Versailles brings together the novel’s most public displays of royal power and its most private forms of control. Its gardens turn the sea woman into a spectacle for visitors; its chateau holds prisoners, separates allies, and gathers the King’s advisers around treasure and contested evidence. The location’s significance lies in this double function: Versailles presents authority as magnificent and shared, even as access, movement, and judgment remain in the hands of the King.

Estate, spectacle, and royal image

At a court fête, a newly constructed island presents guests with an elaborate scene of gold arches, tall spires, flowers, candles, and chamber music. Its sudden appearance—having not existed the previous day—makes the estate seem capable of producing a world on command. Yet the spectacle has a less celebratory counterpart: galley rowers, restrained by chains, are made to propel the guests’ passage. The contrast places the labor behind royal display within the same setting as its apparent enchantment. The island is not simply a beautiful backdrop; it shows how courtly wonder depends on people whose effort and suffering the celebration pushes out of view.

The Gardens of Versailles also organize attention around royal and natural marvels. Visitors file along the Green Carpet toward a tent beside the Fountain of Apollo, where the sea woman is applauded. That response confirms the attraction of the display, but Marie-Josèphe sees its moral cost: the woman is being presented like an animal, and Marie-Josèphe feels responsible because she taught her the tricks that help make the exhibition possible. The garden’s orderly route brings the audience to the captive, while Marie-Josèphe’s lack of authority leaves her unable to close the tent. The public setting makes the conflict between entertainment and dignity visible without giving her the power to resolve it.

The gardens as a route of approach

The Green Carpet serves not only as a ceremonial path for visitors but also as a route by which Marie-Josèphe reaches the sea woman. Before dawn, she leaves the chateau and crosses the estate toward the tent. The hour distinguishes her private purpose from the court’s later public gathering: she is moving through the same grounds before the visitors arrive. At the Fountain of Apollo, the guard is asleep, lulled by the sea monster’s song. The encounter gives the gardens a divided character. They are designed for orderly courtly movement, but at this hour they also permit a secret approach to the captive.

The sequence then changes scale. In daylight, a line of visitors crowds around the fountain and applauds the sea woman. The transition from Marie-Josèphe’s solitary visit to the assembled audience turns a relationship formed through close attention into a public attraction. The Gardens of Versailles thus connect personal access with royal exhibition: the same grounds that let Marie-Josèphe approach the sea woman privately also guide a crowd to watch her. That shift helps explain Marie-Josèphe’s distress at the display, even as the visitors’ applause shows how effectively the court has made it a spectacle.

The chateau as residence and confinement

The chateau’s rooms and guarded thresholds make Versailles a place of unequal access. After the treasure expedition, guards take Lucien away as soon as the carriage reaches the chateau. Marie-Josèphe is escorted to her attic room, where her only company is Hercules. Yves may be in his bedroom, but locked doors and an intervening dressing room prevent her from speaking to him. Her separation from both men is not merely a matter of distance: the household’s doors and guards turn the residence into a barrier between people who need to communicate.

Haleed’s visit briefly crosses that barrier. She comes to Marie-Josèphe despite the danger of the King’s discovering her presence, and says she is about to leave Versailles, Paris, and France. Marie-Josèphe believes she has failed her because she did not find time to ask Yves to sign Haleed’s manumission parchment. Haleed takes the document and assures her that Yves will sign it. Their meeting brings affection and practical consequence into the attic room, but it does not undo the larger confinement: Haleed is leaving, while Marie-Josèphe remains under royal control.

Versailles also houses the mechanisms of royal custody. Louis XIV keeps Yves under guard at the chateau while Lucien remains in the King’s power elsewhere, aboard the flagship. Marie-Josèphe understands that the King is holding both men until she finds the promised treasure and he returns safely to court. The distinction matters: the chateau is not the site of every restraint, but it is one part of a system in which the King can use access to people as leverage. The palace residence carries the authority that reaches beyond its walls.

The King’s chamber and judgment

After the convoy returns, Marie-Josèphe and Lucien are brought to Versailles behind a procession of wagons filled with treasure. Louis XIV leads in an open carriage, covered and adorned with Aztec gold; a hundred musketeers guard the convoy, and people line the road to cheer and stare. The procession makes recovered treasure into public royal display. Marie-Josèphe and Lucien, traveling in a closed carriage, occupy a different position from the King: they are part of the return, but not its visible center. Their disagreement about whether the King must admit he was wrong also gives the spectacle a private counterpoint. Lucien values their defiance; Marie-Josèphe insists on the importance of being right.

At the chateau, the public display gives way to guarded separation. Lucien is taken away, and Marie-Josèphe is sent to her room. Later, the musketeers bring him to the guard room outside the King’s private chamber, where Marie-Josèphe and Yves are already waiting. The scene gathers the separated companions at the threshold of royal judgment. Inside, treasure fills the room in heaps: gold ornaments, armor, headdresses, medallions, unusual cylinders, and jade statues, one of which resembles Lucien’s father. Louis XIV examines a crystal skull; Pope Innocent sits beside him with a rosary and Marie-Josèphe’s drawing box, while books and papers lie on a nearby table. Versailles becomes a meeting place for material wealth, religious authority, records, and personal claims.

Courtly authority and private life

The King’s authority at Versailles is both ceremonial and intimate. Marie-Josèphe reflects that she is married through the authority of the Prince of Rome and the King of France and Navarre, yet the honor itself leaves her indifferent: what matters to her is that she loves Lucien and he loves her. The contrast locates her marriage within the institutions gathered around the court while distinguishing those public forms from her private understanding of the relationship. The chateau’s power can arrange and recognize a marriage, but it cannot dictate what gives that marriage meaning to her.

That tension continues in the scene that follows. As Marie-Josèphe packs her few possessions and prepares a basket for Hercules, Lucien sits apart, absently stroking the cat and staring into space. He tells her she may live apart from him. The supplied episode leaves the consequences of that proposal unresolved, but its placement matters: even after the marriage has been solemnized under royal and ecclesiastical authority, the couple’s private future remains uncertain. Versailles has furnished the ceremony, the audience, the confinement, and the return; it does not guarantee intimacy or freedom. As a setting, it repeatedly converts personal bonds into matters subject to courtly space and power.