At first blush, the subject of Carmel Bird’s twelfth novel, the seventeenth-century court of Versailles, might come across as a surprise. Bird was born in Launceston and lives in Victoria, and she has traditionally focused on Australian subjects in her extensive body of fiction. Cape Grimm (2004) and The Bluebird Café (1990) engage with Tasmania’s Gothic past, from the horrors of colonialism to the Martin Bryant massacre. Red Shoes (1998) was inspired by the Melbourne cult known as ‘The Family’, while The White Garden (1995) was based on the controversial deep-sleep therapy and sexual abuse that occurred at Sydney’s Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1960s.