Letter received by Gwynplaine

The letter received by Gwynplaine is Duchess Josiana’s private invitation to him, delivered at night by her page. It sets her beauty and rank against his disfigured appearance and profession, then declares her desire and summons him to meet. Gwynplaine reads it, but later burns it while Dea sits beside him, choosing not to let the duchess’s appeal enter their shared life. Its brief passage from hand to hand, and finally into the lamp’s ashes, makes the letter a compact turning point in the conflict between rank, desire, and fidelity.

Delivery and Appearance

The letter arrives through stealth. Gwynplaine feels a paper slip between his fingers and turns to find a man standing before him: the duchess’s page, whom he recognizes. The page has approached from behind quietly and placed the message in his hand. In the starlight he appears young and sedate, with a scarlet livery visible beneath a long gray cloak. A crimson cap, marked with a strip of lace and topped with tisserin feathers, completes the distinctive courtly dress. The page’s presence identifies the message’s connection to the Duchess’s household before Gwynplaine has opened it.

The page gives him a specific appointment: at the same hour the following day, Gwynplaine is to be at the corner of London Bridge, where the page will conduct him. This makes the paper more than a declaration. It carries a proposed meeting and offers a route into the Duchess’s private sphere, mediated by a servant who can guide him there. Gwynplaine is initially so taken aback that he moves uncertainly; only after a pause does he go toward the inn, where a lamp allows him to examine the message.

The envelope is closed and addressed simply to Gwynplaine. Its seal bears no design. Under the light, he breaks it and unfolds the letter. The plain exterior gives no indication of its extraordinary contents: the message is a direct, carefully balanced contrast between the Duchess’s beauty and status and Gwynplaine’s appearance and occupation, followed by her avowal of desire and command that he come. The address makes the appeal personal, while its compressed oppositions turn social distance into the very premise of the invitation.

The Offer and Its Contrasts

The letter describes the two correspondents through a series of paired differences: beautiful and hideous, duchess and player, highest and lowest. It does not attempt to erase the difference in rank or conceal Gwynplaine’s public identity. Instead, it names those divisions and sets the Duchess’s desire against them. The invitation thus reaches him not as a promise of ordinary equality, but as an offer whose force depends on the contrast between the life she inhabits and the life he leads.

That appeal has particular significance because Gwynplaine’s face already governs how other people respond to him. His fixed expression provokes laughter even when he does not feel amused; the effect belongs to his face, not to his inward state. On the fairground platform, spectators laugh at him, then turn away, and women recoil from his appearance. The letter’s language places this publicly exposed performer in a new relation to a woman of high rank: the Duchess addresses him as an object of desire, yet does so by explicitly naming the social and bodily difference that ordinarily separates them. The paper records a private approach where his face usually produces an involuntary public reaction.

Reading and Refusal

After reading the letter, Gwynplaine keeps it with him until he is reunited with Dea. Their reunion gathers the people and animals of their shared household around them: Ursus sits between them, Homo is at their feet, while Fibi and Vinos wait outside. At breakfast in the centre compartment, Gwynplaine pours tea for Dea as they sit opposite one another with their knees touching. The letter remains in his possession during this intimate domestic scene, but he does not disclose its contents to her.

When Dea sneezes, smoke rises from the lamp and a piece of paper falls into its ashes. Gwynplaine has just burned the Duchess’s letter. He answers Dea’s question by telling her that nothing has happened, and smiles. The disposal is decisive: rather than follow the appointment offered by the page, he destroys the message without making it part of his conversation with Dea. The scene connects his refusal to an ordinary shared breakfast, not to a public declaration. The letter’s fate is visible in the smoke and ashes, while its contents remain unknown to Dea in that moment.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The letter’s role is brief but sharply structured. First it is a mysterious paper placed in Gwynplaine’s hand; then a sealed, addressed object examined under a lamp; then a written appeal that proposes a meeting; finally, it is reduced to ashes beside Dea. Each change in its physical status marks a change in the possibilities it presents. Its concealed delivery creates uncertainty, its opening discloses the Duchess’s offer, and its destruction closes the path the page has laid out.

The later speech Gwynplaine delivers in the House of Lords gives the letter’s contrasts a broader social resonance, though the letter itself does not cause that speech. There, Gwynplaine argues that his imposed laughter expresses torment and that his body can stand for a people deformed by its rulers. Read beside this public account of his face, the letter’s opposition between a duchess and a player acquires an irony: the aristocratic world can single him out for private desire while the same world is publicly implicated in the power that made his face a mask. The object does not resolve that contradiction. Its brief life instead exposes the distance between being desired as an exceptional figure and being accepted as a person, while Gwynplaine’s decision to burn it places his bond with Dea above the invitation it carries.