisses it, and places it beside him; he takes it. She goes downstairs ahead of him, unbolts the door, and lets him out. The story ends there without confirming her feelings or establishing a future relationship.