3 months ago
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By Thuy On
November 19, 2025 — 12.00pm
HISTORICAL FICTION
Crimson Velvet Heart
Carmel Bird
Transit Lounge, $34.99
Crimson Velvet Heart is Carmel Bird’s 12th book, an historical fiction set in late 17th - early 18th-century France. We flit in and out of the decadent court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, but Bird’s focus is not so much on him as on his grandson’s bride.
It begins in 1685 with the dramatic birth of a child by Anne Marie, the Duchess of Turin and a niece of this King of France (herself a mere child at only 16). Yet, the planned fireworks and cannons have to be cancelled, for she has failed in her task of manufacturing a male heir.
Her daughter, however, will grow up to wield a certain power of her own. Indeed, right after her baptism, Marie-Adelaide of Savoy was already being gossiped about by the nobles of the court, with speculation on how this particular girl-child could prove useful for bargaining purposes. This was an era, after all, when marriage was a tool for strategic political alliances.
Marie-Adelaide’s future was already ordained: she was to marry the grandson of the King (the Duke of Bourgone), at only 12 years of age. In time, her own son was destined to become King Louis XV. But before we flip to those pages of history, there’s much to tell about the short life of this beguiling character.
The cover of Crimson Velvet Heart features a woman bedecked in finery, with lace and velvet drapery, but also what looks like four crystal-topped pins stuck incongruously into her body. What’s even more disconcerting is that she seems unbothered by being stabbed by these needles. The expression on her red-lipsticked and rouged face is calm and beatific.
A portrait of Marie-Adelaide at Versailles, by Pierre Gobert.Credit: Alamy
We learn later that this striking image of a human pincushion relates to religious conversion (from Protestant to Catholic), but the notion of a young woman being pricked serves as a metaphor for manipulation and control – overarching themes of the book.
The narrative is shared between an omniscient third-person perspective and the first-person confessional voice of Sister Clare, a childhood friend of Marie-Adelaide, who becomes her unofficial biographer. Nursing a lost love of her own, Clare’s account is tinged with sadness but also with the joy of having been a companion and confidante to a princess. Other supporting characters, like the secret wife of the King, are also explored in the book, those who have “partly sewn the pattern of the life of the little girl into the great tapestry of history.”
Given its grandiloquent setting, Crimson Velvet Heart thrums with the colour and pomp one would expect, but while the ostentations of the royal court are well described, Bird never lets us forget that this period in time is also wracked with territorial wars and religious persecution. The graveyards of dying battalions and horses are starkly juxtaposed with the glamour of the palace and gardens of Versailles.
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The novel seesaws between the sweet and the rank, the elaborately coiffed wigs on show and the rotten teeth hidden from sight. Taught by her wily father, Victor Amadeus, who was forever shifting his allegiances for personal gain, Marie-Adelaide is portrayed as a sprightly coquette and shrewd political enchantress.
Like many historical novels, this one mixes fact and fiction, and Bird clearly has done her research. At the back of the book is a list of principal characters, a timeline, and an extended bibliography. Her attention to detail throughout, to fabrics, furnishings, and accoutrements, is a delight and offers an aesthetic overlay to the novel: “A necklace of fat creamy pearls glimmers at her throat. A soft white veil threaded with silver on her head.”
There’s a lot also said and implied about the unseemly close relationship between King Louis XIV and Marie-Adelaide whom he first meet as a prepubescent. In modern parlance, one could well say he was grooming her. Was theirs an erotic, incestuous relationship? The book remains coy, but given the notorious in-breeding between royalty of yore, the entrenched patriarchal ruling where infidelity was both rife and accepted, and the power imbalances between an ageing king and an ingenue, it would come as little surprise if the bond between them was thus tainted.
Embellished as it has been by a novelistic eye, Crimson Velvet Heart nonetheless offers a fascinating insight into the pressures and machinations of royal life, wherein girls and women were nothing more than pawns to be moved about in a complex game of war and diplomacy to maintain bloodline and bolster dynasties.
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