Marie-Josèphe de la Croix and Pope Innocent: Clash of Positions

Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s conflict with Pope Innocent is a struggle over authority: whether the sea woman Sherzad can be heard as a truthful person, whether evidence may challenge religious classification, and whether a woman may speak and act on her own moral judgment. Pope Innocent seeks to reserve the right to determine truth and prescribe obedience; Marie-Josèphe answers by defending Sherzad, appealing to evidence, and treating the prospect of her death as a matter of conscience.

The dispute over evidence and classification

The conflict develops against a wider pattern of people dismissing Marie-Josèphe’s knowledge. During the examination of the male sea monster, scholars ridicule her claim that the creature can breathe underwater and mistake her for someone whose mind has been unsettled by study. She persists in Latin, stating that its lungs contain an anomalous lobe unique to the sea people. Yves de la Croix rejects her contribution, and she recognizes that he fears she will disclose what he believes to be a secret. This episode is not an argument with Pope Innocent, but it establishes the evidentiary climate in which Marie-Josèphe’s claims are routinely treated as improper or untrustworthy.

When the question of the sea woman’s status reaches the court, Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, argues that Marie-Josèphe has proved the sea monster understands her. Pope Innocent dismisses that as insufficient: he compares the claim to the possibility that a cat understands its owner. Lucien then turns to the Church’s own history, arguing that beings once classified as beasts had been called demons, and that a status altered once might be altered again. The issue, he says, is whether the creature speaks a human language; proof, rather than assumption, should decide the matter. Pope Innocent counters that the earlier classifications were not mistakes but cases of demonic possession. Their exchange frames Marie-Josèphe’s case as a conflict between inherited religious judgment and a testable claim about the sea woman’s capacities.

Sherzad’s testimony and Marie-Josèphe’s defense

Pope Innocent’s disagreement with Marie-Josèphe becomes direct when he instructs her to study scripture rather than what he regards as demonic utterances. Marie-Josèphe rejects the premise that Sherzad is lying and insists that her testimony is true. Pope Innocent tells her that determining truth is not her responsibility, yet his response also acknowledges that Sherzad has disclosed ugly truths and that those truths are true. The exchange exposes a central tension: the Pope recognizes the truth of what has been said while denying Marie-Josèphe the authority to judge it for herself.

Marie-Josèphe answers with both theological and ethical arguments. She insists that Sherzad has a soul and is a woman, and that killing her would therefore be a mortal sin. Pope Innocent rebukes her for lecturing him on sin. His response does not resolve the argument; it sharpens the contrast between his office’s authority to define doctrine and Marie-Josèphe’s claim that religious judgment must answer to the person whose life is at stake.

Her insistence is practical as well as argumentative. When Sherzad becomes alarmed and accuses those around her of lying, Marie-Josèphe reassures her, and Sherzad calms beneath her hands. This scene does not include Pope Innocent, but it gives concrete form to what Marie-Josèphe is defending: a relationship of trust with a captive being who can respond to care and fear. Her advocacy is grounded not only in disputed classification but in her experience of Sherzad as someone to whom she owes attention and protection.

Gender, obedience, and moral agency

Pope Innocent’s objections concern not only the authority of Sherzad’s testimony but also the authority of the woman defending it. He invokes the expectation that women remain silent and obedient, and later insists that women must be submissive, obedient, and quiet as a matter of God’s will. Marie-Josèphe’s continued speech directly challenges that prescription. She does not accept silence as proof of piety or obedience as a substitute for examining what Sherzad has said.

Her appeal to the Pope’s own reputation for correcting errors in the Church is a pointed use of his authority against his refusal to act. She asks him to save Sherzad by invoking his record of stopping corruption. When he resists, Marie-Josèphe continues to press him, suggesting that he could teach Sherzad about everlasting life. Pope Innocent calls her meddling and again demands submission and quiet. The disagreement therefore turns on more than a single theological question: he treats her intervention as a breach of her proper place, while she treats speaking up as necessary to prevent an injustice.

Limits of the conflict and its significance

The relation is not defined by Pope Innocent alone. Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, supports Marie-Josèphe’s right to be heard before the King, arguing that her claim should be tested rather than dismissed. Later, when Pope Innocent again rebukes her, Lucien makes an angry gesture and then tells the Pope that God made Marie-Josèphe audacious and brave. His defense gives her conduct a different religious interpretation: what the Pope labels disobedience can also be understood as a quality of the person she was made to be.

Marie-Josèphe also draws a boundary around claims that might exploit Sherzad. When the question of immortality arises, she tells Pope Innocent that Sherzad cannot grant it and that only God can. This distinguishes her defense of Sherzad from any promise that the sea woman can provide supernatural power. In the same confrontation, Yves de la Croix admits that he lied about the sea monster’s flesh having such power and that he had conducted no tests. The admission reinforces Marie-Josèphe’s insistence on separating evidence from assertion, even as Pope Innocent continues to control the terms of the debate.

The conflict remains unresolved in the cited encounters. Pope Innocent retains the authority to rebuke Marie-Josèphe and to demand obedience, but he cannot make her accept his account of Sherzad or silence her concern for the sea woman’s life. Their opposition gives the novel’s dispute over religious authority a personal and ethical form: official classification speaks from institutional power, while Marie-Josèphe’s claims arise from observation, conversation, and responsibility toward the being whom others would treat as a demon or creature.