The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

When the fleet circumnavigated the horizon, a chilling and foreboding quiet fell over Versailles. That hectic business of preparation, all those frantic conferences and frantic letters, all came to a standstill. Instead, they were greeted with the deadening silence of the long wait. Their kingdom's future hung in motion, far beyond their reach, and they lived through that suffocating information blackout that separated them from the Caribbean.

Transatlantic communication took months, not moments. A ship that carried news had to withstand the same storms, the same privateers, the same unspeakable vastness of the sea that confronted the fleet itself. Each day that passed incommunicado was an extra day for rumor and foreboding to ferment in the rich soil of the court.

This ordeal of having to wait and remain motionless was a unique sort of torture, worse than the strain of command. When he was about to invade, he was lord, his thoughts busy with logistics and strategy. Now he was nothing more than a man in wait, observer of his own destiny. He couldn't maintain any semblance of placid, kingly assurance, to emit an aura of pure conviction for the benefit of his court. But inwardly, his mind churned and seethed.

He'd sit for hours staring at the great map in the war room, his mind a malevolent persecutor. He pictured the fleet shattered up in a hurricane in mid-Atlantic, the ships lost and dismasted. He pictured some British spy system more effective than his having issued warnings to their admirals, so they made a perfect ambush as the French ships steamed in towards the islands. He secondguessed every decision he'd made. Did I dispatch enough ships? Was information they'd received about these forts accurate? Should I have insisted they bring more food, more water, more men? The perpetual routine of "what ifs" was making him crazy.

The court, without the strong hand of a crisis to keep in check, returned to its habitual mode of rumor and intrigue. Speculation filled the vacuity of information. One morning, some merchant ship coming in from Lisbon would bring a third-hand rumor that a great sea fight had been heard off Barbados. The court would break loose in talk. Had they won? Had they lost? Vergennes would look grimly self-satisfied; Necker would look sick. Two days afterwards, the rumor would be discovered to be utterly false, the drunken fabrication of some sailor. The court's morale would be restored to normal, only to be set in motion again by some new rumor.

The HUD was of no help; it reflected nothing but the volatility of the court's mood, the frantic seismograph of their shared angst.

Court Stability: FLUCTUATING.

Public Confidence (Paris): WOBBLING.

Jamaica Gambit - Status: UNKNOWN.

Louis' only solace was to be obtained in the royal nursery. There he would remain for long periods, gazing at his infant boy slumbering in his cradle. Looking at the small, peaceful face of the Dauphin was a powerful antidote to the storm in his own head. It was a corporeal reminder of what was at stake, of why he'd made this massive wager. This little, frail life was his rock in his raging tide of terrors.

Marie Antoinette was his sole confidante, his sole partner with whom he felt he could open his complete soul to his fears. Late in the evening in the darkness of their personal apartments, the King vanished and he was only Louis, a fearful young man confessing his doubts to his wife.

"What if I was wrong, Antoinette?" he inquired of her one evening, staring into the fireplace. "What if I've sent ten thousand men to their deaths for nothing? What if my pride, my supposed ingenuity in guessing that I might beat all the others, has killed us?"

She would take his hand, her presence a strength of stillness. "You did the best you knew to do, Louis," she would tell him, her voice firm. "You chose to fight with your rules rather than be drawn into a war you did not want to fight. That required courage, not pride. We must trust in that courage, and in the men that sail under your name."

Her implicit trust in him was comforting to his frayed nerves. She was his equal in every possible way, shouldering the terrible weight of his leadership.

As if to suffer through the unease of expecting to hear some tidings from the war were not enough to endure, the world would not wait either. There was a new domestic crisis imminent in the breast of Paris. There had been a string of poor harvests in the northern provinces, and the war logistic disarrangements added to the price of bread so that within the span of a fortnight the price of a simple loaf doubled, and in the working-class sections of the city the mood became stern and irate.

His opponents in court, which national excitement about going to war had held in abeyance, took advantage of the moment. There were rumors again, this time in the drawing rooms of the Old Guard. The King, they whispered, was so busy with his grand far-away wars that he did nothing to prevent his people's starvation back home. They blamed the war, his war, for the shortages and the skyrocketing expenses. It was a gripping, lethal storyline.

Louis was forced to change gears, to tear his mind away from the Caribbean and focus it on Paris' bakeries. He applied the same single-minded, logistical thinking that he'd applied to the invasion.

"It's not a supply problem," he declared in a special council meeting, slapping a report onto the table. "The southern crops were enough. This is a transportation and corruption problem. The grain is not making it to the city, and that little that does manage to get through is being hoarded by speculators to generate a price increase."

He issued at once a series of royal decrees. He ordered the army, mostly idle with the fleet fighting, to create transportation convoys, moving grain from the south regions of plenty to the capital without the corrupt middlemen and provincial governors who were profiteering from the crisis.

Then he called on Necker. "The people will not wait for the market to correct itself. We must act today." He authorized the spending of the "Dauphin's Fund," the profits of the wildly successful bonds, to temporarily defray the cost of Parisian bread, with the speculators having no recourse but to lower their prices or be ruined.

Necker was shocked. "Your Majesty, that's the war chest! To spend it on bread..."

"Minister," Louis said definitively, "I will never be able to win a war in Jamaica if I lose the fight in Paris. Starving citizens are more dangerous than the entire British navy. This will be a political price we will pay. Consider it a stability investment in the home country."

His bold steps paid off. Military convoys arrived one after another within a week. Bread price stabilized and afterwards came down. Crisis was averted. The HUD recorded his victory: Popularity (Paris): STABILIZED. Unrest Risk: LOW.

He'd beaten a two-front war, maintaining a home food crisis in abeyance while he waited to learn the results of his gargantuan military leap of faith afar. But the episode was a chilling, terrifying omen of how precarious his status was. His entire reign was a tightrope act, a desperate fight to keep a dozen different crises from raining down all at once. And the heaviest burden, the one that could shatter it all, was still somewhere out there, drifting in the deadness of the big, open ocean.