“The King in the Golden Mask” (original: “Le Roi au Masque d’or”) was written by Marcel Schwob and first appeared in Le Roi au Masque D’or (1892). The French Schwob (1857-1905), a member of the French Decadents, was a writer noted for his scholarship and his short stories.

In a nameless city a nameless king is presiding over his court when a mendicant comes to the door of his palace. The king, like his subjects, wears a mask. The king’s mask is golden, majestic, and noble. The masks of his court reflect their position: the masks of the jesters are laughing, the masks of the priests scowl, and the masks of the king’s women are smiling and gracious. For time out of mind the faces of the rulers of the city have been covered by masks. The king allows the mendicant to enter his throne room despite the high priest advising against it. The mendicant, who is blind, tells the king that the faces behind the masks of his court are the opposites of what they should be: the priests are laughing, the jesters crying, and the women grimacing. The mendicant further says that the king does not know the common people, and that he does not even know his own face. The king has the mendicant removed from the court, but the king is troubled by the mendicant’s words, for there are no mirrors in the palace, and he is suddenly insecure about his own beauty. So the king slips out of the palace and goes to the woods which surround the city. He sees a beautiful young girl and is gripped with the urge to kiss her skin, to adore her unclothed face. The king takes off his mask, but the girl screams and flees. The king looks at his own face in the river and sees that he is a leper.

The king returns to his palace, convinced that the guards can see that he is a leper, and walks through a hall in which hang the portraits of his ancestors. The king looks for the ancestor which cursed his line with leprosy, tearing down the cloths which hang before the faces of the paintings, but he does not find an answer. He looks at his jesters and priests and women, who are wearing their masks even in their sleep, and he strikes a gong next to his bed, summoning his guards and the priests and jesters and women. He orders them to take off their masks, and he sees that the mendicant was right: the priests’ faces are coarse and humorous from laughing at him, the jesters’ faces are grave and wan with sorrow, and the faces of the king’s women are filled with boredom and stupidity. The king takes off his own mask, displaying his leprosy, and swears he will no longer see the appearances of the world, and drives the clasps of the mask into his eyes, bursting them. He stumbles out of the palace and the city and wanders through the forest. He meets a young girl there. She is a leper, but he can’t see that and she does not tell him, and they wander together, she being kind to him and he thinking that she is horrified by his leprosy. But before they reach the City of the Wretched, where the outcasts of the king’s city have gone to live, the king dies. The girl weeps, for the king died thinking he was a leper, while she could see that his face was clear of the disease. The mendicant appears and tells her that the king’s heart’s blood cured his sickness, and that, though he died wretched, “but now he has laid aside all masks, whether of gold, leprosy, or the flesh."¹

Since the 1990s Marcel Schwob has been studied with something of the critical attention that he deserves, but popularly he is criminally overlooked—in the words of Roger Shattuck, Schwob is a “singularly neglected figure,”² despite being an influence on authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño and despite being admired by Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stephenson, and practically the entirety of French Victorian authors of fantastika. “The King in the Golden Mask” is similar to Schwob’s “Septima,” possessing the same ironic, Decadent tone and lush description. One apposite comparison for Schwob is the American 1920s and 1930s fantasist Clark Ashton Smith; although, it is unknown whether or not Smith was familiar with Schwob’s work, the two share a similar sensibility and prose style.

When it was published “The King in the Golden Mask” was interpreted by journalists as “an allegory of the scandals of France’s III Republic.”³ Schwob was a professional journalist when he wrote “The King in the Golden Mask,” and he would not have been the first French journalist to use fiction as a cover for criticism of the government, but Schwob’s mastery of the conte (tale) and embrace of the combination of scholarship and storytelling was such that he had no need to write an allegory. To write excellent fiction was enough.

Print: Marcel Schwob, The King in the Golden Mask, transl. Kit Schluter. Adelaide, AU: Wakefield Press, 2017.

¹ Marcel Schwob, “Le Roi au Masque d’or,” Le Roi au Masque d’or (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1893), 35.

² Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 151n.

³ Elisa Segnini, “The Mask as a Literary Trope between Decadence and Modernism” (Thesis, University of Toronto, 2010), 139-140.