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 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 7 Summary: “The Street of the Four Winds”
The two epigraphs for this story are in French. The first is from Paul Verlaine’s “fete galante” poems and reads:
Half-close your eyes,
Cross your arms on your breast,
And from your sleeping heart
Drive Away all purpose forever (88).
The second epigraph is from an unknown source, and translates to:
I sing of nature,
The evening stars, the morning’s tears,
The sunsets on the distant horizon,
The sky that speaks to the heart of future existence! (88).
The painter Severn in his little apartment in Paris. A cat walks into his room, and he invites her in with a bowl of milk and breadcrumbs. As the cat eats, Severn talks to her in gentle tones. He asks her about her troubles and wonders why she came to his apartment in the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights of stairs to visit him. He notices her collar, made from a pink silk garter with a silver tag, and realizes she must have an owner.
Daydreaming, Severn imagines what the cat’s owner must look like. First, he pictures an old woman doting on her cat. Then he imagines a younger woman who is beautiful, with gold hair, azure-blue eyes, and rosy lips. He would like to paint her, but not on canvas where the colors would never do her justice. Only in his mind, “for in dreams alone can such colours as [he] need[s] be found” (90). With this daydream, he falls asleep.
The next morning, Severn goes to buy food for himself and the cat. He speaks to the janitor, the butcher, the baker, and another gentleman who lives in the building: they all say the cat belongs to a beautiful woman who lives in the north wing of the building, whose name is Sylvia Elven.
Severn says the name troubles him. Elven is the name of a town he knows, where he once met his “fate”; that fate was a woman named Sylvia. But he says that it is unlikely that this Sylvia and his Sylvia are the same, for it is a common name, and “the world is wide” (92). Severn takes the cat to Sylvia’s apartment to return her. He knocks but no one answers, so he enters. The room is dark and silent. He lights a candle and opens the curtains. On the bed, he sees a woman with eyes open wide and gold hair.
He calls out, “Sylvia, it is I,” implying that he recognizes her. Then he realizes that she is dead and he leans down to kiss her, while the cat sits on his knee purring.
Story 8 Summary: “The Street of the First Shell”
This story opens with another epigraph from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which reads:
Be of Good Cheer, the Sullen Month will die,
And a young Moon requite us by and by:
Look how the Old one, meagre, bent, and wan
With age and Fast, is fainting from the sky (94).
Told in third person, “The Street of the First Shell” takes place in Paris as the city is held under siege by the Prussian Army in 1870. American artist Jack Trent and his young wife, Sylvia, live in the Latin Quarter. Sylvia is afraid as artillery shells fall in other parts of the city, but Jack assures her they will not fall on the Latin Quarter.
Jack gets a message asking him to visit some friends. He goes to see his friends West, Braith, and Fallowby, who are also American artist expatriates. They are poorer than Jack, and starving as food runs out during the siege. Jack lends money when he can, although Fallowby borrows far more money than the others and wastes it on luxury items. Jack invites them all for dinner the next day to celebrate Sylvia’s birthday. Hartman, another American whom none of them like, arrives. West accuses him of being a Prussian spy, and they fight. Hartman cuts West with a knife before running away.
In the city, rumors spread that the French Army is arriving to break the siege. The men in the city make plans to lead an attack outward so they can attack the Prussians from both sides. Another of Jack’s acquaintances from the American Legation warns him that the rumors are false. Then he tells Jack that Hartman has been arrested as a Prussian spy and will be executed. As Americans, it is their duty to vouch for him. Jack would rather let him face punishment.
Later, at Sylvia’s birthday party, the subject of Hartman’s arrest comes up, and Sylvia faints. When she recovers, she admits that before she married Jack she had a relationship with Hartman and had a baby. Hartman now has sole control of the child. For her sake, and the child’s, Sylvia asks Jack to do what he can for Hartman. Reluctantly, Jack agrees. He testifies on Hartman’s behalf. However, he asks the captain of the police to find the child in Hartman’s house and bring it to Sylvia. So long as the child is safe, he does not care what they do with Hartman.
He is still distraught with jealousy over Sylvia and Hartman. At that moment, he sees a group of volunteer soldiers leaving the city to attack the Prussians. In a fit of shame and disgrace, he joins them. The battle is brutal and horrifying. Artillery falls around them. Jack sees another man he knows only to see him die.
Meanwhile, shells fall on Paris and Jack’s friends are frantic. West and Braith escape their building just before the invading Prussians break into it. They can’t find Jack and decide to try to help Sylvia. Suddenly, they see Jack among the soldiers returning ragged and beaten, a “spectre of annihilation” (123). They tell him that shells are falling on the Latin Quarter and he runs to save Sylvia. Among the rubble, Jack sees someone has written: “Here fell the first shell” (123). He rushes into his house and finds Sylvia there, crying but alive, holding her child. Not knowing that Jack is the one who sent the child to her, she explains: “They brought it; it is mine.” He responds: “Ours” (124), indicating he now accepts them both.
Stories 7-8 Analysis
The last four stories of the collection differ from the previous stories in tone and subject matter. They are all romantic in nature, and are all titled after streets in Paris, where the stories are set. One detail worth noting, however, is the repeated use of character names. The names “Jack” and “Sylvia” appear several times in the stories. Although they do not seem to be the same character every time, these Sylvias keep some commonalities from story to story. The reuse of the name points to a deliberate mirroring across the characters: the Sylvias may share a name because they represent “womankind.” Certainly, the repeated name detracts from a sense of personal identity and makes these women more like ciphers than characters in Chambers’s writing.
“The Street of the Four Winds,” is named for a street in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where the main character Severn lives. As with many of the protagonists in the book, Severn is an artist, as indicated by the palette and palette-knife he holds at the beginning of the story. This story is the shortest of the four “Street” stories, and a story of lost love. Severn half remembers and half imagines a past love as he speaks to the stray cat, rather than the narrative showing him actively participating in a romantic relationship. The two epigraphs at the beginning hint at what will come. The first epigraph, with its imagery of arms crossed over a chest, and a “sleeping heart,” bring to mind a body laid to rest in a coffin. The second epigraph, meanwhile, reflects on the movements of nature as markers of time and existence. These two things indicate the changes wrought by time, leading inevitably to the dead love that Severn finds.
Just like Mr. Scott’s Sylvia who is lost or dead in “The Yellow Sign,” Severn discovers that the Sylvia of his past may also be dead. The reader may suppose that the woman he finds dead in the apartment at the conclusion of the story is the same Sylvia he recalls (or imagines) from his past. When he finds her body, he cries out: “It is I” (93), and then kisses her on the lips, implying that he knows her. However, it is possible that he is conflating his memory with this different woman who happens to have the same name, or that his imagination has prefigured reality. This story is therefore key to the Interpretations of Reality.
This version of Sylvia is an example of the motif of women as figures with no history or agency, upon which Severn can place his grief and longing. He implies that she was unkind in the past, and her name now “troubles him like perfume from dead flowers” (92). However, he never explains what awful thing she might have done to him, and the woman is dead, and therefore cannot speak on her own behalf.
“The Street of the First Shell,” likewise takes place in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and features a woman named Sylvia. This story also features another character named Jack: the protagonist is Jack Trent which echoes the Jack Scott of “The Mask.” “The Street of the First Shell” is also a love story at heart. This version of Sylvia does have a history, a past, that exists outside the purview of Jack’s desire, and this very fact causes him distress and angst. This version of Sylvia had a love affair before meeting and marrying Jack Trent, and had a child, with Hartman, a man that Jack finds repulsive. Jack is overcome with jealousy and with disgust that he should forever be associated with Hartman through the connection with Sylvia and the child, and he abandons here. His abandonment of Sylvia is suggestive of the Sylvias of the other stories, remembered as past loves through the perspective of their errant male lovers. Unlike most of the other male protagonists of the book, Jack Trent learns to repent of his actions. He returns to Sylvia and even calls her child “ours,” implying that he intends to stay with her and raise the child as his own. This is a happy ending that is denied to the other Sylvias: the optimistic resolution paired with the ultimate rational moderation of the male protagonist again echoes “The Mask.”
Another aspect of “The Street of the First Shell,” is the relationship between American expatriate artists and the city of Paris, and how they in turn relate to the theme of Decadence and Moral Decay. Chambers himself was a wealthy American expatriate 1886-1893. Through snippets of dialogue we gather that the American artists, including Jack and his friends Braith, West, and Fallowby, as well as the hated Hartman, live in a kind of decadence that the native French residents cannot dream of. The epigraph hints at this dichotomy, as the “young Moon” is a “of Good Cheer,” while the “Old one” is feeble and thin from long fasting and hunger (94). Similarly, the Americans (even those like Braith and Fallowby who claim to be poor) live in relative ease during the siege. Fallowby, for instance, is “fat and lazy” (101) and portrayed as a glutton. They also all feast at Jack’s party for Sylvia. Meanwhile, Jack sees many French people in the streets starving, such as a young boy he interacts with at several points. At no point to the Americans seem aware of this contrast, let alone feel guilt over it.
