Gwynplaine’s Attempted Suicide at the Thames

Gwynplaine’s Attempted Suicide at the Thames brings Gwynplaine to the edge of death after the disappearance of the people he loves. Convinced that he has lost Dea and that his newly restored rank has helped bring disaster upon the troupe, he prepares to jump into the river. Instead, Homo’s touch interrupts the act, and the wolf guides him from the quay to the Vograat. The attempted suicide turns despair into a passage toward the ship and the people Gwynplaine had believed irretrievably lost.

Background: loss and responsibility

Gwynplaine’s decision grows out of the apparent disappearance of his former companions. He grieves not only for the loss of the group but for the thought that, had he been present, he might have stood between them and the power that crushed them. He imagines defending them as a lord, with his title, peerage, and sword, or as a mountebank, with his fists and nails. But that imagined defense immediately collapses under a more painful conclusion: he believes that his own elevation separated him from them and made him the cause of their persecution. In his reasoning, society destroyed them to keep his dignity apart from theirs.

That sense of responsibility sharpens his grief over Dea. Gwynplaine asks himself why he allowed himself to be separated from her and treats his duty to her as inseparable from his duty to the oppressed. Dea, an orphan and blind, represents humanity to him; losing her therefore means more than losing a beloved companion. It feels like the loss of everything that gave his life meaning. He concludes that the group is gone forever, that he has nothing further to expect from people or heaven, and that death is the sole remaining way to recover what he calls his lost soul.

The preparations at the parapet

The physical circumstances make the decision immediate. It is Gwynplaine’s third sleepless night, and fever has blurred thoughts he takes to be clear. Leaning over the water, he reads its darkness as a place of boundless tranquillity and feels the temptation to treat it as a bed. The narrative places his exhausted state beside his conviction that death offers an answer, showing the decision emerging in a moment when his judgment is impaired as well as in the depth of his grief.

Before climbing over the parapet, Gwynplaine removes his coat and folds it there, then unbuttons his waistcoat. His hand meets the Red Book in its pocket—the book given to him by the librarian of the House of Lords. He finds a pencil and writes a brief instruction: “I depart. Let my brother David take my place, and may he be happy!” He signs it, “Fermain Clancharlie, peer of England.” The note makes his intended death an act of renunciation: he imagines that his brother David can occupy the place he is abandoning and wishes him happiness in it.

Gwynplaine then takes off his waistcoat and places it on the coat, setting his hat on top. He opens the Red Book to the page bearing his message, places a stone in the hat, and leaves the writing visible. The arrangement turns clothing and book into a deliberate marker of his departure, while the signed name identifies the man who is about to disappear as the peer whose title has become bound up with his grief and guilt. Near the parapet’s base, a hole in the masonry gives him a foothold; he raises one knee above the top, clasps his hands behind his back, and leans out over the water. His words, “So be it,” make the leap seem settled—until something touches him.

Homo’s interruption and the route away

Homo licks Gwynplaine’s hands. Gwynplaine shudders and turns: the wolf is behind him. The intervention is small and physical, not an argument or a command. It breaks the posture in which Gwynplaine had fixed himself above the river and redirects his attention from the dark water to the animal beside him. The moment changes the course of the scene without cancelling the despair that brought him to the parapet.

Homo turns away, advances a few steps, and looks back to see whether Gwynplaine follows. Gwynplaine does. The wolf wags his tail and continues, repeatedly turning his head to check that his companion remains behind him. He leads Gwynplaine down the slope of the quay at the Effroc stone toward the Thames. The episode presents animal fidelity as action: Homo does not explain or resolve Gwynplaine’s sorrow, but makes a route away from the edge possible, one step at a time.

The Vograat and the abandoned plan

The route ends at the Vograat, a black Rotterdam vessel lying with its main deck nearly level with the wharf. Homo bounds aboard, and Gwynplaine follows in a stride. The ship is quiet: cargo fills the hold, while any passengers are presumed to be asleep below and the crew are likely waiting for the hour of departure. Its readiness gives the encounter a destination beyond the riverbank, though the scene does not yet explain what awaits Gwynplaine aboard.

A lantern near the foremast reveals Ursus’s old four-wheeled van, secured to the mast with thick ropes. Gwynplaine recognizes the vehicle in which his childhood had passed. It is no longer a serviceable home: its wood is worm-eaten, its iron rusty, its leather torn, its wheels warped, and its frame weakened by age and disuse. The van’s decay gives the scene a concrete sign of the life Gwynplaine thought lost, but its presence aboard the ship also means that the world he had sought to leave is not simply absent. The hanging chain beneath it further links the ship to Homo, who has led him here.

Significance

The scene reverses the direction of Gwynplaine’s movement without pretending that his crisis is resolved. At the parapet, he arranges his clothes and leaves a signed note as though his title and life can be handed over together. Homo’s appearance interrupts that planned finality; following the wolf takes Gwynplaine away from the water and toward the Vograat. His brother David is named in the note as the person who should take his place, but the narrative’s immediate answer to Gwynplaine’s isolation is not an abstract promise of recovery: it is the presence of Homo, a faithful companion who waits for him to follow.

The turn also draws the episode’s competing meanings into the same small sequence of objects and actions. The Red Book carries the written renunciation; the clothes and stone mark the intended departure; the parapet offers the apparent end; and the van, decaying yet still present on the ship, points back toward the life from which Gwynplaine believes himself severed. His suicidal intention is real, but the action ends not with a leap or a completed farewell. It ends with Gwynplaine following Homo aboard the Vograat, leaving the consequences of that choice to the events that follow.