I believe the Musee de la Marine in Paris has a fine collection of contemporary seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ship models, but I've never been there. It doesn't seem to get the sort of publicity that the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich does. If I remember correctly, the Musee de la Marine underwent an extensive renovation a few years ago, during which some of its more spectacular artifacts went on a tour of the U.S. (I managed to miss them.) Perhaps the completion of the renovation will give the museum a higher profile. If somebody were to publish a lavishly-illustrated book about it I'd certainly buy it.
Michel - are you reading this? I suspect you know that museum intimately.
I bought, and built, that Heller Soleil Royal kit back in the mid-seventies, when it was new, and I have a love-hate relationship with it. I was in grad school at the time, and really should have known better than to invest so much time in such a project without doing a little reading first. It wouldn't have taken much to discover that, in terms of accuracy, the kit is pretty awful.
The Heller artisans of those days were extremely talented when it came to artistic stuff. Their renditions of carved ornamentation can stand comparison with the finest British "Navy Board" models; that's the highest compliment I can give. But they apparently knew virtually nothing about ships.
Comparison of the kit with some photos of that old model in the Musee de la Marine (which certainly looks reliable, though I don't know anything about its provenance) revealed that Heller had completely botched the underwater hull proportions. They also messed up the stern. The "carved" figures and other ornamentation on it are beautiful, but the designers didn't understand how it was built. There are supposed to be open balconies on the quarter galleries. Heller also screwed up the bow structure (though that was relatively easy to fix). The old model doesn't have a figurehead or the carvings that presumably were mounted in the knee of the head behind it, between the two big molded rails. Heller provided a nice, believable figurehead, but left the space behind it as a void. If a real ship were built like that, the bow would collapse.
I also have my doubts about the spar dimensions. (Here the old model is no help; it's unrigged.) It's been a long time since I saw the kit, but if I remember correctly the fore topmast is longer than the part of the fore lower mast that projects above the deck. I suppose it's conceivable that the French built ships that way, but I doubt it. Such proportions would make it impossible to strike the topmast without removing the lower mast cap.
Then there are the belaying pins, which have sharp points. That one's easy to fix too (plastic belaying pins in general are better replaced with brass ones), but pretty funny.
Maybe the worst mistake, though, lies in the decks. The planks are unbelievably wide, and the decks themselves are perfectly flat. Sometime, somewhere, somebody may have built a sailing warship with flat decks, but the Soleil Royal wasn't it. The deck camber of that old model is perfectly obvious from any picture of it.
I think ChuckFan is probably right about the deck furniture. The old model doesn't have much, and I suspect the Heller people had no idea of how to fill in the gaps. Those bare, simple railings look completely out of character with the rest of the ship.
It's difficult to escape the conclusion that Heller based that kit on nothing but remarkably casual study of photographs - with no recourse to plans (if any contemporary ones exist; I don't know about that) or even measurements of the old model. I find it hard to take such a product seriously as a scale model.
The company took some heat in the modeling press for this kit. (When I got mine finished I wrote a fairly lengthy article about it for the British monthly Scale Models, and I think a few other publications lambasted it pretty thoroughly.) To their great credit (though I have no idea whether any of them read my article), the people at Heller started improving the accuracy of their products shortly thereafter. The galley La Reale is a beauty. And the two 74-gun eighteenth-century ships-of-the-line from a few years later, though they had their problems (still no deck camber), could reasonably be described as scale models. By the time Heller got around to its H.M.S. Victory it apparently had hired somebody who understood the subject. That one has deck camber (and deck beams to keep it there), accurately-rendered planking (though the butt joints in the decks aren't quite arranged right), and accurately detailed spars (though they're compromised a bit by a ridiculous solution to the Great Ratline Problem). Some (not all) of the belaying pins still have sharp points, but this one definitely deserves to be called a scale ship model. I'd go so far as to rate it one of the top ten plastic sailing ship kits ever - probably one of the top five.
One of the saddest aspects of all this is that since the Victory was issued (in about 1977, if I remember right), Heller hasn't done any more pre-twentieth-century ships. I was hoping for an H.M.S. Prince, or a Sovereign of the Seas. But I can't recommend the Soleil Royal. Anybody trying to make a legitimate scale model out of that kit has my best wishes and sympathy.
Another disquieting aspect of this story is that those silly Hellerisms seem to be contagious. A few minutes ago, hoping to get directed to some good material about the ship, I did a Google search on the phrase "Soleil Royal." Several dozen sites came up. I didn't look at all of them, but most referred to models that people were trying to sell over the web. The quality seemed to range from the not-too-bad to the downright ghastly. A few of the models seem to have been built from the Heller kit, but most were either scratchbuilt or based on continental European plank-on-bulkhead kits. Every one that I looked at, though, clearly had used the Heller product as a source of reference - complete with messed up bow and stern, misproportioned hull, and flat decks.
This is a sad way to commemorate a beautiful and important ship.