Marie-Josèphe tries to prove to Louis XIV that the sea woman is human

Marie-Josèphe tries to prove to Louis XIV that the Sea Woman is human by making their communication, rather than the Sea Woman’s unfamiliar body, the basis of judgment. She tells the King that she understands the Sea Woman and is understood in return, and insists that the Sea Woman speaks and is intelligent. The effort becomes a struggle over who may interpret the captive and what the court will accept as evidence: the Sea Woman can answer, but only Marie-Josèphe can make her meaning legible to her human judges.

The claim of mutual understanding

Marie-Josèphe makes her case directly to Louis XIV. She presents understanding as reciprocal, not as a human observer’s guess about an animal: she understands the Sea Woman, and the Sea Woman understands her. From that assertion she draws a moral conclusion, identifying the captive as a woman and a human being like herself and everyone else. While an artisan continues sawing at the lock, Marie-Josèphe’s declaration gives the imprisoned figure a voice in the court’s consideration even before the King accepts that she has one.

The argument is not simply that the Sea Woman is alive. When the Sea Woman returns to the surface, she wakes, rises through the water, and breathes there. M. Boursin reacts by whispering that she is alive. Louis XIV, however, turns the same evidence into a challenge: he asks what she is if not a monster. Marie-Josèphe answers by returning to intelligence and womanhood, but Yves de la Croix disputes both, likening the Sea Woman to a parrot and rejecting the idea that she can be a woman. The disagreement shows the limit of mere observation: seeing life does not compel the court to recognize personhood.

Appearance against testimony

Louis XIV’s refusal is categorical. He groups the Sea Woman with a dog, a parrot, and a creature, excluding her from the category of women. Marie-Josèphe’s attempt to persuade him fails, and the setback is described as overwhelming. The Sea Woman, swimming at Marie-Josèphe’s feet, appears to understand the King’s refusal; she shrieks and spits. Her reaction makes the dispute more than a technical question about classification. The captive is present, responsive to the exchange, and nevertheless treated as an object whose status the court may decide without granting her own account authority.

Marie-Josèphe offers a different method of judgment: she asks Louis XIV to look at the Sea Woman’s dead mate’s skull, bones, and hands, and to listen to the Sea Woman while she interprets. The appeal joins physical evidence to testimony rather than relying on appearance alone. Yves, by contrast, points to the Sea Woman’s face and bodily form as reasons to deny her likeness to a man. Their opposing readings make the body itself contested evidence: Marie-Josèphe asks the court to connect it with speech and understanding, while Yves uses visible difference to support exclusion.

Permission to make the case

The dispute later reaches a setting in which Louis XIV and Pope Innocent enter the cage to observe the captive. Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, argues that the Sea Woman’s status need not be fixed forever: as the Church had once mistaken beasts for demons, he says, a further change might be possible. He identifies the question to be proved as whether the Sea Woman speaks a human language, and invokes scientific proof as the proper standard. Rather than declare Marie-Josèphe right, he asks Louis XIV to allow her to demonstrate her claim. The King finally agrees to see.

That permission matters because it gives Marie-Josèphe’s interpretation a hearing without settling the question in advance. The encounter remains controlled by powerful human observers: the King and Pope Innocent enter the cage to inspect their captive, while Marie-Josèphe must speak on her behalf. The arrangement grants her a role but also exposes its constraint. The Sea Woman’s words cannot reach these witnesses directly; recognition depends on whether Marie-Josèphe can translate them and whether the court will accept her as a credible intermediary.

Interpretation before the court

During the audience, the Sea Woman trills, snarls, spits water, and disappears. Pope Innocent calls her an ill-trained beast. Yves interrupts as Marie-Josèphe begins to explain what she has said, but Pope Innocent tells him to let her speak and asks for the Sea Woman’s meaning. Marie-Josèphe reports an insult about the Pope’s appearance and explains that Sea People consider humans ugly because their faces are smooth. The exchange supplies a concrete instance of the communication she has claimed: the Sea Woman has expressed a judgment, and Marie-Josèphe can convey both its content and its cultural context.

Pope Innocent responds by asserting that human custom is to eat sea monsters, which he places among beasts made for human use; he also invokes the subordination of women. His declaration therefore makes the hearing a contest not only over the Sea Woman’s intelligence but over the principles that govern who may speak and who may be used. Louis XIV, by contrast, says he will hear what the monster—or, as he corrects himself, Mlle de la Croix—has to say. Marie-Josèphe falls to her knees in relief. The correction does not establish the Sea Woman’s humanity, but it opens space for the interpreter’s testimony.

The story as a test

Marie-Josèphe urges the Sea Woman to tell a story about sea creatures, storms, or Atlantis, explaining that this may be her last opportunity. The Sea Woman promises an extraordinary story if Marie-Josèphe will interpret it. Facing Louis XIV, Marie-Josèphe then seeks to turn the Sea Woman’s images into words. The episode thus shifts from an assertion of mutual understanding to a practical trial: the court is offered not just Marie-Josèphe’s claim, but an account she must carry across the boundary between the Sea Woman’s expression and human language.

The evidence here leaves the attempt in progress rather than recording a final verdict. Its decisive change is narrower but consequential: after initially dismissing the Sea Woman as a monster, Louis XIV permits Marie-Josèphe to speak for her, and the Pope’s demand to hear the interpretation makes the claim answerable in public. Whether that hearing will secure recognition remains unresolved. The scene’s central tension persists between a captive who communicates and an audience that controls the terms on which communication can count as proof.