King Candaules

Candaules, king of Lydia, is so proud of his wife's beauty that he wants the world to know it, and arranges for his favourite guard Gyges to see her. Gautier's version of the old Greek story of a king, a queen and the man who saw too much. By Théophile Gautier (1844), translated by Lafcadio Hearn. A public-domain classic, from One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances.

Content warnings: Sexual content · Death

🎧 Audio coming soon. This story is being read aloud now.

How it begins Five hundred years before the Trojan war, and seventeen hundred and fifteen years before our own era, there was a grand festival at Sardes. King Candaules was going to marry. The people were affected with that sort of pleasurable interest and aimless emotion wherewith any royal event inspires the masses, even though it in no wise concerns them, and transpires in superior spheres of life which they can never hope to reach.As soon as Phœbus-Apollo, standing in his quadriga, had gilded to saffron the summits of fertile Mount Tmolus with his rays, the good people of Sardes were all astir, going and coming, mounting or descending the marble stairways leading from the city to the waters of the Pactolus, that opulent river whose sands Midas filled with tiny sparks of gold when he bathed in its stream. One would have supposed that each one of these good citizens was himself about to marry, so solemn and important was the demeanor of all. Keep reading →

Chapters

1. 1Chapter I20 min · 9 Nov
2. 2Chapter II20 min · 9 Nov
3. 3Chapter III19 min · 9 Nov
4. 4Chapter IV15 min · 9 Nov
5. 5Chapter V15 min · 9 Nov

⚑ Report this story