Several days had passed since the ignominious expulsion of the Royal College of Physicians. A fragile, nerve-wracking stalemate had settled over the Tuileries Palace, a quiet so profound it felt like the held breath before a scream. The Dauphin's condition was stable, a word that was both a comfort and a torment. The fever had not worsened, the angry swelling in his joints had not increased, and he slept for long stretches, his small face peaceful in the filtered light of the nursery. Louis had turned the royal apartments into a proto-modern sickroom, a fortress against the unseen enemies of the 18th century. The air, kept fresh by constantly open windows, smelled of clean linen and boiling water, not the usual palace scents of perfume and floor wax. Linens were changed twice daily, a level of hygiene that had the palace laundry staff muttering about the King's strange obsessions.
Louis himself was a gaunt shadow of the triumphant figure who had sworn his oath on the Champ de Mars. His fine coats were perpetually rumpled, his face was covered in a dark stubble, and his eyes were hollowed out by sleeplessness. He was exhausted, but he was resolute. He was holding the line.
The line broke on a Tuesday night.
The attack came without warning. Louis had been dozing in a chair by the fire when a cry from the bed jolted him awake. It was a sharp, piercing sound of pure pain, a sound that cut through the palace's quiet halls and straight into his heart. He rushed to his son's side. The boy was thrashing, his small body wracked with tremors, his face contorted. The fever, which had been a low, sullen fire, had roared back to life, blazing under Louis's hand. He was weaker, impossibly so. The fragile stalemate was over; the enemy was advancing again.
His HUD, which had been blessedly quiet, flared to life with a brutal confirmation.
Dauphin's Health Status: DETERIORATING.
ANALYSIS: Pathogen advancing. Systemic inflammation increasing.
HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY PROBABILITY: 81%
The number ticked upward, a slow, merciless clock counting down to a fate he refused to accept. A cold wave of true, bottomless despair washed over him. His initial protocol—his 21st-century knowledge of basic sanitation—was not enough. It was like trying to stop a siege with a well-swept street. He was merely holding back the tide, not turning it. He sat by his son's bed in the dead of night, the silence of the room amplifying the boy's ragged breathing, and the weight of his own failure threatened to crush him.
But Arthur Miller, the man inside the king, was a problem-solver. It was the core of his being. His mind, even when fractured by grief and exhaustion, refused to shut down completely. It began to churn, to search for another angle, another variable he had missed. He began to think beyond sanitation. What else kills patients in the old world? Not just the disease, but the wasting. Malnutrition. Weakness. The body lacking the strength to fight back.
He started to access a different set of memories from his past life. Not the grand sweep of history or the intricacies of political science, but the mundane, half-remembered health advice that permeated 21st-century life. He recalled articles about the immune system, the importance of vitamins in preventing cellular decay, the role of protein in tissue repair. He couldn't have explained the microbiology to save his life, but he understood the core principles. The body was a machine that needed the right kind of fuel to function, especially when it was under attack.
This was how he would fight back. Not with panic, but with a new, proactive regimen. He would go on the offensive. He rose from his chair, his despair transmuting into a new, fierce resolve.
He strode into the palace kitchens in the pre-dawn hours, a terrifying apparition to the sleepy scullions and cooks. He didn't just demand broth; he gave specific, bizarre instructions to the bewildered Royal Chef. He demanded concentrated, clarified beef and chicken consommés, boiled down for hours until they were a rich, savory jelly. He explained, in simple terms they could not possibly understand, that this was the very essence of strength, easily absorbed. He was fighting for protein.
Next, he went to the royal gardeners. The palace greenhouses contained a few precious orange and lemon trees, their fruit an incredible luxury reserved for the most important royal desserts. Louis ordered them all harvested. He personally supervised the pressing of the juice. He was fighting for what he vaguely thought of as its anti-scurvy properties, what his former life knew as Vitamin C.
His final order was the strangest of all. When the weak autumn sun was at its highest, he insisted that the Dauphin's entire bed be moved from its place in the nursery to stand directly in the patch of sunlight streaming through the tall windows. He recalled some distant, fragmented notion of sunlight and health, of a vitamin the skin itself could produce.
To everyone else at court, from the highest duke to the lowest chambermaid, these were the bizarre, esoteric rituals of a grief-stricken king descending into madness. To Louis, it was a desperate, logical application of 21st-century nutritional science. He was fighting a war on a cellular level, using weapons no one else in this world knew existed.
This new, obsessive focus, however, served only to deepen the rift with Marie Antoinette. She saw her husband forcing strange, sour foods on their weakening son while continuing to refuse any conventional medical help. She saw his clinical detachment—his meticulous measuring of juices, his dispassionate observation of symptoms—and mistook it for a chilling coldness. She needed comfort, shared grief, a hand to hold in the dark. He offered her a regimen.
One evening, after she had spent an hour trying to coax their son to swallow a spoonful of the sour orange juice, she finally broke. She confronted him as he stood by the window, charting the boy's fever on a piece of parchment.
"Louis, he is fading before our eyes! He can barely keep down water! And you want him to drink this… this acid?" Her voice was taut with a week of unshed tears. "Dr. Lassonne always said a sick child needs soothing milk-porridge, something to coat the stomach. Not this!"
"The porridge is useless," Louis snapped, his own exhaustion making him cruel, stripping his words of any diplomacy. "It's just starch and sugar. This," he said, gesturing to the cup of juice, "will give him strength. His body needs fuel to fight. It needs tools to rebuild."
"You know nothing of medicine!" she cried, the words finally erupting from her. "You are a man of numbers and laws and ledgers! You are not a physician! You are letting your pride, your stubborn, inexplicable pride, kill our son!"
The accusation, so deeply unfair and yet so understandable from her perspective, hung in the air between them. It was a mortal wound to their alliance. He saw her clinging to tradition, to a fatal ignorance. She saw him as an arrogant amateur, experimenting on their dying child. He had no way to explain why he was right, no way to share the impossible secret that was the source of his knowledge. Any attempt would sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
He could only turn away from her stricken face, his silence a thick, impenetrable wall between them.
Marie Antoinette watched him, her heart breaking. The man she had come to love and trust, the brilliant, steady man who had saved their kingdom, was gone. In his place was this strange, cold obsessive. She could no longer bear the inaction, the strange rituals, the isolation. She had to do something.
Believing her husband was truly lost to a madness born of grief, she made a terrible, desperate choice. Later that night, after Louis had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep in his chair, she crept to her writing desk. Her hand trembling, she penned a short, frantic note. She sealed it with her personal crest and gave it to a loyal lady-in-waiting, a woman who had been with her since she first arrived from Austria.
The message was for Dr. Lassonne. It was a plea, a command, and a conspiracy.
It read: "For the love of God and for the life of my son, come to the palace at once. Use the private entrance. The King must not know."
It was a betrayal, but it was a betrayal born of a mother's love and a wife's terror. She had chosen to fight for her son, even if it meant defying his father.
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