Paris

Paris functions as both a destination beyond Versailles and a place where private lives and intellectual work continue outside the King’s immediate presence. The novel rarely develops it as a setting in its own right; instead, roads, departures, and a hidden library make the city a measure of who can move freely, who must leave, and what survives beyond courtly display.

A city seen from Versailles

Paris enters the court’s conversation as a place of creative and domestic life. Louis XIV contrasts Marie-Josèphe’s presence at court with Mlle de la Guerre’s absence in Paris: the composer is there with her husband, expecting a child and producing an opera. The contrast joins artistic work to circumstances unavailable to Marie-Josèphe in that moment. Louis XIV suggests that the opera might be dedicated to him, placing even an absent Parisian artist within the orbit of royal recognition. Paris is thus not simply the opposite of court. It is a place where artistic achievement can develop away from the King, though the King still imagines a dedication as a link between the work and his authority.

The city’s proximity is also registered through the Avenue de Paris, a route between Versailles and the world beyond its gardens. Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, travels along it in a carriage toward the Marble Courtyard, passing visitors waiting to enter the gardens. His carriage follows the route Pope Innocent has taken. The destination is still the royal residence, but the approach distinguishes Lucien from ordinary visitors: Louis XIV allows few carriages into the forecourt, and Lucien understands this privilege as a public sign of the King’s esteem. He uses the carriage more often than necessity requires, making access visible rather than keeping the favor private. The road therefore carries both people and evidence of rank.

Access, freedom, and departure

A later carriage scene makes the same route signify unequal freedom. Monsieur’s gilt-bright carriage, lit by lanterns, crosses the cobbles, passes through the gateway to the Place d’Armes, and disappears down the Avenue de Paris. Marie-Josèphe asks whether she is going to Paris with him. Her question reveals a longing to see the city and her awareness that men possess a freedom of movement she does not. She immediately judges her own curiosity as ill-bred and impertinent, so the desired journey becomes a reminder of the restraint imposed on her even before she can make it. Lucien answers that he is going home; Paris is a real destination for him, while for Marie-Josèphe it remains a place she wants to reach.

Haleed’s planned departure gives Paris a different role: it is one stage in leaving the country altogether. At Versailles, she tells Marie-Josèphe that she is leaving Versailles, then Paris, then France, and intends to change out of her clothes before going. The sequence turns the capital into a threshold between the court and a life elsewhere, not a final refuge. Marie-Josèphe’s distress is bound to the unfinished manumission parchment: she has not managed to get Yves to sign it, while Haleed takes the document and says he will sign. Paris is therefore connected to a departure whose practical and personal conditions remain unsettled in this scene.

Yves’s hidden library

The epilogue places Yves de la Croix in Paris on Midwinter Night, walking through sleet and darkness to his tiny house. Inside, he lights a candle, opens a secret door, and enters a library. The concealed room gives the city an intimate dimension distinct from the public routes and courtly privileges associated with it elsewhere. Yves opens his satchel and unwraps his latest discovery from oiled silk: an illuminated manuscript showing sea people leaping and playing amid cerulean waves and gold sunlight.

He closes the manuscript carefully and sets it beside Marie-Josèphe’s opera score, now bound in calfskin, M. Boursin’s cookbook, and a sheaf of Madame’s letters. The arrangement brings together different forms of work and memory in a room hidden from ordinary view. The score links Yves’s Paris life to his sister’s creative work; the letters preserve another connection to court; and the new manuscript records sea people in vivid images. Paris becomes the place where Yves can keep and study what the court’s public life does not contain. Its final image is not a royal procession or a formal entrance, but a small, private act of preservation in a concealed library.