History YMMV / LesColombesDuRoiSoleil

** 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.

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: 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?

* TransAudienceInterpretation: Henriette has a complex relationship with gender. One can suppose that she's only SweetPollyOliver, 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 dresses 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.

* HoYay: 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.
* LesYay: 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 PseudoRomanticFriendship.

* MoralEventHorizon: [[spoiler:Léon. ''Boy'', did he have it coming.]]

* ArtisticLicenceHistory: 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 able to benefit of a comfortable retirement, where she was even able to take care of Louise until her death.
** 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 immigrate 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.

* OneSceneWonder: 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.

** 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 immigrate 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.

* ArtisticLicence-History: 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.