For weeks, Louis had been living a fractured existence. He was a man playing multiple, simultaneous chess games on boards scattered across his kingdom. On one board, he maneuvered the complex pieces of the National Assembly, cajoling and threatening to secure the funding for his war. On another, he directed Carnot, his new queen, to sweep across the board of military logistics, ruthlessly eliminating the corrupt pawns of the old system. On a third, he managed Bonaparte, a knight of terrifying and unpredictable power, preparing him for a gambit that could win or lose the entire match. He had poured every ounce of his energy, every watt of his 21st-century intellect, into these grand, strategic moves.
He told himself he was doing it for the survival of France. He told himself it was the cold, hard duty of a king. But deep in the recesses of his own heart, in a place his analytical mind refused to examine too closely, he knew there was a deeper, more desperate reason. He had been using the vast, complex, but ultimately solvable problems of the state as a shield, as a refuge from the one simple, intimate, and utterly unsolvable problem that awaited him at the end of every exhausting day.
The nursery had become a quiet island of sorrow in the sea of his frantic activity. The Dauphin was having a "good day." It was a term the royal household had come to use for a day when the fever was a low, smoldering ember rather than a raging fire, a day when the deep, relentless ache in his bones subsided into something manageable. He was sitting up in bed, propped against a mountain of pillows, and for the first time in a long time, he possessed the fragile energy to play.
Spread out on the heavy silk blankets before him was his magnificent collection of toy soldiers. They were not the crude wooden toys of a common child. They were exquisitely crafted miniatures, cast in lead and painted by the finest artisans in Paris, a gift from the officers of the Swiss Guard. He had grenadiers in their tall bearskins, cavalrymen on prancing horses, and tiny, perfect brass cannons.
Louis entered the room, the weight of his many wars pressing down on him. He saw his son playing, and his face, a mask of regal fatigue, softened. The boy looked up, and his own pale face lit up with a pure, uncomplicated joy that struck his father like a physical blow.
"Papa!" he said, his voice weak but clear. "Colonel Giraud came to visit! He brought me a present!"
The young Colonel, the new hero of the army, had clearly been instructed by Barnave to pay his respects. Beside the bed was a beautiful, hand-drawn and colored military map of Northern Italy.
Louis felt a lump form in his throat. He forced a smile and sat on the edge of the massive bed, the mattress sinking under his weight. "Did he now? Let's have a look."
Together, the King of France and his dying heir unrolled the map. The Dauphin, with the solemn intensity only a child can muster, looked from the map to his toy soldiers. "Colonel Giraud said this is where the new war will be. Can you show me, Papa?"
With a gentle, slightly trembling finger, Louis traced the projected path of Napoleon's invasion. He explained it in the simple, epic terms of a fairy tale. "This is where our brave soldiers will go," he said, his voice a low murmur. "They will march from here, in our home of France, all the way across these big mountains." His finger crossed the Alps. "And they will come down into this beautiful sunny land called Italy. And they will fight the bad men in the white coats, the Austrians, who want to come and hurt France."
The Dauphin listened, his blue eyes wide with fascination, his imagination filled with the clash of tiny, heroic figures. He carefully picked up one of his toy cannons, a perfect miniature Gribeauval, and placed it decisively on the spot marked "Milan."
"General Bonaparte will put his cannons there," he declared with satisfaction.
Then he looked up at his father. His expression was no longer one of play. It was one of perfect, innocent, and absolute faith. The kind of faith a small child has that his father can fix a broken toy, or chase away a nightmare.
"Papa," he asked, his voice clear as a bell in the quiet room. "When General Bonaparte wins the big war for you… will that make me better?"
The question.
It was so simple. So sincere. So utterly devastating. It bypassed every one of Louis's carefully constructed defenses. It pierced through the layers of the King, the strategist, the commander-in-chief, and the reincarnated accountant, and it plunged like a shard of ice directly into the heart of the terrified father.
In that terrible, clarifying moment, he finally saw the truth of his own psychology. He hadn't just been running a war. He had been running from this room. He had poured all his frantic, desperate energy into the Italian campaign because it was a problem his genius could solve. He could manipulate the variables, calculate the risks, deploy the assets. He could win. And he realized, with a sudden wave of self-loathing, that he had been unconsciously treating that predictable, manageable war as a substitute for this unwinnable one. He had been trying to rack up a victory so total, so brilliant, so overwhelming, that it could somehow, cosmically, balance the scales of fate. That he could present it to God, or to history, or to whatever cruel force governed this universe, as payment for his son's life.
He was no longer thinking rationally. He was a desperate father at a high-stakes table, pushing all his chips in on a single, insane gambler's bargain.
His HUD, the cool, logical extension of his 21st-century mind, for the first time offered an analysis not of the world outside, but of the chaos within. A new, alarming notification appeared in his field of vision, its text a calm, clinical diagnosis of a mind approaching a breaking point.
PSYCHOLOGICAL STATE: WARNING.
Cognitive Bias Detected: High-level Emotional Transference and Magical Thinking.
Analysis: Subject is projecting desired outcome of an insoluble personal crisis onto a soluble external strategic problem.
Risk of compromised strategic judgment due to emotional investment: MODERATE and RISING.
Probable Outcome: Logical fallacies and disproportionate risk-taking in military and political decision-making may result.
His greatest asset, the cold, rational, analytical mind of Arthur Miller, was becoming compromised, infected by the desperate, superstitious grief of an 18th-century father.
That night, Louis sat alone at his desk, composing his final, official orders for General Bonaparte before his departure for Italy. The letter was supposed to be a formal document, a dry recitation of chains of command, strategic objectives, and rules of engagement. But as he wrote, his personal desperation, the terrible bargain he had made in his own soul, bled onto the page.
He wrote a sentence about maintaining discipline, then crossed it out with a violent slash of his pen. He started again, his handwriting growing more forceful, less controlled.
"Victory is not an option, General," he wrote. "It is a necessity. Every cannon you take, every banner you capture, every enemy soldier you drive from the field is a blow struck not just against Austria, but against the despair that threatens to consume us. Do not be cautious. Do not be merciful. Do not listen to the timid advice of old men. Be a thunderbolt. I have given you the means; I demand a result that will echo through all of Europe. For the good of the nation. For the good of us all. Do not fail."
The unspoken subtext hung in the silent room, a desperate prayer from a helpless father to his chosen instrument of salvation: Do not fail me.
He sealed the letter with the royal crest, the hot wax dripping like blood onto the parchment. His hand, for the first time since he had arrived in this century, was trembling almost imperceptibly. He had just placed the immense, crushing weight of his own sanity, and his last, desperate hope for a miracle, onto the young, ambitious, and utterly unsuspecting shoulders of his new general.
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