“Hop-Frog” is first and foremost a tale about revenge, and fittingly, the mood of the story is bitter and angry. Though Hop-Frog has suffered various indignities at the hands of the king and his counselors, it is their disrespectful behavior towards the kind and sympathetic Trippetta that rouses his fury. At the end of the story, the narration underscores this bitter mood as Hop-Frog explains his murderous actions and motivations:
At length the flames, suddenly increasing in virulence, forced the jester to climb higher up the chain, to be out of their reach; and, as he made this movement, the crowd again sank, for a brief instant, into silence. The dwarf seized his opportunity, and once more spoke: “I now see distinctly,” he said, “what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors,—a king who does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl, and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest.”
With mocking verbal irony, Hop-Frog pretends that he does not already know the identities of the “maskers” in the gorilla costumes, and he states that they are none other than the most powerful statesmen in the kingdom as if he is learning this alongside the audience. He angrily incriminates them in the mistreatment of Trippetta, accusing the king and his men of cruelty and cowardice. There is a clear sense of ironic bitterness in his claim that this shocking act of revenge is his “last jest” or final joke at court.
