# The King in Yellow — Character guide

> Key figures in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers.

- [Hastings](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/hastings.md): A newly arrived American in Paris whose sober decency makes him the perfect witness to his friends' unraveling, and to worse things waiting in the dark.
- [Clifford](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/clifford.md): A brilliant, harebrained painter whose Salon triumph and scandalous charm conceal how little he can resist anything — wine, women, or the wrong book.
- [J. Trent](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/trent.md): A sculptor of fierce discipline and stranger appetites, drawn to the forbidden text as a man is drawn to a cliff edge in the dark.
- [the girl](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/the_girl.md): A servant girl whose idle curiosity about a serpent-bound book costs her everything, and whose dazed eyes afterward see things no living woman should.
- [Selby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/selby.md): A fresh-faced newcomer to the Latin Quarter, still innocent enough to blush at a pretty girl and ask the one question everyone else knows better than to answer.
- [Mr. Wilde](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/mr_wilde.md): A soft-spoken, unsettling presence who reads dynasties into being and treats other men's minds as instruments to be tuned to his own key.
- [Tessie Reardon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/tessie.md): A model whose laughter and curiosity pull her toward the forbidden Yellow Sign, binding her fate to a painter already marked by the King in Yellow.
- [Boris Yvain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/boris_yvain.md): A painter whose easy friendship with the narrator and shared love for Geneviève becomes an unbearable weight the narrator can neither name nor shed.
- [Louis de Calvados](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/louis_de_calvados.md): A Parisian artist and friend whose charm and constancy anchor a circle of painters, even as one of them drifts toward ruinous obsession.
- [Richard Osborne Elliott](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/elliott.md): A blunt, loyal painter who scolds his friend Clifford for chasing women and dodging engagements, yet keeps covering for him anyway.
- [Constance Hawberk](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/constance.md): Hawberk's daughter, whose beauty and warmth draw the narrator's devotion even as his ambitions curdle into something far darker.
- [Geneviève](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/genevieve.md): Geneviève is the woman whose face the narrator of 'The Demoiselle d'Ys' longs for daily, whose hands he remembers on the spinet keys, whose marble likeness he kneels before in the sealed room. She is both flesh and stone
- [Sylvia Elven](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/sylvia.md): Sylvia Elven exists in 'The Street of the Four Winds' as a name on a garter, a town in Brittany, and a corpse laid out in lace and silk in a darkened chamber. The narrator, who once met Fate in Elven and found it unkind,
- [Rue Barrée](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/rue_barree.md): Rue Barrée is the elusive object of Clifford's, Elliott's, and Rowden's thwarted affections, a woman whose heart of ice they describe with rueful admiration. She buys pansies every spring but shakes her head at roses, an
- [Jack Scott](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/jack_scott.md): Jack Scott moves through the Paris stories as a friend to Hastings and the narrator, a painter whose letters arrive incoherent with prayers that his friend not leave the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile. He is the voice of
- [Severn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/severn.md): Severn belongs to the circle of painters and models around Clifford and Elliott, a man Clifford names alongside Selby as being 'like Hastings' — straitlaced, decent, a brick. He is the moral ballast in a Quarter where mo
- [II West](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/west.md): West is the narrator's companion in Boris's studio, the witness who listens fascinated as an Easter lily is plunged into a basin and drawn out as flawless marble, veined with palest azure. He is the curious, skeptical ey
- [Braith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/braith.md): Braith belongs to the small circle of friends and household intimates moving through the narrator's rooms, part of the comfortable social texture that the story slowly corrodes. The tension he embodies is the ordinary ma
- [Fallowby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/fallowby.md): An acquaintance in the Parisian stories.
- [Colette](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/colette.md): A young girl in The Street of the Four Winds.
- [Valentine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/valentine.md): A character in The Demoiselle d'Ys.
- [Cécile](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/cecile.md): A woman in The Street of the Four Winds.
- [Puss](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/puss.md): A cat in The Street of the Four Winds.
- [Hartman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/hartman.md): A character in The Repairer of Reputations.
- [Rowden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/rowden.md): An acquaintance in the Parisian stories.
- [Alec](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/alec.md): A friend in The Repairer of Reputations.
- [Hildred Castaigne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/hildred_castaigne.md): A relative of the narrator in The Repairer of Reputations.
- [Phantom of Truth](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/phantom_of_truth.md): An allegorical figure in The Phantom of Truth.
- [Countess Jeanne d'Ys](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/countess_jeanne_dys.md): A noblewoman in The Demoiselle d'Ys.
- [Mr. Castaigne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/mr_castaigne.md): The narrator's father in The Repairer of Reputations.
- [Raoul](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/raoul.md): A character in The Demoiselle d'Ys.
- [Edward Burkes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/edward_burkes.md): A friend in The Repairer of Reputations.
- [Hastur](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/hastur.md): A mysterious entity associated with the King in Yellow.
- [Madame Marotte](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/madame_marotte.md): A landlady in the Parisian stories.
- [Cassilda](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_king_in_yellow_se/characters/cassilda.md): A character from the play The King in Yellow.

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