Yves de la Croix

Yves de la Croix is a Jesuit natural philosopher whose royal commission to find and capture sea monsters becomes a test of what scientific knowledge is for. He can examine their bodies, publish his findings, and serve the ambitions of Louis XIV; he struggles to accept the ethical consequences of recognizing the sea people as persons. His changing position links the book’s courtly spectacle and anatomical inquiry to a private betrayal of Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, and finally to a clandestine effort to preserve what the Church and crown seek to suppress.

Identity and Return

Yves first appears as a young Jesuit pursuing his quarry across a tropical sea on Midsummer Day. From the galleon’s bow he scans the horizon beneath the fierce sun, absorbed in the shifting water and the prospect of discovery. The ship carries Louis XIV’s emblems, making the hunt at once a natural-philosophical expedition and an undertaking under royal authority. When Yves returns, Marie-Josèphe recognizes the brother she had last seen as a youth in homespun, now a grown man in a long black robe. Her impulse to run to him is checked by the decorum she has learned at court and Saint-Cyr; Yves, by contrast, immediately resumes the authority of their earlier household, ordering her not to let the specimen be moved before he returns.

His command shows that the expedition has not separated him from his earlier scientific habits. He has brought equipment and specimens, and he treats Marie-Josèphe as someone expected to assist his work. Yet the arrival also presents the costs of his mission as spectacle: sailors carry a basin containing the female sea monster, while a separate shrouded bundle accompanies the cargo. Yves steadies the basin himself, an act that suggests both care for the captured creature and possession of the object his commission has brought back.

The Royal Commission and Scientific Work

Yves tells the court that Louis XIV gave him the means to locate the annual gathering place of the last sea monsters and capture two alive. The male resisted until his death; the female survived. Yves describes the difference as a contrast in will, interpreting the female’s survival as an absence of the male’s resistance to captivity. The account establishes the terms of his expedition: royal resources have enabled a rare discovery, but the animals’ capture and survival are already being understood through the purposes of their captors.

The King orders the French Academy of Sciences to publish Yves’s notes and sketches and commissions a medal. The command converts the expedition into public recognition and official knowledge, while further binding Yves’s reputation to the monarch who funded it. During a later dissection, Yves reports that the features he has studied so far—the muscles and bones—have counterparts among other animals known to natural philosophy. Louis XIV rejects this emphasis on what is shared and insists that Yves identify what is unique. Yves accepts the demand and takes up his lancet. The exchange exposes a tension within his research: careful comparison can place the sea monsters among known natural creatures, but the court wants a singular property that might serve its ambitions.

Yves later presents the dead male sea person to the King’s philosophers, speaking in Latin and using natural philosophy to argue that sea monsters are natural creatures rather than demons. He has reserved an arm for the Academy’s examination. Marie-Josèphe records the work, and her drawing makes the dead individual’s human features newly visible to her. The demonstration is therefore both a scientific argument against supernatural classification and an act that turns a person’s body into an object of public study. Yves helps establish the creature’s natural status, but that conclusion does not by itself secure recognition of its humanity.

Family, Faith, and Conflict

Yves’s relationship with Marie-Josèphe combines genuine familial connection with a growing conflict over judgment and authority. When Louis XIV asks whether Yves inherited his father’s musical abilities, Yves answers that his sister is the more gifted musician. The response recognizes her talent before the King, even as their later disagreements reveal how little trust remains between them. During the dissection, she calls for his attention while he is sectioning the sea monster’s brain; the interrupted work brings their collaboration into view, but also marks the strain of asking her to participate in an inquiry whose consequences she increasingly disputes.

That dispute becomes explicit when Yves tells Marie-Josèphe that the sea monsters are beasts created for human use and urges her to leave court for a convent, presenting withdrawal as protection from what he calls her agitation. Marie-Josèphe refuses, and Haleed rejects his claim that she would be happy in the convent. Yves’s appeal to religious shelter thus collides with the women’s own knowledge of what would constrain them. His position also contradicts the implications of his research: he has argued that the creatures belong to the natural world, yet now invokes a hierarchy that makes them available for human use.

The deepest rupture concerns Sherzad’s ruby ring. Marie-Josèphe confronts Yves with the conclusion that he took the token while Sherzad was incapacitated and concealed what he knew about the dark-robed man who had taken it. She explains that she withheld her conclusion from the King because accusing her own brother would have been difficult, and that her lie may endanger Sherzad. Yves produces the ring and apologizes, confirming the central fact of her accusation. His flight from the chapel and hurried return to the Fountain follow the exposure of a betrayal that is at once personal and consequential for Sherzad. The ring, carried secretly in his pocket, makes his private wrongdoing tangible; his apology does not undo the danger his silence has created.

Yves is also caught between ecclesiastical authority and royal desire. When the prospect of immortality is discussed, he remains silent as Marie-Josèphe argues that Sherzad cannot confer it. Later, he quietly tells Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XII that he has proved the strange organ’s effect and that it is as the King hoped. The disclosure prompts the Pope to demand that the Church examine the creature. Yves’s assertion is presented as a claim made to the two rulers, not as an independent demonstration to the reader; in the surrounding exchange, his earlier silence has already shown the pressure exerted by the hope of immortality. His choice supplies the court with what it wants to hear while placing the captive sea people under still greater threat.

Recognition, Penance, and Secrecy

At the royal carrousel, Louis XIV privately tells Yves that he is proud of him and acknowledges him as his son. He explains that Yves’s mother would have forgiven the disclosure, but that she had not wanted the King to acknowledge him while her husband was alive. Yves’s bewildered response reveals that the recognition is new to him. It changes the meaning of his place at court: he is not only a priest and royal investigator but also the King’s son, a relationship disclosed at a moment when his work and loyalties have become entangled with royal power.

Later, after the sea woman has declared war on the men of land and disappeared, Pope Innocent XII refuses to excommunicate those present. He tells Yves that the Church faces a terrible threat and assigns him a penance: search out every mention of the sea monsters, in every book. The order turns Yves’s scholarly labor against its own record. He burns a dissection sketch and sees the Pope scatter material that includes a book by M. Boursin and letters from the Black Cabinet. The same kind of paper that had once carried observation, correspondence, and public claims is now targeted for destruction. Yves’s punishment is not merely to abandon a conclusion; it is to help erase the evidence by which the sea people might be remembered.

The epilogue shows that he does not complete that erasure in spirit. On Midwinter Night in Paris, Yves returns to his small house, opens a secret door, and enters a library. He unwraps an illuminated manuscript depicting sea people among blue waves and golden sunlight, then places it beside Marie-Josèphe’s opera score, M. Boursin’s book, and Madame’s letters. Nearby stand the sea-monster medal and two of Marie-Josèphe’s framed drawings, one of Sherzad and one of the male sea monster; the male’s skeleton rests in an ebony reliquary inlaid with mother-of-pearl. These objects preserve different kinds of testimony—image, music, writing, and remains—inside a private space where the public order of censorship cannot easily reach them.

Yves’s final intention is to protect the sea people through secrecy for the present, without accepting secrecy as a permanent answer. The ending does not erase his complicity: he participated in capture and dissection, took Sherzad’s ring, and made a claim about the organ that served royal hopes. Instead, it leaves him holding two opposed responsibilities. He has been ordered to search out and suppress a history; in private, he gathers the very records that can keep it from disappearing. His arc turns scientific custody into moral custody, without suggesting that preservation alone can repair what has been done.