Ficool

Chapter 10 - The Weaponization of Etiquette

Parisian roars died out almost as quickly, and in their stead, the icy, deep silence of Versailles moved in. Art had won the war of the city square with his art, but walking through the palace again, he was walking into hostile terrain. Vergennes' spotlessly slippery Old Guard did not respond by staging an open rebellion or frontal assault. Their methods were far trickier, far Frenchier, and greatly more rage-inducing. They created the weapon that would kill him: his sense of correct etiquette.

In the days following the pronouncement, the court had changed. The fear his actions had initially engendered among the nobility curdled into a silent, unified, and venomous disdain. There was no real disrespect. That would have been a crude, punishable affront. Art was treated to a campaign of perfect, stifling, and malicious obedience. He was the embodiment of the absolute monarch, the center of the universe, and the parallels between him and a leper at table ran so far that they included the theme of inclusion.

It began insidiously. When he appeared in the Hall of Mirrors during the morning audiences, the typical ebb of discourse would not desist. It would simply keep on going, the tone and cadence the same, as if a ghost moved through the chamber. The courtiers would bow with precise accuracy, their faces expressionless masks, before they turned away to continue their discussion, leaving him standing in an unperceived circle of seclusion. His private invitations to the candid games of cards in the private apartments, where the real political maneuvering happened, now mysteriously and unfortunately "lost" by a sloppy page. The informal hunts that he had formerly been 'expected' to attend, now "perfectly arranged," by the moment that he inquired.

His HUD also displayed his new status in graphic detail.

Faction Popularity: Court Nobility (Old Guard) -40% (STATUS: OSTRACIZED).

He was the most powerful man in France, yet systematically, expertly snubbed into oblivion in his own home. He was in theory a king, but in reality a social pariah.

Their actual cleverness lay in turning Versailles' Byzantine protocols against him. Art spoke no second language of the court's protocols, and his every syntactical error was magnified into a capital offense. He took a shortcut one day through the Marble Courtyard, the path his modern mind estimated would be the shortest between one wing of the palace and the other. By the hour, the tale was going the rounds like wildfire: the King, in his pride, had walked down a corridor open only to the monarch on solemn occasions of formal state, irrefutable proof of his dictatorial insensitivity to sacred tradition.

One evening at a long-winded formal dinner, he involuntarily addressed the Duchess of Chevreuse, the aged and rightfully titled Duchess, by the dull "Madame," instead of the prescribed, more respectful "Madame la Duchesse." The Duchess made a barely perceptible wince, a tightening of the eyes, but the damage was done. For the rest of the evening, he sensed the tale being passed around the room in meaningful looks and whispered words. The King was unsophisticated. The King was uncouth. The King did not respect the proper respect of the powerful houses of France.

And all of it boiled down to a climax at a state dinner, a week after the arrests, which was Vergennes' masterpiece of political ingenuity. Art sat at the head of the long table, nominally the guest of honor. But the placements at the table were a piece of strategic genius. On his right sat the old and extremely deaf Marquis de Saint-Simon, grumbling the full length of the meal about the lousy quality of the modern snuff. On his left sat the fervently religious and humorless Comtesse de Provence, expounding to him for two long hours the religious import of proper courtly behavior.

He sat between bore-inducers, locked in a stalemate of conversation. Up the table, he saw the real party. Vergennes was the life of the party, cracking a joke to a table of snickering nobles. The Duke of Orléans was deep in hushed, concentrated debate with some general. And at the other side of the table, sitting like a thrown-over queen, sat Marie Antoinette. She sat among a cluster of loyal friends, the women of the Polignac and Lamballe clans. She laughed at something one of them whispered, a carefree, untroubled sound that hurt. For the entire multi-course meal, she did not even look his direction.

Art sat there, rending his food, the loneliest, most powerful man in the world. Those rich sauces made his tongue taste ashes. He was the King, but they had succeeded in rendering him impotent, in attacking him in a battlefield where his strengths would count for nothing.

His inner thought process was that of righteous outrage. I can balance accounts. I can root out theft. I can rile up a crowd. How do I fight this, though? How do you audit a snub? What is the line-item expense of malicious compliance?

He tried using the HUD to find an exit, a flaw in their plan.

Prompt: "Create a plan for the termination of social isolation at the court."

The translucent screen displayed a list of non-productive, expensive, and likely irrelevant suggestions.

Option A: Host a Grand Ball.

Cost: 50,000 livres.

Projected Outcome: The Old Guard and their allies will send their regrets, citing "prior engagements" or "sudden illness." The ball will be attended only by minor nobles and those seeking favor, highlighting your isolation rather than breaking it. Court Popularity: No Change.

Option B: Issue a Royal Decree Demanding Respectful Treatment.

Projected Outcome: Catastrophic. You cannot legislate respect. The decree would be seen as the act of a weak, petulant tyrant. Court Stability: -10%.Personal Authority: -15%.

Option C: Confront Vergennes Directly.

Projected Outcome: Vergennes will express profound shock and innocence, professing his undying loyalty while masterfully gaslighting you. The confrontation will be fruitless and leave you looking paranoid. Vergennes Relationship: -5%.

Art psychically wiped the screen with a growl of frustration. His talent was of no use here. He had no figures to compute, no binary options with clear outcomes. It was a cultural war, a war of impressions, of a thousand implicit, subtle rules that he did not understand. It was a problem of humans, and his rational mind was a hammer that would not fix a delicate timepiece.

He looked down the table at his opponents, smiling and plotting in their silent language of glances and whispers. He had come out on top in Paris, but now, inch by inch, the terrible truth was becoming clear to him: the route to the revolution did not simply run the length of the boulevards of the city. It ran right through that dining room. And in there, he wasn't simply losing. He was being disintegrated.

More Chapters