Master Flea

Written in 1822, in the last year of Hoffmann’s life, this comic fairy tale drops the shy, wealthy bachelor Peregrinus Tyss into a tangle of magic and mistaken identity in his native Frankfurt. He gives shelter to the beguiling Doertje Elverdink, who is really Princess Gamaheh of Famagusta, and strikes a bargain with Master Flea himself, king of the fleas, who lends him a magic lens for seeing into other people’s thoughts. What follows blends romance, absurdity, and sharp social mischief. Hoffmann worked into it a savage lampoon of a real Prussian official and the paranoid hunt for subversives, and the censors cut those pages before the book could appear. This edition restores the story for modern readers, available as a free PDF and EPUB.