YMMV / Les Colombes du Roi-Soleil

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • How much of Charlotte's bravado is genuine, and not her way of coping with a horrible fate she's terrified of and trying to avoid at all costs?
  • Is the Princess of Condé trying to make all her ladies as miserably married as she is, or is it just that she really can't take a hint about Isabeau refusing Bazan?
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: The storyline about three students being accused of poisonning one of the teachers to punish her for interfering in their letters actually happened, as can be read in Madame de Maintenon's correspondence.
• Artistic Licence – History:
  • While some of the girls' names were lifted from the Saint-Cyr registers, none of them are those of the girls who actually acted in Esther.
  • While Louise really did exist, she was not raised in Saint-Cyr. Her mother actually raised her for a few years in Paris, before passing away in 1687 and sending her off to be taken care of by a parish priest and his sister. Two of her daughters, however, were educated in Saint-Cyr.
  • While Claude de Vin des Oeillets was accused of having participated to satanic masses and purchased love potions on Madame de Montespan's behalf, she was protected by the King and his minister Colbert and given a comfortable retirement, where she was even able to take care of Louise until her death.
  • Charlotte's journey to Siam and back, while in almost every detail a perfect copy of Claude de Forbin's journey, is set in 1690 instead of 1686.
  • While it was true some women who were accused of light crimes could be sent to America, New France (which eventually became Canada) was not one of those places where they were sent, given colonists were very carefully selected since there was an attempt at making it a model colony. The closest it came to such a situation was with the Filles du Roy, girls and ladies of ages varying from 12 to 30 years old, who came from lower nobility, the bourgeoisie or peasantry who agreed to migrate to New France in exchange for a dowry in order to get married, given there were very little women in the colony at the time and that Louis XIV was concerned it wouldn't grow. These women were carefully selected, as they were to be married to officers of the Carignan-Salières regiment, which was one of the best in France and who were sent to protect the colony. However, the program was long over by the time Gertrude is sent there. All in all, it would have been much more likely for her to be sent on one of the Caribbean colonies to work in plantations.
• Creator's Pet: Averted: despite the author having written a five-book series^note Marie-Anne, fille du Roi about the childhood of the Princess of Conti, King Louis's eldest natural daughter, her few appearances in Les Colombes definitely mark her down as an Alpha Bitch, which matches how her contemporaries described her as she grew up.
• Hollywood Homely: Isabeau and Henriette sometimes bemoan the fact they aren't pretty... although the girls at Saint-Cyr were said by several contemporaries of being very good-looking, due to the selection filtering out girls with certain flaws. So it might be less that Isabeau and Henriette aren't pretty, and more that their entourage is just very pretty.
• Ho Yay:
  • Aniaba and Gabriel are fencing partners, they go drink together, and Gabriel killed a man to defend Aniaba's honor. Of course, by the end of the book, both are married to women they love.
  • Gertrude sure likes talking about how pretty Anne is, and that goes without mentioning the (innocent) caresses and the messages they send each other in secret... She's however quite horrified at the implication from one of the teachers that it might be a lesbian affair, but how much of it is due to rampant homophobia and denial is never cleared up. At the very least, it's definitely a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
    • What adds to the mystery is that there was actually an instance of a teacher and a student in the blue class, implied in one of Madame de Maintenon's letters as having had an affair, them being discovered and the two of them being sent away from Saint-Cyr. Whether that was an inspiration for Gertrude and Anne has never been clarified.
  • Victoire's obsession with Marie-Adélaïde is compared by her friends to Gertrude and Anne's story.
• One-Scene Wonder: King Louis only appears in a few scenes, there are books in which he doesn't even appear, but the very mention of his name is hot stuff each single time.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Henriette has a complex relationship with gender. One can suppose that she's only Sweet Polly Oliver, dressing up as a man to pursue her interests; but one can also read into her deep comfort in masculine clothing and her peaceful sense of euphoria when she sees herself dressed in her father's clothes for the first time. That said, while she was always made to feel like she was not good enough as a woman, she still seeks womanhood and even femininity when they don't come with judgment, like in the camaraderie of Saint-Cyr or when she visits a modiste on her own for the first time. At the end of her book, she chooses to be a man at sea and a woman on land, which suggests some level of genderfluidity.
• Values Dissonance: Book 10 especially frequently uses variations of the word "nigger"^note nègre in French, négresse in the feminine form and négrillon to describe a black child to decribe Africans. While this would be midly to extremely offensive today, in the seventeeth century that was just the common word to describe a black person.
• The Woobie: The girls are all this to varying extents, but Charlotte, Gertrude and Olympe probably take the cake.