Boursan proposes butchering the sea woman

M. Boursin proposes butchering the Sea Woman after Louis XIV rejects Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s attempt to have her recognized as a woman. He presents a cookbook image of her as a meal and offers plans for serving her at the King’s table. Lucien de Chrétien intervenes, using the Church’s classification of sea monsters as fish and the practical risk of spoiled meat to secure an immediate reprieve. The episode turns a dispute over classification into a direct struggle over whether the Sea Woman may be treated as a person or as food.

Background and Proposal

The proposal follows a failed appeal by Marie-Josèphe. Louis XIV has dismissed the possibility that the creature could be a woman, and Marie-Josèphe is left shocked by his refusal. The Sea Woman, swimming at her feet, reacts with a shriek and spits toward those present. Rather than reconsider the decision, Louis XIV asks M. Boursin to explain his plans, giving the cook an opportunity to frame the Sea Woman as a culinary subject.

M. Boursin enters the fountain enclosure with an old book and presents its contents to Louis XIV, the Academicians, Yves de la Croix, and Marie-Josèphe. His proposal is not simply to kill the Sea Woman: he imagines turning her into a carefully staged royal dish. He describes a small portion for Louis XIV and a larger preparation modeled on Charlemagne’s banquet, treating the creature’s body as the material for an ambitious culinary performance. The contrast between the scale of his imagined feast and the Sea Woman’s presence in the fountain makes the proposal’s stakes unmistakable: a living captive is being discussed as a menu.

The Book and Marie-Josèphe’s Response

The book’s woodcut gives M. Boursin’s plan a visual form. It depicts a Sea Woman arranged on a platter, with a dead sturgeon held against her chest; in the image, the roasted figure’s eyes are open and empty. Marie-Josèphe screams at the sight. The image is not a record of something already done, but an illustration of the future M. Boursin is proposing—and of the violence his language of recipes and ingredients makes easy to overlook.

M. Boursin treats Marie-Josèphe’s reaction as a question of taste, asking whether she dislikes seafood and assuring her that he could make the grotesque creature almost beautiful. His answer fails to meet what her response signifies. She is confronting the proposed transformation of the Sea Woman from a living being into a dish, not objecting to the menu. The Sea Woman herself flicks water toward the people around her with her webbed toes, remaining an active presence while they discuss her as an object to be estimated, prepared, and served.

The Chevalier de Lorraine takes Marie-Josèphe into his arms and muffles her sobs. His gesture offers immediate comfort, but does not resolve the threat: M. Boursin continues to ask for permission to take the Sea Woman, arguing that the meat must hang before it can be served. The scene therefore moves from the book’s imagined meal to a concrete request for custody of the captive. The question is no longer only what M. Boursin plans to cook, but whether the King will permit him to begin.

Lucien’s Intervention and the Reprieve

Lucien de Chrétien first states that the creature is a fish. When M. Boursin challenges the implication, Lucien builds his argument from the categories already invoked by the proposal. If the Sea Woman is not human, he argues, she must be a beast; M. Boursin himself has appealed to the Church’s judgment that sea monsters are fish. Killing her that day, Lucien adds, would leave the flesh spoiled before Louis XIV’s banquet. The intervention does not establish the Sea Woman’s humanity. Instead, it turns the assumptions used to make her killable into reasons to delay the killing.

Louis XIV accepts Lucien’s reasoning and orders that M. Boursin may not butcher the creature that day. He also instructs Lucien to arrange for Jean-Baptiste Fagon to attend Marie-Josèphe. The King remains calm and in control as he issues both orders, while M. Boursin’s elaborate culinary plans are stopped at the point of immediate action. Lucien departs, and the Chevalier de Lorraine again lifts Marie-Josèphe into his arms.

Consequences and Significance

The reprieve is precise rather than absolute: Louis XIV forbids the butchering that day, but the scene does not show him granting the Sea Woman freedom or recognizing her as human. Her safety rests, for the moment, on Lucien’s argument and the King’s decision. That outcome preserves the tension between Marie-Josèphe’s effort to assert personhood and a courtly system in which the captive can still be classified as a fish, a beast, or a dish.

The episode also distinguishes the means by which the characters respond. Marie-Josèphe’s distress and the Sea Woman’s gestures make the cost of the proposal present, while Lucien’s appeal succeeds through a practical contradiction within M. Boursin’s own case. The King’s order has an immediate effect, but not the force of a settled change in status. By ending with a ban on butchering for that day, the scene converts a threatened act into a temporary delay—and leaves the Sea Woman’s larger predicament unresolved.