Domenico Scarlatti

Domenico Scarlatti is a young harpsichordist among the musicians gathered at Versailles for the King’s celebration. His brief appearances reveal a musician already capable of intricate playing and clear judgment, but still a child: he imagines growing up to marry Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, while his music gives him a way to persist when M. Coupillet belittles him.

Identity and Musical Talent

Domenico sits alone at the harpsichord when Marie-Josèphe finds him in the musicians’ room. She waits as he finishes a passage with a cascade of embellishments; afterward, he gazes out at the day and fingers variations with one hand. His sigh and the fact that he is not allowed to rise for two hours place his musicianship within a tightly managed court routine, even as his playing shows nimbleness and invention.

The King’s musicians have gathered at Versailles for the celebration, and Marie-Josèphe brings in the score of the King’s cantata. Domenico pages through it, moves his head to its rhythms, hums occasional notes, and fingers along with his free hand. His response is not mere politeness: he says the new music is much better than what Marie-Josèphe played at Saint-Cyr Girls’ School, distinguishing his genuine musical judgment from the praise he had previously offered her.

Marie-Josèphe and His Future Fantasy

Domenico admits that he had called Marie-Josèphe’s earlier songs pretty because he wanted her to like him and marry him when he grew up. His candor makes the exchange both tender and comic: he speaks of marriage as a future possibility, while Marie-Josèphe recognizes that their stations are impossibly distant and deflects the proposal by saying she will be an old lady before he is ready. She does not humiliate him with the full explanation. Instead, she responds gently to a child whose musical discernment has outpaced his understanding of social barriers.

His own estimate of that future is concrete: he asks whether he will be able to play whatever he likes in two years, when he will be eight. The exchange frames him as a child whose ambitions—musical freedom and marriage alike—are vivid but constrained by age and circumstance. Marie-Josèphe’s reassurance that no one could stop him from playing whatever he liked when he was older offers encouragement without promising the future he wants with her.

Conflict with M. Coupillet

When M. Coupillet condemns a piece and waves his baton toward Domenico, the boy does not stop playing. Coupillet invokes the genius of Signor Alessandro Scarlatti and treats the music Domenico is performing as a failed attempt to match him; the passage identifies that piece as one Coupillet takes to be his father’s. Marie-Josèphe protests that Signor Scarlatti admired it, while she stoops to gather the rumpled sheets.

Domenico’s shoulders shake with laughter, but his hands never falter. The contrast between his laughter and his uninterrupted playing is his most decisive response to the insult: he keeps the music sounding while the adult tries to define its worth. The scene brings together the qualities shown elsewhere in miniature—technical control, a lively response to music, and a willingness to meet discouragement without surrendering the performance.