Hildred Castaigne is the protagonist and narrator of the short story "The Repairer of Reputations", the first in the 1895 collection of horror and weird fiction The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers.
Castaigne is strongly implied to be a mentally troubled man obsessed with the mysterious play The King in Yellow. He becomes increasingly more dangerous as the story progresses, taking fiction as fact, to the point of attacking other people. It remains ambiguous whether he actually committed any murders.
Background[]
Since Castaigne is shown to be an unreliable narrator, not a single information given in his first-person narration can be definitely assumed as a fact. It is, therefore, up to the reader to decide what to believe and what not to.
Castaigne appears to be a young or middle-aged American man who lives in New York City in the year 1920 (in which the story is set, 25 years after its publication in 1895). He has a cousin named Louis, who is a military officer engaged to a girl named Constance, the daughter of Mr. Hawberk, an armorer and friend of Castaigne. Upstairs in the same building where Hawberk works, there lives a very eccentric character, Mr. Wilde, who works as a "repairer of reputations" (the namesake of the story). Despite every other character considering Mr. Wilde as a man out of his mind, Castaigne is a deep admirer of him, whom he believes has hidden knowledge about valuable facts.
At some point in his life, Castaigne suffered an accident where he fell from his horse and, during his convalescence in an insane asylum under Dr. Archer, he read the infamous play The King in Yellow, which according to him was banned in many countries due to inducing madness into the reader. While the first act of the play is seen as relatively ordinary, it only prepares the reader for the second act, the part responsible for driving the audience insane. Upon finishing the first act and realizing the effect the play was having on him, Castaigne tried to throw the book into the fireplace, but accidentally caught a glimpse of the first page of the second act, which he then read obsessively on its entirety.
Castaigne claims to possess a crown made of fine jewels like gold and diamonds, kept inside a safe in his home. According to Louis, however, it is just a brass crown kept inside a biscuit box.
Story[]
During a conversation with Castaigne, Mr. Wilde claims to be, as a "repairer of reputations", in command of a vast conspiracy to influence and command powerful men whose reputations he has saved from scandal. Castaigne believes that, with Wilde's help, he has found out that he is a heir of the "Last King" of "The Imperial Dynasty of America", which according to Wilde descends from a lost kingdom in the star cluster of the Hyades (which is mentioned in the play The King in Yellow). Castaigne, however, perceives his cousin Louis as standing before him in the line of succession, so he plans to force Louis to abdicate his claim to the throne, accept exile, and never marry Constance.
Castaigne arranges to meet Louis at midnight in a park, where he has him read a whole genealogical document about "The Imperial Dynasty of America", which mentions them both, without asking him a single question. After Louis finishes, Castaigne says that he has to abdicate his right to the throne, to which Louis, believing his cousin to be still mad, agrees. However, after Castaigne says Louis should also not marry, he proceeds to tell his cousin that he has murdered Dr. Archer and Constance, to Louis' shock. Castaigne runs to the apartment of Mr. Wilde, followed by Louis. Once there, he finds the feral cat that Mr. Wilde keeps, who tries to attack him, so he attempts to kill the animal with a knife in the dark, but this results in Mr. Wilde "lying on the floor with throat torn open". The police arrive as Castaigne sees Constance crying and is dragged away. A postscript says that Castaigne has been committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.
External links[]
- Hildred Castaigne on The Yellow Site (The King in Yellow wiki)