The fire in the empress's apartment

The fire in the empress's apartment is a pivotal event in Gulliver's Travels that transforms Gulliver's status from celebrated hero to condemned traitor, as his unorthodox method of extinguishing the blaze—urinating on the palace—violates a fundamental law against touching the royal person and incurs the empress's lasting enmity, ultimately catalyzing the conspiracy that forces his flight from Lilliput.

Causes and Background

Gulliver had recently been created a nardac, the highest title of honor in Lilliput, for his capture of the Blefuscu fleet. Yet his refusal to help the Emperor of Lilliput reduce Blefuscu to a province had already sown discord at court. Flimnap, the lord high treasurer, had represented to the emperor the low condition of the treasury, claiming that Gulliver had cost his majesty above a million and a half of sprugs and advising that the emperor take the first fair occasion of dismissing him. The political atmosphere was thus charged with suspicion and resentment when, at midnight, Gulliver was alarmed by the cries of many hundred people at his door, with the word burglum repeated incessantly.

What Happens

Several of the emperor's court made their way through the crowd and entreated Gulliver to come immediately to the palace, where her imperial majesty's apartment was on fire, by the carelessness of a maid of honor who fell asleep while reading a romance. Gulliver got up in an instant, and orders being given to clear the way before him, and it being a moonshine night, he made a shift to get to the palace without trampling on any of the people. He found that the Lilliputians had already applied ladders to the walls of the apartment and were well provided with buckets, but the water was at some distance. These buckets were about the size of a large thimble, and the poor people supplied him with them as fast as they could, but the flame was so violent that they did little good. Gulliver might easily have stifled the fire with his coat, which he unfortunately left behind him for haste, coming away only in his leathern jerkin. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable, and this magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt down to the ground if, by a presence of mind unusual to him, he had not suddenly thought of an expedient by which in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction. The expedient was to urinate on the flames, a method that proved effective but deeply offensive to Lilliputian sensibilities.

Consequences and Aftermath

Gulliver returned to his house without waiting to congratulate the emperor, because although he had done a very eminent piece of service, he could not tell how his majesty might resent the manner by which he had performed it. By the fundamental laws of the realm, it was capital in any man, of what quality soever, to even touch the empress or the royal princesses without invitation. Gulliver was a little comforted by a message from his majesty that he would give orders to the grand justiciary for passing his pardon in form, which, however, he could not obtain. He was privately assured that the empress, conceiving the greatest abhorrence of him, and in the presence of her chief confidants, could not forbear vowing revenge. This enmity proved decisive. When the conspiracy against Gulliver was later formed, Skyrris Bolgolam, the high admiral, who was a creature of the empress, was perpetually instigated by her majesty to insist upon Gulliver's death, she having borne perpetual malice against him on account of that illegal method he took to remove her and her children the night of the fire. The fire thus became the personal grievance that hardened the empress against Gulliver and fueled the impeachment that led to his escape from Lilliput. The event also illustrates the arbitrary and self-serving nature of Lilliputian justice, where a service that saved the palace was punished as a crime because it violated a technical law, and where the monarch's mercy was proclaimed even as a cruel sentence was being prepared.