Gwynplaine’s attempted suicide and Homo’s guidance to the ship

Gwynplaine’s attempted suicide and Homo’s guidance to the ship is a near-fatal turning point in which Gwynplaine, convinced that he has lost Dea and the rest of his company, prepares to disappear into the Thames. He leaves a signed note naming David as the person who should take his place, but before he can leap, Homo finds him and leads him down the quay. The event converts a solitary decision toward death into a movement toward the ship and the possibility of reunion.

Despair at the Thames

Gwynplaine approaches the parapet after a period of acute exhaustion and grief. It is his third night without sleep, fever has come over him, and his thoughts, which he takes to be clear, are blurred. His despair is not detached from what has happened to those around him: he believes that his absence from Dea and the troupe left them exposed to persecution, and that his new position has helped society separate and crush them. He imagines that his own disappearance might allow them to remain in peace. The thought is both an attempted escape from his own suffering and, in his understanding, a last effort to protect them.

The loss of Dea gives that reasoning its most painful force. Gwynplaine regards her as the centre of his life, and her blindness and orphanhood make her, in his mind, an emblem of the vulnerable people he had addressed in the House of Lords. His political concern for the oppressed and his private love are therefore bound together rather than opposed: to think of defending the people is to think of Dea, while separation from her makes the whole cause seem irretrievably lost. At the river, he concludes that there is nothing more to expect from either human beings or heaven. Death appears to him as an outlet from a world in which both his public purpose and intimate life have collapsed.

The farewell and the preparations

At the parapet, Gwynplaine places a hand firmly on the masonry and looks down at the river. He takes off his coat and folds it on the parapet, then reaches into his waistcoat pocket and finds the red book given to him by the librarian of the House of Lords. Its presence links this private crisis to the public identity he has just acquired. In the book, he writes that he is leaving and asks that his brother David take his place and be happy. He signs the message as Fermain Clancharlie, peer of England, recording both his legal name and the rank he means to relinquish.

He then lays his waistcoat on the coat, places his hat on top, and leaves the red book open at the written page inside it, weighted with a stone. These arrangements make the intended leap a considered act rather than a sudden movement: Gwynplaine creates a visible record of his decision and directs the consequences toward David. Yet the note also exposes the contradiction at the heart of his new status. He has been restored to a title and inheritance, but at this moment he treats the public identity of Fermain Clancharlie as something another person can assume once he is gone. His preparation is orderly; the state of mind behind it is not. The sleeplessness and fever described just before the scene complicate the certainty he attributes to his thoughts.

Homo interrupts the leap

After laying out his clothes and belongings, Gwynplaine looks into the darkness above him and moves toward the edge. He places a foot in a hole in the masonry, raising his knee above the parapet so that little effort would be needed to go over. He clasps his hands behind his back and leans forward. At that instant, he feels a tongue licking his hands and turns around. Homo is behind him.

Homo’s intervention is quiet and physical: the wolf looks earnestly at Gwynplaine, wags his tail, and licks his hands again. The animal does not answer Gwynplaine’s despair with an argument or a human explanation. Instead, his presence breaks the isolated sequence of preparations and arrests Gwynplaine’s movement toward the water. For a moment Gwynplaine is stunned by the sudden return of hope. The narration presents Homo as arriving when Gwynplaine has exhausted his expectations and treats the animal’s appearance as a reversal: where the river had seemed to offer a final resting place, Homo’s return makes continued life imaginable.

Homo turns away, advances a few steps, then looks back to see whether Gwynplaine is following. Gwynplaine does follow. The wolf leads him down the slope of the quay at Effroc-stone toward the Thames, repeatedly turning his head to check that Gwynplaine remains behind him. This is guidance rather than a rescue completed by force: Homo offers a direction, and Gwynplaine accepts it by walking after him. The scene ends with that change of course, before the evidence here establishes his arrival at the ship. The route toward the vessel begins with a small act of trust in the companion who has found him.

The grotesque body and the event’s reversal

The crisis gathers force from the difference between Gwynplaine’s appearance and his inward life. His face has been shaped into an unchangeable expression of laughter, while his thoughts and feelings remain his own; sorrow, anger, pity, or astonishment cannot erase the public mask. As a mountebank, he has been made an object that provokes laughter in spectators, even when he does not laugh himself. Once the novelty passes, people turn away from him, and women in particular recoil from his face. His appearance is thus at once the instrument of his livelihood and a mark that exposes him to social rejection.

That imposed smile had also become the central image of Gwynplaine’s political speech. Before the Lords, he described his face as the result of power and torture and made it a symbol of a people whose suffering was concealed beneath an appearance of rejoicing. The speech had translated bodily deformity into a public accusation; the present scene returns that image to the private person who bears it. Gwynplaine’s preparations at the river show how far the symbolic role has failed to protect him from grief. Homo’s interruption, by contrast, does not erase the suffering or resolve the political injustice. It changes the immediate course of events: the man whose face seems permanently fixed in laughter turns away from the Thames and follows a living companion toward the ship.