# Master Flea — Character guide

> Key figures in Master Flea by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

- [Peregrine Tyss](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/peregrine_tyss.md): Peregrine Tyss lives quietly on his inheritance, avoiding society until Master Flea fixes a microscopic glass in his eye and turns every casual greeting into a broadcast of hidden greed and vanity. The gift exposes how t
- [George Pepusch](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/george_pepusch.md): Pepusch is the one man in Frankfurt who tells Leeuwenhoek the truth to his face, and the one who loves Dörtje Elverdink with a passion that overrides caution and friendship alike. When Leeuwenhoek's trained fleas turn ou
- [Master Flea](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/master_flea.md): Master Flea narrates his own fall: once a free sovereign skipping kisses onto the bosom of the beautiful Gamaheh, he was captured by Leeuwenhoek, chained, and forced to watch his subjects drilled into tailors, professors
- [Antonie van Leeuwenhoek](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/antonie_van_leeuwenhoek.md): Leeuwenhoek has built a career on showing cultivated fleas to paying audiences, dressing them as soldiers and statesmen and pocketing the proceeds. When his vassals desert him mid-performance and his tricks collapse into
- [Princess Gamaheh](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/princess_gamaheh.md): Gamaheh is the beloved at the center of Master Flea's own history: a beauty whose neck and bosom he haunted as a devoted suitor, and whose fate he failed to prevent when the Leech-Prince and two interfering fools interve
- [King Sekakis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/king_sekakis.md): King Sekakis belongs to the enchanted prehistory that Master Flea recounts: a ruler whose infatuation with Gamaheh sets the tragedy in motion when the Leech-Prince strikes and the Thistle Zeherit and Genius Thetel blunde
- [Alina](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/alina.md): Within the Tyss household she is the trusted old retainer, the one who knows where everything is kept and who has watched her master's nephew Peregrine grow from a brooding recluse into a man suddenly keeping strange com
- [Mr. Swammer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/mr_swammer.md): Swammer belongs to the small circle of curious, half-scholarly figures surrounding Peregrine Tyss, and his chambers function as a threshold between respectable Frankfurt society and something far stranger. He is the guar
- [Jan Swammerdam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/jan_swammerdam.md): Swammerdam stands at the centre of the social world Peregrine both desires and dreads, a naturalist whose name carries the weight of real scientific obsession and whose rooms hold the alluring Dörtje Elverdink. Master Fl
- [Dörtje Elverdink](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/dortje_elverdink.md): Dörtje is the beautiful young woman lodged in Swammerdam's chambers, whose silver voice and easy affection make her the fixed point of Peregrine's desire and the chief obstacle to his resolutions. Master Flea warns that 
- [Rose Lemmerhirt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/rose_lemmerhirt.md): A female character, likely connected to the Tyss or Pepusch circle.
- [The Thistle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/the_thistle.md): A magical thistle that is the transformed form of King Sekakis or a related entity.
- [The Douanier](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/the_douanier.md): A customs officer character, possibly a leech or associated with leeches.
- [Thetel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/thetel.md): A genius or spirit character appearing in the narrative.
- [The Leech-Prince](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters/the_leech_prince.md): A prince who is a leech, involved in the thistle's story.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/master_flea_se/characters