The Moon and the Sun

Avram was a brilliant (and underappreciated) writer, but he was not an exciting speaker. As the tape unreeled, my mind wandered. I thought: The sailors who reported sea monsters and mermaids were uneducated, and they were superstitious, but they were experienced and they weren’t stupid. So what was it that they saw and reported?

I dug out a scrap of paper and wrote, “Why do we, today, think that sea monsters never existed, when they obviously did—and maybe still do?”

I went home and wrote a short story in the form of an encyclopedia article, “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea” (by Vonda N. McIntyre, illustrated by Ursula K. Le Guin [Ygor & Buntho Make Books Press, 1997]). I wrestled to keep it short. (I had a deadline on another project.) The story kept trying to make itself longer; the article format kept trying to evolve into characters, dialogue, and plot. By the end of the article the sea monster and the natural historian—and the natural historian’s sister, who does not even appear in the encyclopedia article—had come alive. They became the basis for The Moon and the Sun.

An alternate history takes an enormous amount of research, as I discovered when I decided to set The Moon and the Sun in 1693 in the court of Louis XlV. The more research I did, the more I found I’d chosen a serendipitous place and time: the residence of the most powerful man in the world, at the historical balance point between ancient alchemy and modern science.

My research also uncovered a number of entertaining coincidences. After I had invented—I thought—the natural history of the sea people, I came across a description of Steller’s sea-cow, a relative of the manatee indigenous to the Bering Sea. The natural history of Steller’s sea-cow resembles the natural history of the people of the sea to a remarkable and disturbing degree. The sea-cow was first seen by Europeans during the Vitus Bering expedition of 1741. By 1768, the species had been hunted to extinction. Only a single sketch exists of the creature by anyone who observed it alive.

During the same expedition, George Steller also described the Danish sea ape. No contemporary taxonomist has ever identified it.

In another interesting coincidence, Lucien de Barenton, count de Chrétien, became an integral part of the story long before I had ever heard of the maréchal de Luxembourg. Lucien is rather a nicer person than the maréchal, I believe, but their histories and their physical descriptions bear sorne remarkable resemblances. The story of Queen Marie-Thérèse’s illegitimate child has only one more level of complication in my story than in the rumor of the time.

My background is in modern science, not in history, and though I now know a lot about 1693 and the court of Louis XIV, I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m very grateful for the advice and help I received from a number of people who kept me from walking into pitfalls. Thanks to translator Elborg Forster, whose A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz 1652-1722 was invaluable. Several historians were kind enough to read and comment on the book: Dr. and Mrs. Orest Ranum, and Dr. Charles A. Le Guin. Marc Francis Fevre researched the details of the family of the chevalier de Lorraine. Mona Helen Preuss found invaluable information on Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and summarized her biography for me, as the book defeated my high school French.

Ron Drummond brought Jacquet de la Guerre to my attention. In an early draft of the story, I made the inexcusable error of assuming—just because no women composers were mentioned in scores of reference works—that no women composers existed at the court of the Sun King. In fact, Versailles was practically crawling with them. But even Jacquet de la Guerre, who was among the foremost composers of her time, who was a great influence on baroque music, and who was permitted to dedicate her work to Louis XIV (a rare honor for anyone), rates only half a line in an entire modern reference work about music in Louis’ court. I am only surprised that I was surprised by this.

Two books particularly helped my understanding of the period and the people. Nancy Nichols Barker’s uniquely sympathetic Brother to the Sun King: Philippe, Duke of Orléans treats Monsieur as a comprehensible human being, rather than as the usual figure of contempt and ridicule. Peter Burke’s The Fabrication of Louis XIV allowed me to understand the amazing and overwhelming chateau of Versailles as a deliberate political statement of power and control, rather than as the product of a baroque ego backed by the resources of an entire country.