“Erase the existence of the sea monsters from our conscience—and from our posterity”

The command to erase the sea monsters from memory is an order not merely to destroy evidence, but to deny the creatures a place in the past and in the future. Its scope reaches from chronicles and broadsheets to paintings, myths, and private recollection. Yves de la Croix carries out the immediate act of destruction, but the secret collection he assembles later preserves images and objects the decree was meant to make disappear.

The Order and Its Scope

The order is delivered amid an attempt to suppress the record of Carrousel week. The speaker tears pages from the current volume of M. de Dangeau’s journal and declares, “This week of Carrousel must vanish utterly.” He then throws down broadsheets containing the Stories of Sherzad. These actions place the command within a systematic effort: the celebration’s written record and the stories of the sea people are both targets, not incidental casualties of a broader purge.

The speaker makes the intended reach explicit: “Every painting, every myth, every memory of the creatures. The decree of the Church that raised them from demons to beasts.” The list crosses different kinds of evidence and remembrance. A journal can document an event; a broadsheet can circulate a story; a painting can keep an image visible; a myth or memory can carry meaning beyond any single document. The reference to the Church’s decree adds a further target: even the official religious reclassification of the sea people must be erased. The order seeks to remove both the creatures and the changing account of what they are.

Its final formulation, “You will erase the existence of the sea monsters from our conscience. And from our posterity. You will do as you know you should,” makes the command at once moral and temporal. “Conscience” makes the present community responsible for what it chooses to remember; “posterity” extends that responsibility to people not yet born. The divided cadence—first conscience, then posterity—turns forgetting into a demand made across generations. Yves is not asked simply to destroy a particular document. He is commanded to help ensure that later readers will have no record by which to know what was destroyed.

The Burning of the Decree

The command itself arrives as a physical object: a roll of vellum inscribed in black ink and illuminated with gold and scarlet. Its formal, carefully colored surface contrasts with what Yves does to it. He bows his head, unrolls the vellum, and holds it to a candle flame. It smokes, contorts, and burns; Yves drops the ashes into an Aztec dish with blistered fingers. The scene makes erasure tangible, bringing an abstract demand about memory down to the damaged hand, the burning material, and the residue left behind.

The action is also sharply double-edged. Yves destroys the written instrument that commands the disappearance of the sea monsters, but he does so by obeying its recipient’s instruction. His bowed head and the burning vellum show compliance in action; they do not, on their own, establish inward agreement. The later evidence of his private collecting complicates any simple reading of this scene as complete submission. The decree’s destruction is immediate and visible, while the question of what Yves will do with the history it seeks to suppress remains open.

The Secret Counter-Archive

On Midwinter Night in Paris, Yves returns through sleet and darkness to his tiny house, lights a candle, opens a secret door, and enters his library. There he unwraps an illuminated manuscript showing sea people leaping and playing amid cerulean waves and gold sunlight. Rather than destroying such an image, he admires it, closes the book carefully, and places it on a shelf. The manuscript offers a vivid counter-image to the decree: the sea people appear not as erased creatures but as a people represented in color and motion.

The shelf holds more than this one manuscript. Beside it are Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s exquisite opera score, bound in calfskin, M. Boursin’s cookbook, and Madame’s letters. Candlelight also catches a sea monster medal and frames containing Marie-Josèphe’s drawings of Sherzad and the male sea monster, both haloed with scraps of gilt and broken glass. Nearby, the male sea monster’s skeleton lies in an ebony reliquary inlaid with mother-of-pearl. These objects preserve different kinds of trace: writing, music, correspondence, images, a commemorative medal, and a body preserved as a skeleton. Their variety answers the order’s own catalogue of what must be removed.

Secrecy, Memory, and the Future

Yves’s thought supplies the condition under which this collection survives: “For now, I must protect the sea people with secrecy, Yves thought. For now. But not forever.” Secrecy is both a refuge for the surviving record and a limit on its public reach. The manuscript and other objects remain protected in a hidden library, not restored to public circulation. Yet the final qualification, “But not forever,” distinguishes temporary concealment from permanent erasure. The archive preserves the possibility that the sea people’s history may become known again, without claiming that this has already happened.

The expression’s central tension lies between a command made absolute in its wording and a history that proves harder to eliminate in practice. The order names conscience and posterity as its intended territory; Yves’s collection shelters evidence against that future. The scene does not show the records being restored to the public or the command being formally reversed. Instead, it ends with the materials surviving in secret and with Yves’s protection explicitly provisional. Erasure has been attempted, and the attempt has acquired a counter-record.