I really don't want to get into another big argument about this kit. Everybody who has any interest in my opinion of it surely knows by this time what that opinion is - i.e., extremely low. In the interest of keeping the facts (such as they are) straight, however, I'll offer the following. I'll try my best to keep my opinions out.
1. The spelling of the ship's name is Le Soleil Royal. No E on the end of Royal. ("Soleil," meaning "sun," is a masculine noun. Thus the masculine article "le" ["the"] and the masculine adjective "royal" ["royal," or "regal"]. The feminine adjective "Royale" would be appropriate only if the noun modified by it were feminine, in which case the ship's name presumably would be "La Soleile Royale." That, at least, is what I remember from my freshman-level college French course - taken longer ago than I care to think about.)
2. From what I've been able to learn so far, there are no 100% reliable primary sources as to the appearance of this ship. The unfinished model in the Musee de la Marine most emphatically is not a primary source. It apparently was built - or started - in the nineteenth century.
3. Earlier in this thread there are references to four - count 'em, four - drawings that bear the name of the ship and give every appearance of dating from the reign of Louis XIV. The first two (both posted on Sept. 23, 2006; just scroll up the thread to see them) show only the transom. One is attributed to P. Hippolyte Boussac, the other to Jean Berain the Elder. [Later edit: I goofed here. The Boussac drawing/painting dates from the nineteenth century; it certainly looks like it was based on a seventeenth-century work of some sort - quite possibly the Berain transom drawing.] They look quite similar at first glance, but disagree with each other in numerous significant details. The one by Berain, for instance, pretty clearly shows a projecting balcony under the two central windows in the uppermost row. Berain also clearly indicates - in this view - that there were open quarter galleries on the two lower decks. (The Boussac drawing shows solid blue panels outboard of the outermost windows on those levels; I think, though, that this may be a mistake on the part of the person who tinted the drawing. [Later edit: or maybe by Boussac himself, assuming he was attempting to copy the Berain work.] In such seventeenth-century publications each copy of the print had to be hand-tinted, and the person doing the tinting probably would not be the one who made the drawing. [Later edit: equally true, generally speaking, in the nineteenth century.])
Then there are the two side views - bow and stern - also attributed to Berain. The side view of the stern pretty clearly doesn't match the view of the transom drawn by the same artist, in that the side view doesn't show open quarter galleries and the transom view does. Why those two views, by the same artist, differ so much I have no idea.
The bottom line about those three graphic sources is that they contradict each other - and so far as I know there's no reason to give any of them more credence than the others. [Later edit: the Boussac transom view, dating from almost two centuries later, clearly deserves less credence than the others. But the two Berain views of the stern contradict each other.] Maybe they represent different ships; maybe one (or more) of them represent(s) a preliminary design that wasn't executed; maybe they represent the same vessel at different points in her career. I don't know.
I suspect some French scholars have dug into the literature and graphic sources about this ship pretty thoroughly over the decades. Maybe there's a French language monograph or article that sorts all this out; if so, I haven't seen it - but that's hardly remarkable. There's a great mass of French language material that rarely, if ever, gets distributed in English-speaking countries.
4. The unfinished Musee de la Marine model doesn't agree with any of those graphic sources. The overall proportions and number of windows in its transom don't match either the Boussac or the Berain views of the transom, and the model bears scarcely any resemblance to the Berain side views (though the bow is certainly closer than the stern). The model does have open quarter galleries, but the proportions of its transom are decidedly different from those of both the Berain and Boussac transom views.
What sources the builder of the model consulted I have no idea. He obviously was a highly-skilled craftsman; I think we can rule out the possibility that he simply miscounted the number of windows. There are enough similarities between the model and the four contemporary drawings to suggest that there's some connection between them, but why they diverge so much is a mystery.
5. Some time back a Belgian member of this Forum, Michel VRTG, did some digging about the history of Heller. He found out, as I recall, that the Heller Soleil Royal kit was in fact based on something called a "bakelite model" that had been built by a gentleman (whose name I've long since forgotten) who had in turn based it on the Musee de la Marine model. [Later edit: I found the reference to the bakelite model - though it doesn't provide much enlightenment. It's at the end of this thread, which also contains some discussion of the deck furniture question: /forums/560866/ShowPost.aspx .] Appaently somewhere in the transition the proportions of the hull got distorted (I'm among those who think the proportions of the Heller kit don't match those of the Musee de la Marine model), and somebody misinterpreted the quarter galleries. The ones in the Heller kit - which look nothing like those in the Berain side view - match the general shapes of those on the Musee de la Marine model pretty well. Imagine a photo of the MM model's stern taken directly from the side; it would look almost exactly like a photo of the Heller kit taken from the same angle. I suspect the kit designers were working from just such a photo; thus they missed the open quarter galleries. That, at any rate, is one possible explanation for why they botched them. The designers clearly were not looking at the Berain side view - and Berain showed open quarter galleries in his other drawing.)
6. The gun barrels in the Heller kit don't have the right proportions for the time period. They're too long and skinny - and the inclusion of the little "dolphins" above the trunnions is at best dubious.
7. The Musee de la Marine model is unfinished; it has no figurehead or other carvings on its bow, no spars, and virtually no deck furniture. There's some discussion earlier in this thread of Heller's ridculous attempt to finish off the bow. There's plenty of room for guesswork about the deck furniture, but I'm strongly inclined to agree with Chuckfan: the ultra-simple ladders and railings are distinctly out of character with the period, and certainly with the exterior decoration of the ship.
8. Several of my earlier comments on various inaccuracies in the kit - the screwed up spar proportions, the pointy-ended belaying pins, the lack of yard parrels - do indeed concern mistakes and omissions that can be fixed fairly easily. My point was that they demonstrate a basic problem with the kit: the people who designed it simply didn't know what they were doing. A person who thinks a belaying pin has a sharp point doesn't know what a belaying pin is for. And (ok, here's a personal opinion; sorry) anybody who doesn't realize that yards are supposed to be fastened to masts has no business designing a ship model.
The people who worked in Heller sailing ship design section (or whatever they called it) in those days were enormously talented artisans whose understanding of the workings of sailing ships was, at best, extremely sketchy. (They demonstrated that repeatedly with their efforts to recycle hulls into different ships - sometimes from different centuries - with results that frequently were, in terms of scale modeling, downright hilarious.)
Shortly after the Soleil Royal was released, the quality and accuracy of Heller sailing ships started to improve markedly; with the Reale, the chebec, H.M.S. Victory, and the two smaller 74-gun ship kits the company obviously was making a genuine effort to appeal to serious scale modelers. Unfortunately it was just about at that time that Heller got out of the sailing ship business.
I'm not at all sure enough information is extant to enable a reasonably accurate reconstruction of Le Soleil Royal to be built. I continue to suspect that, somewhere on the continent of Europe, there are a number of ship modelers and naval historians who would find this whole thread silly, because it rehashes a subject they sorted out years ago. I don't know, for example, whether a set of her hull lines, or any other builder's plans for her, exist. I do know that the French naval archives were, for many years, notoriously poorly organized, but that the situation has gotten much better in recent decades. I wonder if, for example, Jean Boudriot, the dean of the history of French naval architecture, has ever taken on the challenge of Le Soleil Royal. (M. Boudriot has in fact published a book about several famous models in the Musee de la Marine. I haven't seen the book; I wonder if the Soleil Royal is one of the models in question.)
I'm all in favor of reconstructions of important ships for which the available data is meager; I've often cited the Revell Golden Hind as an excellent example. But there is also such a thing as an incompetent reconstruction. In my personal opinion the Heller Soleil Royal falls in that category. But to each his own. As I've said repeatedly in this thread, I don't contend that my low opinion of a kit should prevent anybody else from building it.