Carrousel week at Versailles

Carrousel week at Versailles is a court celebration whose record becomes the object of a deliberate campaign of erasure. Its significance lies in the contrast between the public fascination with the sea creatures and the King’s later attempt to remove not only accounts of the celebration but also the stories, images, and religious ruling through which their existence had been recorded.

Courtly spectacle and the sea creatures

The surviving account characterizes the Carrousel as a self-indulgent celebration of the monsters. That description places the week within the court’s appetite for viewing and discussing the creatures, an appetite established in earlier scenes. When Yves de la Croix presents a dead specimen, courtiers crowd around to see it, even as its odor repels them. The workers later move another specimen cautiously beneath ice and sawdust because it reeks of preserving spirits and corruption. Such details set courtly display beside the creatures’ physical presence: they are at once objects of fascination and bodies that resist being made decorous spectacle.

The court’s handling of the creatures is also a dispute over who may describe them and how. Marie-Josèphe de la Croix objects when Yves excludes her from drawing a specimen, pointing out that she has drawn animal anatomy for him before. In another confrontation, after Louis XIV refuses to recognize the sea woman as a woman, he turns to M. Boursin for his plans. These episodes do not establish specific incidents during Carrousel week, but they show the arguments about knowledge, representation, and status surrounding the creatures whose celebration the week commemorates.

What the King orders removed

The account of the week ends in an act of state-directed destruction. Louis XIV demands that the Carrousel week vanish, and singles out pages from the current court journal documenting the celebration. The order reaches beyond one chronicle: he also casts down the broadsheets called the Stories of Sherzad. The celebration’s history is thus vulnerable in both official writing and popular printed narrative.

The King’s inventory of what must disappear extends further still, to paintings, myths, and memories of the creatures. He includes the Church decree that had raised them from the category of demons to that of beasts. Erasure therefore targets not just evidence that the court held a spectacular week, but also the cultural and religious record of how the sea people had been represented and classified.

Significance of the erased record

The objects named in the order reveal the breadth of the intended silence. A journal preserves the court’s account; broadsheets preserve Sherzad’s story; paintings and myths carry images and interpretations; the decree records an institutional change in classification. Treating all of them as material to be eliminated makes the celebration’s legacy part of the conflict. What had been displayed and narrated at Versailles could be recast as though it had never entered the court’s memory.

The episode consequently turns the Carrousel from a spectacle into a struggle over historical evidence. The King’s command does not merely suppress an embarrassing celebration: by targeting its records alongside stories and religious judgments about the sea people, it attempts to control the terms on which the creatures can be remembered.