Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is a powerful religious authority in the novel, shaping what may be taught, created, and recognized as human. Its position is not static: through Pope Innocent, it first condemns Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s music and rejects her defense of the sea woman, then acknowledges that the sea people are people and orders the destruction of records about them. This reversal does not undo the Church’s earlier persecution. Instead, it makes the institution’s final act a struggle over who may preserve the past.

Authority and Religious Discipline

The Church’s authority appears both as formal teaching and as personal direction from Pope Innocent. When Marie-Josèphe’s composition is criticized, Innocent invokes the Church’s rule that women should remain silent. Marie-Josèphe distinguishes religious observance from a ban on women’s music more broadly, but Innocent insists that the restriction applies at all times and describes music as injurious to her modesty. He urges Louis XIV to censor what he considers pagan excess. The scene shows how religious discipline reaches beyond worship into artistic practice, and how a woman’s creative work can be treated as a matter for institutional control.

Innocent’s rebuke unsettles Marie-Josèphe in part because she regards him as a holy man, unlike predecessors she believes were corrupt. She had understood the convent’s silence as misguided, believing that God would not require women to live without expression; after Innocent’s condemnation, she wonders whether the sisters had been closer to the truth. The Church’s authority therefore operates not only through rules but through a believer’s uncertainty about her own judgment. The rebuke turns artistic censure into a crisis of conscience.

The Church’s reach also appears in Innocent’s warning to Yves de la Croix. He points to the dangers surrounding Louis XIV’s court, naming debauchery, adultery, bastardy, heresy, atheists, and monsters among its perceived threats. Yves answers that his vows and faith protect him, but admits that many months have passed since he last said Mass or heard confession. Innocent replies that Yves’s vows require attention. The exchange presents religious authority as pastoral admonition as well as condemnation: Innocent worries about the spiritual condition of both Yves and his sister, while demanding that Yves renew his observance.

Moral Boundaries and Unequal Judgment

The Church’s moral teachings define conduct as well as belief. In conversation with Lucien de Chrétien, Marie-Josèphe learns that the Church forbids physical love between men or between women. She is surprised that such love might be pursued for passion or pleasure rather than children. The exchange establishes the Church’s prohibition while also showing the limits of Marie-Josèphe’s prior knowledge: she has little understanding of sexual matters and has been taught that she should not possess such knowledge.

The novel places this doctrine beside the protection afforded to powerful men at court. Madame de Maintenon condemns Monsieur’s relationship with the Chevalier de Lorraine and declares that, without royal protection, both men might be burned. Lucien likewise explains that the protection of Louis XIV shields them from that danger. The Church’s prohibition thus carries potentially severe consequences, but its enforcement is entangled with rank and royal favor. Religious authority is forceful in principle, yet the court can alter what happens to those subject to its judgments.

In another confrontation, Pope Innocent tells Marie-Josèphe that she should not undertake moral philosophy because women’s minds are unsuited to it, suggesting instead that she pursue natural philosophy or cooking. When she protests that natural philosophy proves the sea woman is human, the exchange reveals a conflict between her evidence-based claim and the Church’s insistence on limits to women’s intellectual authority. Innocent’s dismissal does not answer her argument; it attempts to deny her standing to make it.

The Sea People and the Church’s Changing Classification

The Church’s treatment of the sea people exposes the consequences of defining a community as less than human. Yves tells Pope Innocent that the sea people are nearly extinct because of the Church: instead of offering them the word of God, people tormented them as demons and preyed on them as cattle. His accusation links religious classification to persecution and exploitation. In this account, the Church’s failure was not simply mistaken belief; it helped make violence against the sea people seem permissible.

At the final confrontation, Marie-Josèphe insists that the sea monsters are people. Innocent agrees. Lucien is surprised that the Pope openly admits something so damaging to his own influence. The admission marks a striking change from the earlier exchanges in which the sea woman’s humanity is denied or subordinated to the claim that beasts exist for human use. It confirms the central dispute: whether the sea people are persons with a history and claims of their own, or creatures available for human judgment and use.

The Church’s position has already been formally altered: Innocent refers to its decree raising the sea people from demons to beasts. Yet this reclassification does not establish their full humanity. The distinction matters because it changes the category under which they are understood without repairing the treatment Yves describes. The Church’s successive labels—demons, then beasts, and finally people in Innocent’s admission—show that naming is consequential, but that a changed name alone cannot reverse persecution.

Penance, Censorship, and the Erasure of History

After acknowledging the Church’s part in the sea people’s suffering, Innocent does not call for their history to be recorded or their losses publicly repaired. He says that history must be corrected and makes Yves’s penance the search for every mention of the sea monsters. He demands the removal of every book, painting, myth, and memory, including records of the Church’s own decree reclassifying them. He gives Yves a written decree and orders him to erase the sea monsters’ existence from the conscience of the present and the memory of posterity.

The order is enacted through specific objects. Innocent burns Marie-Josèphe’s dissection sketches, while M. Boursin’s book, letters, and broadsheets connected with the Stories of Sherzad are swept into the campaign. Yves burns the vellum decree itself. These acts make censorship more than a general instruction: the written record, scientific drawing, correspondence, and circulating story are all treated as targets. The Church’s apparent correction of its earlier error becomes an effort to eliminate evidence that the error—and the people harmed by it—ever existed.

The novel’s ending places this imposed silence beside the sea people’s altered customs. They can no longer risk mating beneath the sun, because too few remain to withstand another assault. At the gathering described for the coming Midsummer, they plan to meet at sunset in the dark of the moon; they will not gather again for fourteen years under the same conditions. The Church’s erasure order and the sea people’s precautions are not identical actions, but they meet in their consequences: the history of a vulnerable people is threatened both by deliberate suppression and by the dangers that force their lives out of public view. The Catholic Church thus stands at the center of the novel’s conflict over religious authority, responsibility, and the power to decide what later generations will be allowed to remember.