After three full days of intense, non-stop political maneuvering—of imposing martial law, of forging his monstrous new Triumvirate, of issuing a hundred orders to restore a semblance of order to a traumatized city—Louis was utterly, profoundly exhausted. He had been running on pure adrenaline and the cold, hard fuel of necessity. He had been the General-King, the ruthless negotiator, the architect of a new and terrible peace. Now, the adrenaline was gone, leaving behind a bone-deep weariness and the hollow ache of his victories. He finally relinquished command of the city to his new, untrustworthy allies and made his way back to the one place in the palace that truly mattered.
He returned to the nursery. He had been away for nearly seventy-two hours, an eternity in the life of a sick child. The quiet, herb-scented room was a world away from the smoke, blood, and cynical deal-making he had just endured.
He found Marie Antoinette and Dr. Lassonne by the Dauphin's bedside. The boy was not better. He was markedly weaker. The stress and pervasive fear of the "Night of the Furies"—the distant shouts, the crackle of gunfire, the palpable terror that had gripped the palace itself—had taken a severe toll on his fragile system. His low-grade fever had returned with a vengeance, and his breathing was shallow. He was not asleep, but lay in a state of weary lethargy, his eyes half-closed.
Dr. Lassonne's face was grim, etched with the quiet despair of a physician who knows he has reached the end of his art. "Your Majesty," he said softly, his voice barely a whisper so as not to disturb the child. "The boy's strength is… failing. The agitations of the last few days have undone all our progress. My remedies, the poultices, the willow bark… they are no longer enough. His body is giving up the fight."
Louis felt a wave of cold, nauseating dread wash over him, a far more terrifying feeling than he had felt facing down the mob. He had just saved his kingdom, imposed his will on the most dangerous men in France, only to come back and find that he was losing his son. All his brutal, brilliant political victories felt like meaningless, bitter ashes in his mouth. The desperate, secret bargain he had made with fate—a great victory in Italy in exchange for his son's health—seemed a world away, a fool's delusion. The war abroad was a distant abstraction; this was the real, unbearable front.
Into this atmosphere of absolute despair, a new piece of information arrived. It came in the form of a sealed note from Talleyrand, delivered by a silent and discreet secretary. Louis, expecting another political crisis, another fire to be put out, broke the seal with a tired sigh. But the contents were not what he expected.
"Your Majesty," Talleyrand's elegant, spidery script read, "a curious matter has come to my attention through my contacts in the scientific community, a sphere in which, as you know, political affiliations are often porous. There is a physician of some note in Switzerland, a country doctor from Geneva named Jenner, who is conducting some most radical and intriguing experiments. He claims to have found a way to prevent the terrible scourge of smallpox by inoculating his patients not with the disease itself, as is the dangerous custom, but with a similar, much milder, disease found in cows. He calls this curious process 'vaccination.' The established scientific community, of course, considers him a dangerous crank operating on the fringes."
Louis's heart began to pound, a slow, heavy drumbeat in his chest. Vaccination. Jenner. These were not random names to him. They were landmarks from a lost world, signposts of a future he thought he had left behind forever.
Talleyrand's note continued, "More curiously, one of Jenner's former, and reputedly most brilliant, students, a young English physician named Edward Pym, has been exploring related ideas. Pym, it is said, believes that controlled exposure to weakened or 'attenuated' forms of a pathogenic agent can build the body's natural 'resistance' to the full disease. He has been conducting private, and likely illegal, experiments with heat-treating pathogenic samples before introducing them. He is a brilliant outcast, a man ahead of his time, and he is, by a remarkable coincidence, currently in Paris. He fled England a month ago due to his radical political sympathies and his open support for our revolution."
Louis's hands trembled as he read the words. Heat-treating pathogenic samples. Attenuation. This was not just Jenner. This was Louis Pasteur, a hundred years ahead of his time. This Dr. Pym… was he a crackpot? A fraud like Mesmer? Or was he, by some impossible, timeline-altering miracle, a genuine pioneer? Was this it? A real, scientific miracle, delivered to his doorstep? The bargain he had made was not with fate, but with history itself. Had his violent reshaping of the world somehow shaken loose this piece of the future and sent it hurtling into his present?
The final sentence of Talleyrand's note gave him his answer on how to find the man.
Louis, his mind reeling with a new, wild, and terrifying hope, issued an immediate order to the captain of his guard. "Find this Dr. Pym," he commanded, his voice strained. "Use every agent we have. Check the registers of every inn, every boarding house. I want him found. Bring him to me. Now."
He looked over at his weakening son, a fierce, desperate light burning in his eyes. He was about to do something utterly reckless. He was about to place the life of the Dauphin, the heir to the French throne, into the hands of a radical, unknown, and potentially dangerous foreign doctor, a man whose ideas were considered madness by the established science of his time.
But as the guardsmen rushed to carry out his orders, Louis's eyes fell again upon the final, chilling lines of Talleyrand's message, a detail that, in his initial rush of desperate hope, he had barely registered.
"A word of caution, Your Majesty, on the matter of this Dr. Pym. While his scientific ideas are intriguing, his political associations are… concerning. My sources indicate that he was introduced to the radical circles of Paris by a mutual acquaintance in London… a certain Thomas Paine. He is known to be a frequent and welcome guest at the salon of the Marquise de Condorcet, and is said to be a fervent, outspoken admirer of the political philosophy of the late… Citizen Robespierre."
The words hit Louis like a physical blow. The potential miracle cure, the impossible scientific breakthrough that had just appeared like an answer to a prayer, was not a neutral event. It was politically tainted. It was arriving from the very same network of intellectual, high-minded radicals who had sent the charlatan Mesmer to his door.
He was faced with an agonizing, impossible question. Was this a genuine, miraculous hope? A random gift from the chaotic new timeline he had created? Or was this the most sophisticated, most insidious, and most dangerous Jacobin trap yet? A trap designed not to exploit his wife's faith, but his own secret, impossible, 21st-century knowledge.
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