In the scene following the King's demand that Hop-Frog drink a goblet of wine, the narrator uses both hyperbole to describe the king's anger and a simile that compares Trippetta to a dead body. Despite the fact that Hop-Frog reacts badly to alcohol, the king demands that he drink yet another glass:
"Here, drink this!" and he poured out another goblet full and offered it to the cripple, who merely gazed at it, gasping for breath. “Drink, I say!” shouted the monster, “or by the fiends—” The dwarf hesitated. The king grew purple with rage. The courtiers smirked. Trippetta, pale as a corpse, advanced to the monarch’s seat, and, falling on her knees before him, implored him to spare her friend.
After the first glass of wine, Hop-Frog is left confused and distressed, which the king interprets as sulky behavior. The enraged king is described by the narrator as “purple with rage,” a conventional hyperbole that implies that the king is so angry that the blood rushing to his head has left him looking purple. As Trippetta attempts to defend Hop-Frog, she is described by the narrator as being “pale as a corpse,” a simile that compares her, in her nervousness, to a dead body. The narrator, then, suggests that she has gone pale with fear while confronting the monarch, speaking both to her fear of him but also to her bravery in this moment.
