The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

Art spent two days imprisoned in his study, a captive of his impossible decision. The letter from the Empress sat on his desk, taunting him with its elegant writing. He refused sustenance, could not rest, and paced the length of the Savonnerie carpet until he had worn a groove in the thick rug. He felt worse than he had since awakening in this golden hell. He was a isolated man in court, his reforms were going nowhere, and he was being dealt a diplomatic blackmail with his own yet unborn child. All his strategy—a rational, data-based assault on the kingdom's treasury—was turning against him.

He was only just beginning to learn a terrible lesson about Versailles. Here, reality didn't matter. It was perception, perception, perception. It didn't matter that his reductions were a prudent part of a budget; all that mattered was someone thought them an insult. It didn't matter that the Austrian "loan" was financial madness; all that mattered was that refusing it would be taken as a personal snub by the Queen. He was waging a financial war, but his enemies were waging a war over culture. And he was losing.

Necker could examine ledger books and ferret out fraud, but he could not write a satirical retort. He could establish new accounting procedures, but he could do nothing in response to the malicious rumors in palace hallways. Art demanded a different weapon, a different type of minister. He needed a man with an ability for persuasion, a talent for story, a refined art for shaping public sentiment. He needed a man with a talent for propaganda.

He discarded the Austrian letter and grasped a heap his pages had collected for him from Paris—a sampling of the poems, pamphlets, and political broadsides fashionable among the city's salons. Most were fawning encomia to the nobility or biting, unsigned polemics. One pamphlet he happened to notice. It was a short, satirical dialogue, written in a light, ironical hand. It mildly poked fun at formality, the preoccupation with genealogy in the court, yet praised the King's new, "astonishingly practical" focus on the kingdom's finances. It was biting, witty, well-targeted, able to attack the system without impugning the Crown itself. It was excellent propaganda.

"Who wrote this?" Art asked a young page, busied in cleaning the fireplace.

The boy's eyes grew wide. "Oh, that, Your Majesty? It is unsigned, of course. But everyone says it is the work of Monsieur de Beaumarchais."

The name struck a chord in Art's mind. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. He wasn't a noble. He was a low-born watchmaker's son who had clawed his way onto the fringes of court life through sheer, presumptuous ability. He was an inventor, a man of music, a financier, a statesman, and first of all, a playwright. His new play, The Barber of Seville, had been a hit in Paris, a licentious comedy about a clever servant giving his noble master the run-around. He was a scandalous provocateur, a man of incandescent genius and unchecked ambition who lived for nothing so much as sticking his finger in the eyes of the powerful. He was everything.

The idea that struck Art in his mind was so extreme, so in defiance of royal decorum, that a smile crept onto his lips for the first time in days. He would not summon Beaumarchais officially. This had to be conducted in secret. He gave the silent page a secret mission, a sack of money, and an unsigned, sealed letter.

Three days later, a carriage with draped curtains deposited a man in an obscure palace service entrance. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, in extreme nervous excitement, though perfectly dressed, was brought through a succession of rear palace corridors and a servant's staircase, and found himself, aghast, in the very private study of the King.

Beaumarchais immediately fell to his knee, his mind a whirl. Any midnight, closed-door audience with the King could be only one thing: he would be put in prison for his satirical broadsheet and sent off to the Bastille. He had gone too far, at last.

"Rise, Monsieur Beaumarchais," said Art behind his desk. He spoke in a calm, weary tone. "You are not in trouble. Just the opposite, I need your help."

Beaumarchais stood up laboriously, his expression a mixture of profound relief and utter confusion. He gazed at the scene: the King, exhausted, with a spark in his eye, amidst a pile of books and documents in confusion. This wasn't the pampered, distant monarch he imagined. This man worked.

Art decided against ceremony. He thought this man would admire frankness. "Monsieur," he began, "I read your new leaflet. It was smart. You effectively pointed out the absurdity in my current situation."

Beaumarchais gulped. "Your Majesty, it was a trifle, a bit of idle fancy..."

"It was brilliant political rhetoric," interrupted Art. "That leads to where I come in. I have a perception problem. My enemies in this court are masters of a different kind of warfare. They are using tradition, decorum, and rumor to frame me as a rough, unsteady despot. I must respond. Not with royal decrees—that's a hammer, not a rapier—but with concepts. With culture."

He leaned forward, his eyes settling on the playwright's. "I need plays where wit over birth is championed. I need tracts where being frugal is framed as anything but penurious, but patriotic. I hunger for poems and for songs where being thrifty is hip, where justice is noble. I try to bring this kingdom into the future, yet I'm being kept back by men who live in the past. I need you to be my silent revolution's poet laureate."

The playwright sat in stuporous silence. The King of France was proposing, with a straight face, with a completely serious expression, that he, a common man, a satirist, be his private minister for propaganda. It was the most lunatic, the most dangerous, the most thrilling offer he had ever had. Beaumarchais was a man for intrigue, for combat with the status quo. The offer for doing so with the secret imprimatur—and, he presumed, the purse—of the King himself, was an opportunity for derring-do. He looked in the young king sitting in front of him, instead of a stiff monarch, a fellow revolutionary, a pragmatist stuck, as he was, in the very gilded cage he kept rocking.

A slow, bright smile creased Beaumarchais's face. "Your Majesty," he said, his voice with a newfound passionate zeal. "I do, in fact, have a few ideas that might prove handy. One specifically, a continuation, in fact, of my earlier play. A short story about a servant, a man, Figaro, who in a... disagreement... with his aristocratic master over a matter of justice."

In the candlelit study, an improbable alliance was formed, a secret understanding between absolute monarch and subversive artist. For the first time in weeks, there flickered within Art a spark of genuine hope. He still had his impossible Austrian dilemma to resolve, his letter still lying on his desk like a warrant for his execution. But he had something new to weaponize himself with, a weapon for the only battleground on which he had been overwhelmed.

When Beaumarchais left, his head reeling with plots and couplets, Art sat down in his desk chair in front of the two pieces of paper that defined his kingdom hitherto. On one side, there was the Austrian ultimatum for five million livres—the hard, cold mathematics of his universe. Beside it, there was a page of parchment on which Beaumarchais had slapped a title for his new play in a careless hand: The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro.

He glanced down at the two pieces of paper, and the HUD popped him a notification unlike any he had ever seen. It wasn't a status alert nor a request for a decision. It was an upgrade to the system itself.

NEW MECHANIC UNLOCKED: CULTURAL INFLUENCE.

This stat measures your ability to shape the narrative and ideals of the nation through soft power (art, theater, fashion, philosophy). Higher influence unlocks new options and passive support.

Current Cultural Influence Level: 1%. Let the games begin.