"Get out."
The voice was quiet, almost a whisper, yet it cut through the stuffy, expectant air of the royal nursery with the force of a thunderclap. It was so unlike the King's usual measured tone that for a moment, no one moved, certain they had misheard.
Dr. Portal and the assembled physicians froze, turning from the Dauphin's bed to stare at Louis. The King had pushed himself off the wall, his posture no longer that of a passive observer but of a predator about to strike.
"Your… Your Majesty?" Dr. Portal stammered, the gleaming lancet in his hand suddenly looking less like a tool of healing and more like a murder weapon.
"You will not touch him," Louis said, stepping forward into the center of the room. His eyes, which had been dull with grief, now burned with a cold, terrifying intensity that none of them had ever witnessed. "You will not bleed him. You will not purge him. You will not burn him. Your 'cures' are barbaric superstitions dressed in Latin. You are dismissed. All of you. Get out of my sight."
He was shattering every rule of court etiquette, every norm of royal conduct. This was not a polite dismissal; it was a furious, contemptuous expulsion. He was insulting the most respected men of science in his kingdom, men who were members of academies and advisors to dukes. To the onlookers—the handful of high-ranking courtiers who had gathered, the servants flattening themselves against the walls, even Marie Antoinette herself—this was not a calculated decision. It was a terrifying sign of a mind unhinged by grief, a public and shocking collapse of royal decorum. He was rejecting medicine itself.
The physicians, their faces a mixture of shock, fear, and profound professional offense, scrambled to gather their instruments and their dignity. They backed away from the King as if he were the one afflicted with a madness, bowing clumsily before fleeing the room in a state of disarray.
Marie Antoinette rushed to his side the moment the door closed behind the last retreating doctor. "Louis, what have you done?" she cried, her voice a mix of fear and disbelief. "They were our only hope! You've sent them away! Who will help us now?"
"No," he said, his voice ragged, the fury draining away to be replaced by a desperate, absolute certainty. He knelt by his son's bed, tenderly brushing a stray lock of damp hair from the boy's forehead. "They are his executioners. Their hope is a death sentence."
He looked up at his wife, his eyes pleading for her to understand what he could never explain. "From now on, we do it my way. The way I told you. The windows stay open. He will have fresh air, day and night. He will drink only boiled water and the clear chicken broth the kitchens make. He will have complete rest. That is all we can do. That is all we will do."
He had just declared war on the entire medical establishment of the 18th century. In doing so, he had isolated himself completely, making himself look like a grief-stricken madman clinging to peasant notions of fresh air and clean water. He had chosen the lesser of two evils, but to the rest of the world, he had simply chosen madness.
The scene, inevitably, cut away from the silent, tense drama of the palace to a smoky, raucous room in the old Jacobin monastery. News in Paris, especially scandalous news from the court, spread faster than fire in a dry field. The King's bizarre behavior, his furious dismissal of the Royal College of Physicians, was the topic of every conversation. A group of radicals, their voices loud with wine and revolutionary fervor, were laughing about it.
"Did you hear? The great reformer King believes in the miracle of fresh air!" one shouted, slapping the table. "He's become a peasant superstitionist! Perhaps next he'll hire a village witch to wave a dead cat over the boy!" The room roared with laughter.
But one man was not laughing. In a quiet corner, away from the boisterous main table, Maximilien Robespierre sat nursing a glass of water, his face impassive, listening intently to every detail, every exaggeration. He filtered the signal from the noise, the facts from the mockery.
A younger, more fervent ally, a man with the sharp, hungry look of a zealot—perhaps the nascent Saint-Just—leaned in and scoffed. "The King has lost his mind. His grief has broken him. It is a gift to us."
Robespierre shook his head slowly, deliberately, a small, chilling smile touching his thin lips. His voice, when he spoke, was a low, analytical whisper that barely carried over the din. "No. You are mistaken. That is the simple explanation, and therefore it is wrong." He fixed his gaze on his young compatriot. "For two years, we have been fighting a ghost. An idea. We have been fighting a man who was always one step ahead, whose logic was a weapon we could not counter. He built a constitution on it. He balanced a national budget with it. His strength was his absolute, inhuman rationality."
He leaned forward, his pale eyes gleaming with a terrifying, dissecting insight. "This," he whispered, "is the first time he has faced a problem that his logic cannot solve. He cannot run a cost-benefit analysis on a fever. He cannot negotiate terms with a disease. And in this moment of crisis, he has abandoned his greatest weapon. He has abandoned reason for… what? Hope? Desperation? It does not matter. The point is, the machine has shown a ghost. For the very first time, the King is not acting like a perfect, rational system. He is acting like a man. A frightened, helpless man."
Robespierre took a slow sip of water, his mind working with the cold precision of a watchmaker. "We could never attack his strength; it was unassailable. His competence made him beloved. But his weakness… a weakness we can use. The people admired a strong, competent father of the nation, a roi-citoyen. They will not long respect a helpless one, a man ruled by his passions. We will not attack him directly. That would be a mistake. It would create sympathy."
He set the glass down. "We will simply wait. We will watch. And we will remind the people, gently, that the fate of the stable nation he built now rests entirely on the frail shoulders of a sick child, a child whose father has turned to remedies of fresh air and boiled water." He had identified Louis's first true vulnerability. Not a political misstep, but a profoundly human one. He had found the crack in the flawless marble statue.
The final scene returned to the oppressive quiet of the Tuileries. Days had passed, blending into a monotonous cycle of fear and hope. Louis had thrown himself into the role of chief nurse, a routine of quiet desperation. He rarely left the nursery, personally supervising his son's care. He sat by the bedside for hours, watching the boy's shallow breathing, feeling for fever, noting every small change. The HUD flashed a report that was both a small victory and a profound defeat. Dauphin's Health Status: CRITICAL (Deterioration Paused). It wasn't a recovery, but it wasn't a decline. A fragile, temporary stalemate had been reached. Yet below it, the other line continued its slow, inexorable climb: HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY PROBABILITY: 78%... 79%...
A royal secretary, his face etched with sympathy, entered the room, moving on silent feet. He bore a message on a silver tray. Louis, assuming it was another state document requiring his signature, took it without looking up. But it wasn't on the crisp, official letterhead of one of his ministries. It was a rough-printed pamphlet, the ink still slightly damp, from one of the radical Paris sections, the notorious Cordeliers Club. It was an "Open Letter to the Citizens of Paris."
He unfolded it, his blood running cold as he read. The document began with flowery, almost cloying words of support, offering the nation's prayers for the swift recovery of the beloved Dauphin. But the final lines were a masterpiece of veiled political threat, the rhetorical stiletto of a master agitator like Danton or Desmoulins.
"The Nation shares the profound anxiety of its First Citizen, the King. For the great constitutional project we have all so tirelessly built, the stability of our realm, and the future of the liberty of all Frenchmen rests upon the health of this single, precious child. A nation prays he will prove strong enough to bear the awesome weight of its destiny."
They weren't just watching his grief. They were weaponizing it. They had expertly and publicly linked his son's fragile life directly to the stability of the state he had built, turning his private, unbearable tragedy into a public political crisis. The message was clear: if your son dies, your kingdom dies with him.
Louis's hand tightened, crumpling the rough paper into a ball. He was fighting a war on two fronts. In the suffocating quiet of the nursery, he battled biology and fate for his son's life. And outside the palace walls, his political enemies, having finally scented blood in the water, were beginning to circle. The question was no longer just "Can he save his son?" It had become something far more terrible: "Will his desperate attempt to save his son end up costing him his kingdom?"
To be the first to know about future sequels and new projects, follow my official author blog: https://waystarnovels.blogspot.com/