Books
Carmel Bird
Crimson Velvet Heart
Luscious and rich with detail and emotional resonance, Carmel Bird’s 12th novel, Crimson Velvet Heart, is an ambitious slice of life from late 17th and early 18th century France, moving between the stories of Princess Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy and her best friend from school, Clothilde, now the nun Sister Clare, appointed to write her life story in a convent cell.
The quiet and reflective tone of Sister Clare is countered by a wry and often sly narrator. Bird breathes life into the Palace of Versailles, behind bedroom doors and down garden paths, listening to court gossip on sexual exploits, observing the folly of the Sun King, Louis XIV, while the stink of human faeces lying in palace corners permeates throughout.
Weaving through the book is a slow burn of love between Clothilde and a gardener, Jean-Jacques, a soldier who goes off to war. Like hundreds of thousands of young French men, he is sacrificed to religious fervour and disappears.
The novel is expertly structured, moving seamlessly between royal histories and stories and the Aesop’s fables that Sister Clare adores. Bird cleverly brings in the courtly dialogue as a commentary on Adélaïde and the king’s actions. Much is deftly suggested: when Adélaïde arrives from Savoy, the king is besotted with his grand-niece. She sits in his lap and they frolic, dancing, spitting food at each other. She is married at 12 to his grandson and heir. But has the king’s desire flowed over into a sexual relationship?
The novel also traces the enduring legacy of a princess’s pain: the blood, the body, the illness – all in public view. France looks on with eagerness as Adélaïde gets her period and becomes pregnant, has miscarriages, loses sons after they are born. The horror of what Adélaïde endures is magnified by the loving way Sister Clare recalls her earlier girlhood spirit, the naked sprite who jumps into a pond.
Sister Clare’s grief at the loss of Jean-Jacques changes the course of her life, infusing the stories she tells with traces of the lavender oil that he distilled. Bird’s focus here is not just on her characters but also on the act of writing itself. Sister Clare’s years of work, her pen-and-inked pages, are to be destroyed when she dies. We are witnesses, then, to a disappearing history – where only Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, its blazing sun motifs and gold fleurs-de-lis, remain.
Transit Lounge, 320pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 29, 2025 as "Crimson Velvet Heart".
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