This chapter explores how music and liturgy intersected with models of the monarchy that emphasized military prowess and strength. Shortly after Louis XIII had had Concino Concini assassinated in 1617, the figure of Saint Louis IX, crusader, model king, and literal forbear of Louis XIII came to prominence, with the elevation of his feast and with a new liturgy and hymns that emphasized how the saint emulated David’s model of kingship. At the same time, David himself, frequently portrayed as a musician, featured widely in pamphlets and psalm translations or paraphrases that invited the reader or listener to consider how Louis battled heresy as David battled Goliath. In musical terms, this interest was not manifest in the liturgy of the chapelle royale, but the musicians of the chambre and chapelle nonetheless sang psalms together at the king’s mealtimes in the liturgy of Benedictio mensae, and in non-liturgical performances of psalm settings by Artus Auxcousteaux and others.

Kate Chopin’s classic The Awakening can be interpreted through the lens of Chopin’s own intellectual and social development to show how the novel tells a story at once similar to and different from that of its author’s life. In this reading, the main character of the novel begins as a figure with almost no exposure to the realm culture and ideas, but develops a keen appetite for independent thinking and undergoes, in the course of the novel, an education – one that, at the end of the book, is perhaps only really beginning in earnest. Chopin’s own development is both mirror and foil to that of the novel’s heroine.