Preservation of the male sea monster’s body

The preservation of the male sea monster’s body is a hurried and imperfect attempt to keep a dead creature available for royal dissection. Hauled to the Fountain of Apollo under ice, then covered with sawdust and packed again while the planned examination is delayed, the body changes from a specimen to be studied into contested evidence. Its decay sets a practical limit on inquiry, while its remains later enter the argument over whether sea people belong to the category of monsters at all.

Transport and Immediate Preservation

After Yves de la Croix’s capture of two sea monsters, the male has died resisting, while the female remains alive. The dead creature is loaded into a wagon filled with ice, apart from the baggage in another wagon. Dirty, ragged boys help lift the creature and the shrouded figure, unafraid of the living monster’s groans. For Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, the division is stark: Yves has caught one creature for the King and another for his own study, but only the dead one can be treated as a conventional specimen.

At the Fountain of Apollo, the body and the live creature divide Yves’s attention. Before leaving, he orders that the specimen not be moved until he returns. Marie-Josèphe takes charge of the workers and directs them to cover the bundle with ice, then cover the ice with sawdust, while the others fetch Yves’s equipment. The handling is careful because the specimen reeks of preserving spirits and corruption. The workers breathe in short, unhappy gasps and glance fearfully toward Yves and the groaning living sea monster; Marie-Josèphe, accustomed to the smell from years of assisting her brother’s experiments, is not troubled by it.

The urgency is more than an effect of the odor. Marie-Josèphe recognizes that Yves must dissect the body quickly or be left with rotten flesh and a skeleton. When she returns to the tent, the specimen lies beneath melting ice, and water runs down the legs of the dissection table into a puddle flecked with sawdust. She arranges Yves’s instruments and readies paper on her drawing box, preparing to record the examination even as the physical conditions threaten to overtake it.

Dissection Delayed

Yves publicly describes a planned gross dissection, beginning with the sea monster’s skin, fascia, and muscles. The examination is not simply private research: it takes place before the King and court, amid the odors of preserving fluid and flesh close to rotting. The living sea monster’s song ceases when Yves pulls aside the canvas covering the dead male. His announced procedure thus brings together two forms of attention: the court’s inspection of a displayed body and the investigator’s intended passage through its anatomy.

That work is curtailed when Louis XIV dictates the dissection’s progress. After the body has been flayed, Yves picks a long shard of glass from the laboratory table, throws it into a garbage bucket, and folds the canvas over the remains. The gesture closes the examination for the moment; he then has ice packed around the specimen again. Count Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien remarks that the dissection might proceed in two or three days, but not that day, because Louis XIV is welcoming the Pope. The delay turns the preservation effort into a race against a timetable set not by the body’s condition but by court ceremony and royal authority.

The body’s preparation therefore remains provisional. Ice and sawdust can slow deterioration, and preserving spirits are already part of the handling, but the melting layer shows that the method does not suspend time. Marie-Josèphe’s concern about what will remain to dissect is borne out by the need to interrupt and re-cover the flayed specimen. The body is kept for possible further study, yet the evidence establishes neither that the dissection resumes on schedule nor that preservation succeeds indefinitely.

Remains as Evidence in a Dispute over Personhood

Although the body is preserved for anatomical study, its remains acquire another purpose when Marie-Josèphe argues that the surviving sea woman is intelligent and human. She tells Louis XIV that she understands the woman and that the woman understands her. When he challenges her to account for what the being is if not a monster, Marie-Josèphe insists on the woman’s intelligence and humanity; Yves rejects that conclusion and compares her intelligence to a parrot’s.

Marie-Josèphe points to the dead mate’s skull, bones, and hands, urging the King to look at them and listen to the sea woman. In this appeal the preserved body becomes more than a specimen: its anatomy is offered alongside the living woman’s speech as evidence against an easy distinction between human and monstrous. The body cannot speak for itself, and its remains do not settle the question, but they allow Marie-Josèphe to place the dead male within the same inquiry as the woman whose understanding she has experienced.

Count Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien supports a test based on proof, arguing that the creature’s status has changed before and that the question is whether she speaks a human language. Louis XIV agrees to let Marie-Josèphe try to demonstrate her claim. The Pope raises a different standard, asking whether she has discussed souls or Christian faith with the creature or converted her. The preserved male body thus sits at the intersection of competing authorities: anatomical observation, communication, royal judgment, and religious doctrine. Its material presence can strengthen an argument, but the dispute shows that classification depends on what different authorities accept as evidence.

Significance and Limits

Preservation keeps the male sea monster physically available after death, first for dissection and later for comparison with the living sea woman. That availability matters because the court’s treatment of sea people depends on how they are classified: a body designated a specimen may be cut open, while the same remains can also be invoked to question whether the category of monster is justified. Yet preservation does not grant the dead creature a voice or protect it from royal control. Louis XIV can determine when the dissection proceeds, and the examination is folded beneath the demands of ceremony.

The contrast with the female sea monster sharpens the body’s significance. Yves describes the male as having resisted to death and the female as surviving, while Marie-Josèphe’s later argument depends on the living woman’s ability to understand and communicate. The dead male supplies bones and anatomy; the living woman supplies an answer to those who would deny her intelligence. Ice, sawdust, and canvas preserve the remains long enough for that comparison, but not beyond decay or power. The body’s preservation is therefore both practical and political: it prolongs scientific access to a dead sea person while making the limits of that access visible.