Marie-Josèphe de la Croix

Marie-Josèphe de la Croix moves through courtly spectacle, scientific inquiry, and political danger without accepting the roles others assign her. A musician and aspiring natural philosopher, she becomes the sea woman’s interpreter and advocate: translating a language of images and song into testimony that human authorities can hear, even when they refuse to believe it. Her central achievement is not simply to speak for Sherzad, but to recognize her as a person whose words, history, and freedom matter.

Identity and Arrival

Marie-Josèphe’s first appearance at court is framed by the magnificence of a procession fifty carriages long. She had dreamed of riding in such a display, but the reality exceeds her expectations. She travels in the carriage of Monsieur and Madame, second in magnificence only to Louis XIV’s, with Lotte beside her. Her new position as Lotte’s lady-in-waiting has already taught her to moderate the excitement she once might have shown openly. The scene establishes both her proximity to royal power and the rules of behavior that accompany it.

At Le Havre, she recognizes Yves immediately when he comes down the gangplank, though she has not seen him since he was a youth. Now dressed in a long black robe, he appears to her as a grown man, handsome and severe. She wants to run to greet him, but her experience at Saint-Cyr and Versailles has taught her to behave more sedately. His arrival is inseparable from the mysterious cargo he has brought: sailors carry a gilded basin, and Yves steadies it with a protective hand. Before she understands the full consequences of his expedition, the contrast between her impulse to greet her brother and his guarded possession of the basin places personal affection beside the secrecy of his work.

Music, Inquiry, and Intellectual Agency

Music gives Marie-Josèphe a public identity, but the court does not readily recognize her authorship. When Louis XIV praises a piece, he believes M. Coupillet composed it. M. Coupillet does not correct him; Domenico Scarlatti does, speaking without invitation to identify Marie-Josèphe as the composer. His intervention exposes both her achievement and the assumptions that have obscured it. Louis XIV then commissions her to compose a cantata for his anniversary, honoring her father’s memory. The commission brings recognition, but it also makes her work answerable to the expectations of the court.

Her intellectual interests extend well beyond composition. While preparing paper at the dissection table, she writes an equation in Leibniz’s notation, recognizes that her attempted solution is inadequate, and decides the problem deserves further inquiry. When the sea monster cries, she erases the equation so that no one can read it and enters the creature’s cage. The small action joins two defining commitments: her curiosity is active and serious, but she does not treat scientific work as a reason to ignore another being’s distress.

Later, she tells Lucien that she is investigating the nature of gravity. She distinguishes Newton’s discovery of what gravity does from the unanswered question of what it is, and considers whether observation of very small things might reveal what the study of planets has not. Her thought turns toward the possible use of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope. These are presented as questions rather than discoveries; the evidence establishes her appetite for investigation, not a completed theory. Her willingness to pursue them nevertheless marks a claim to intellectual work in spaces where her musical ability is more readily noticed than her scientific reasoning.

The Sea Woman and a New Language

Marie-Josèphe’s relationship with the captive sea creature begins in direct opposition to force. When a man tries to drive the creature to the surface with a goad, she kneels at the pool and puts her hands into the water, urging it to come to her and assuring it that it is safe. The creature takes hold of her wrists and pulls her into the pool. The encounter does not make captivity disappear, but it establishes a physical bond that sharply contrasts with the attempts to command the creature through fear.

Their deeper connection develops through song. Marie-Josèphe tells the sea woman that she can see the songs and asks whether the creature understands her. The answer is not speech in human words: a song evokes a tiny fish, its movement, surroundings, and qualities. Marie-Josèphe learns that the sea people communicate through images and associations rather than ordinary verbal statements. This discovery changes her role. She is no longer merely a visitor to the cage or a witness to the creature’s behavior; she becomes a listener learning how to interpret another form of thought.

That work requires patience and judgment. When Sherzad’s images surround her, Marie-Josèphe faces Louis XIV and tries to turn them into language. On another occasion, she sketches rapidly while interpreting, knowing that charcoal cannot reproduce the beauty of Sherzad’s songs but can preserve a record of what they convey. Servants display and pin up the completed sketches. The images become evidence in a court that otherwise has little access to the sea woman’s meaning, though their existence cannot guarantee that the court will accept her account.

Testimony, Evidence, and Conflict

Marie-Josèphe argues directly for the sea woman’s humanity. She tells Louis XIV that she understands Sherzad and is understood in return; the captive speaks, thinks, and is a woman like other human beings. This is not an abstract claim detached from experience. It follows from the communication she has painstakingly established, and it challenges the convenient label of monster that makes imprisonment and dissection easier to justify.

Her testimony is tested when Sherzad recounts the attack on her people’s birth islands. Marie-Josèphe translates as best she can from a language without words and makes sketches as she speaks. A galleon bearing a cross appears in Sherzad’s account, and her song turns discordant as the ship approaches. The drawings preserve the sequence of the story, including the contrast between the sea people’s former sense of safety and the arrival of human violence. By interpreting this history, Marie-Josèphe brings a collective experience of vulnerability into the royal setting, where the sea woman might otherwise be treated only as a specimen.

The limits of persuasion become especially clear when Marie-Josèphe offers the existence of Sherzad’s token as proof that the sea woman has communicated with her. Louis XIV replies that he has no way to know that the token ever existed. Spectators plead for the captive not to be killed, but their appeal does not change the King’s authority or the direction of events. Marie-Josèphe understands that good intentions from the crowd may make matters worse rather than move him. Her experience shows the difference between possessing evidence and persuading those who control what counts as evidence.

She also refuses to conceal what she believes about Yves. When he has said nothing about the token, she confronts him and identifies him as the man Sherzad described as having taken it. She insists that he knew the truth, and accuses him of taking the token when Sherzad was unable to defend herself. The accusation places her loyalty to the sea woman in direct conflict with her bond to her brother. She does not treat kinship as a reason to suppress testimony, even when the person she challenges is the brother whose return she had longed for.

Protection, Loyalty, and the Ending

Marie-Josèphe’s interpreting also has practical consequences. Sherzad puzzles over a chart because it shows only the edge of the sea and, to her, is dangerously inaccurate. Once Marie-Josèphe explains its purpose, Sherzad can use it to communicate the location of a sunken galleon in a cove near Le Havre, where rocks hold the wreck and treasure lies scattered. Later, Marie-Josèphe relays Sherzad’s promise that the treasure is covered with gold and jewels and offered for her sake, despite the betrayals and broken promises between them. The promise is joined to a declaration of war against the men of the land. Marie-Josèphe’s role as interpreter therefore carries political stakes as well as personal ones: she makes both an offer and a threat intelligible to Louis XIV.

Her protective instinct continues when Sherzad, agitated and out of her element, struggles toward a wagon. Marie-Josèphe tells Lucien to steady the horses while she tries to calm Sherzad. She approaches with reassurance, then takes Sherzad’s webbed hands and sings to show what she hopes will happen. In the later confrontation with Louis XIV, Sherzad propels herself toward him, and Marie-Josèphe throws herself between them. She is trying to prevent a meeting of royal authority and desperate resistance from ending in further violence; the men around her interpret the moment through their own assumptions about obedience, suicide, and attempted murder.

Marie-Josèphe’s personal future is likewise shaped by power. She is married to Lucien by the Prince of Rome, with the marriage given by Louis XIV, yet the honor means little to her beside her love for Lucien. His response is not uncomplicated: as she prepares her few belongings, he tells her that she may live apart from him. The marriage therefore does not resolve every uncertainty in their relationship. At the novel’s close, Marie-Josèphe hears Sherzad singing over the waves, runs barefoot down the wet sand, and sings Sherzad’s name-song. Sherzad replies. The exchange returns the story to the bond made through listening: after confinement, failed persuasion, and betrayal, their communication remains possible. Marie-Josèphe’s importance lies in sustaining that possibility, insisting that another being’s song can carry knowledge and that hearing it creates an obligation to respond.