While the streets of Paris devolved into a patchwork of localized, brutal gang wars, the Tuileries Palace was an island of surreal, terrified silence. Every gate had been barred, every window shuttered. The palace was on a full lockdown, its perimeter secured by the grimly professional Swiss Guards and the handful of National Guard battalions whose loyalty to the King was considered absolute. Yet the immense stone fortress, with its gilded rooms and priceless tapestries, felt less like a castle and more like a cage. The sounds of the city—distant shouts, the crack of an occasional musket shot, the tolling of the emergency tocsin from a renegade church tower—filtered through the walls, constant reminders of the chaos the King himself had unleashed.
Louis was in his study, which had been transformed into a makeshift command center. He stood with Barnave and Talleyrand around the great map of Paris, the same map where just days ago he had made his fateful decision. They were no longer commanders moving pieces on a board. They were men huddled around a sputtering radio in a besieged bunker, listening to the sounds of a battle raging just beyond their sight. Frantic, breathless, and often contradictory reports arrived every few minutes, delivered by a handful of trusted, terrified agents who navigated the dangerous streets to bring them news.
The King's HUD, his secret window into the quantitative soul of his kingdom, was a flickering, chaotic mess of data he could not act upon. The numbers cascaded in a waterfall of red, a clinical diagnosis of a city in the throes of a seizure.
PARIS MUNICIPAL STABILITY: -90% (CRITICAL - STATE OF ANARCHY)
FACTIONAL CONFLICT LEVEL: EXTREME. Open warfare between Dantonist/Cordelier and Robespierrist/Jacobin elements.
NATIONAL GUARD EFFECTIVENESS: -75% (Paralyzed by conflicting orders and factional loyalties).
RISK OF UNCONTROLLED SPREAD OF VIOLENCE TO NEUTRAL SECTIONS: HIGH.
Each new report, each new data point, only deepened the sense of a plan spiraling wildly out of control. Barnave, who had argued so passionately against this devil's bargain, was ashen-faced. His idealism was being mugged by the brutal reality of what he was hearing. An agent reported that the Dantonists, in their zeal, had not just silenced the Robespierrist presses; they had burned the entire printworks to the ground, along with the neighboring buildings. Another told of how a mob had mistaken a well-known moderate deputy from The Plain for a Jacobin and had nearly lynched him before he was rescued.
"This is not a political purge," Barnave said, his voice a strained whisper. He looked at Louis, his eyes filled with a horrified accusation. "This is a pogrom. We did not unleash a political strategy, Your Majesty. We have unleashed hell."
Talleyrand, ever the calm center of any storm, remained outwardly composed, but even he, a man who viewed human affairs with the detached amusement of a bored god, seemed unsettled by the sheer ferocity of the violence. "The Dantonists are proving to be… more vigorous than I anticipated," he remarked, his voice a dry masterpiece of cynical understatement. He tapped the map, his long, pale finger indicating the Rue Saint-Honoré. "The outcome is irrelevant if they fail to secure the primary target. All this is just noise. The only signal that matters is the fate of Robespierre."
Louis felt a profound, suffocating sense of impotence. It was a feeling he had not truly experienced since the first terrifying days of his reincarnation. He had paid for this chaos. He had willed it into being with a single word. But he had absolutely no control over its course or its outcome. He had provided the gold and the pretext, and then Danton, a creature of pure, elemental force, had taken over. He had to simply stand here, a prisoner in his own palace, and wait to see if the monster he had hired would succeed in killing the other monster that was hunting him. He felt less like a king and more like a man who had hired an assassin and now must wait for news, hoping that the killer, having finished his work, did not decide to murder his employer as well for being the only witness.
This was a new, terrifying lesson in the nature of power. He, Arthur Miller, the man of data, of systems, of control, had deliberately created a situation that was pure, random, uncontrolled chaos. The probabilities on his HUD were meaningless now, because they were changing second by second with every street fight, with every decision made by a drunken mob leader three kilometers away. He was gambling not just with the future of France, but with his own life, on the actions of a corrupt demagogue.
A new, chilling thought began to form in his mind, a strategic possibility so dire he had not even considered it. He had analyzed the binary outcome: a Danton victory or a Robespierre victory. But what if they both lost? What if they simply bled each other to death, decapitating both major radical factions and leaving a smoking, catastrophic power vacuum? Who, then, would fill it?
His eyes widened with a new fear as he stared at the map of Paris, at the location of the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the Paris Commune.
As if on cue, the doors to the study burst open. A new agent, a man Louis recognized as one of his most reliable, staggered into the room. He was a former Swiss Guard, a man named Weber, his face was smudged with soot and there was a crude bandage wrapped around his forearm, dark with blood.
"The Duplay house," he gasped, leaning against the doorframe for support. "It's a fortress. Robespierre's men… Saint-Just, Couthon… they are fighting like fanatics, firing from the windows. The mob can't get in. Santerre's men… they've set the building on fire. They mean to burn him out."
Louis felt a flicker of grim satisfaction. The primary objective was close to being achieved.
"But that is not the worst of it, Your Majesty," Weber continued, taking a ragged breath. His eyes were wide with alarm. "The Paris Commune. They have seen their moment. The council has declared a state of emergency. They are not taking sides with Danton or Robespierre. They have mobilized their own loyal battalions of the National Guard, the ones from the most radical sections like Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel."
He pushed himself upright, his voice urgent. "They are marching now. Their spokesmen are declaring on the street corners that they are acting to 'restore order from all criminal factions' and to 'save the Republic from its own corrupt leaders.' They are not trying to stop the fighting. They are making a play for absolute power themselves."
The color drained from Barnave's face. Talleyrand let out a soft, almost inaudible curse. Louis stared at the map, the horrifying new reality crashing down upon him. His brilliant, ruthless gambit had not produced a clear winner. It had not resulted in one of his enemies eliminating the other. It had created a three-sided civil war in the heart of Paris, with his two targets now joined by a third, even more radical and unpredictable force. The board was no longer black and white. It was black and white and blood red, and all three were now his enemies.
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