The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

Victory was a far tougher and maddening enterprise than defeat. In the months subsequent to Jamaica's loss and theinine British surrender, Versailles was the political capitals of the world. The salons of the court, where one used to attend to glimpse the intrigues played, were the bustling centers of serious, pompostrious world diplolasoy. Paris was haggling for the Treaty, and Louis, the successful architect of victory, now sat himself as the wracked negotiator of the appetites of his successful allies.

The discussion was held in the Salon of Hercules, a spacious room whose ceiling depicted the demigod's great achievements. It struck Louis as a bitter irony. He'd achieved the miraculous; now he faced twelve more. It was a tense ecosystem of divergent interests. There was the British delegation led by a proud-faced lord as if he were bad-smelling; defeated, they were yet proud, and they wanted to surrender as little as possible. There was the Spanish ambassador, the arrogant and assertive Count of Aranda, demanding a success his own army had contributed little to achieve. And there was the American delegation led by the phlegmatically practical Benjamin Franklin, himself and his countrymen John Adams and John Jay personifying the nation two years beforehand didn't exist but now bargained on level with old empires.

Leading the way was Vergennes, arrogant and able, luxuriating in the role of casting the deciding vote for a new order for Europe. It didn't take long for it to become clear to Louis that his putative allies were about as hostile to each other as they were to the British. That grand coalition that defeated the war was fracturing when it came to making peace.

The first and most intractable problem was Gibraltar. The Spanish ambassador, on direct instruction from his king, was demanding the return of the strategically located rock on the Mediterranean Sea at its outlet that the British controlled for nearly a century. This was the Spanish question of national honor, their primary goal of the war. The British delegation flatly refused. To give up Gibraltar would be the nation's shame they could not endure, they said.

The Count of Aranda was apoplectic. "This is an outrage!" he bellowed. "We entered into this war as your loyal ally! We have shed Spanish blood! His Most Catholic Majesty, my king, demands the restitution of Spanish soil. In accordance with the sacred conditions of the Pacte de Famille, France owes us support for our cause. We will not sign any treaty, we will not ratify any peace, until the Spanish banner waves anew over the Fortress of Gibraltar!"

Louis had a throbbing headache take hold behind his eyes. He hadn't fought a war and driven his kingdom into bankruptcy to retrieve a rock for his buffoon of a cousin, the Spanish King Charles III. Renewal of a ruinously expensive war over Gibraltar was unthinkable.

The second major disagreement was brought about by the borders of the newest nation in America. Gentle yet firm logic was presented by Benjamin Franklin to support expansive borders, with the United States' territorial reach on one map from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River to the west.

The Spanish ambasador gazed at the map with horror. Spain controlled the massive land mass of Louisiana on the other side of the river. The last thing they desired was a powerful, expansionist, ideologically adventurous republic on their frontier.

"Impossible!" Aranda declared. "This new nation must be limited to the coast. The interior nations are the property of the native peoples, under Spanish protection and direction. To grant the Americans all this land would give life to the monster that will one day devour us all!"

To Louis's utter dismay, he saw his own foreign minister, Vergennes, secretly nodding along with the Spanish. Vergennes, who was the epitome of the ideas of the school of balance of power, didn't want to see the United States emerge as a genuinely great power from the wreckage of the British Empire. He wanted a grateful, subservient American republic looking to French generosity for its life and not an emerging continent-sized rival that one day could challenge France's New World interests.

He was caught between the three-way tug-of-war by his own party supporters. Each plenary session was a new hell of conflicting demands and unstated threats. He was the conciliator and his own party was threatening to tear the peace to bits.

The HUD, one time so sharp and definite in the war, was now a flickering, confusing jumble. Once its projections offered blunt odds, now they were full of wide error margins and dozens of branching, conditional future histories. The history was broken, the old way removed, and the system was struggling to compute the sheer new parameters he'd added.

PEACE TALKS STATUS: STALLED.

Potential Outcome: Gibraltar Stalemate - 65% chance of leading to collapse of negotiations and resumption of hostilities.

Potential Outcome: US Border Dispute - 50% chance of alienating either Spain or America, fracturing the alliance.

The system now offered him no obvious answers, only the maddeningly convoluted chart of probable failures. He was adrift on the sea with the gust of his own making.

He knew he needed to break the stalemate and he could not do it on the grand stage of the salon. He needed to have a quiet discussion, an backroom deal. He wrote Benjamin Franklin a private message requesting yet another secret meeting.

They met on this night inside the very same library where the two men originally forged their secret alliance. Franklin was fatigued but resolute.

"Doctor," Louis said bluntly. "This peace stands the chance of breaking down under the strain of the wishes of my allies. I need your help."

"I surmised as much, Your Majesty," stated Franklin gruffly. "The Count of Aranda is one of the stubbornest men I have ever encountered."

"He will not retreat on Gibraltar," Louis confirmed. "And I cannot, I will not, restart the war that forced me to spend one billion livres already just to defend a rocky barren spot in the Med over. It is for us, Doctor, to be the reasonable men present. There must be compromise."

He walked over to a map on the wall. "Vergennes and Aranda want to confine you to the coast. They fear a strong America. I look to the future more. A strong and successful America favorable to France is the best possible brake on British power. To get the treaty, I have to give the Spanish something. They must feel they have won, that they have truly contained you."

Franklin listened, his face expressionless.

He outlined his program, a harsh, rigid act of diplomatic horse-trading. "I will not support the Spanish attempt to get you beyond the Appalachians. That is absurd. I will, however, compel you to give up concessions on your southwestern boundary. Abandon the claim to the greater part of West Florida. Give the Spaniards their buffer strip along the Gulf of Mexico. It will appease Aranda and give my cousin back in Madrid a territorial victory to boast of."

"And for what?" he questioned with keen eyes.

"In return," Louis declared, "I will place the full and sole diplomatic might of France on your side of the quest for the northern territories. The whole of it below the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. The Ohio Country will be yours. It is the heart of the continent industrially and agriculturally. It is ten Floridas' worth."

He waited for that to sink in for a minute or so before adding the final, critical ingredient. "And as confirmation of our lasting friendship, and to make this accommodation more... palatable... to your Congress to ratify, the French Crown will agree to forgive twenty percent of your nation's entire outstanding war debt with Roderigue Hortalez and Company."

Franklin sat for a long time in silence, drinking it all in. Louis was providing him with the future heart of his nation and forgiving him millions of livres of debt. The price was to give up a strip of southern swampland to appease the Spanish. It was the ultimate act of brilliance, practicality, and blatant cynicism. He was applying France's financial power as leverage to force a territorial giveaway between his other two allies.

"You negotiate tough, Your Majesty," he concluded at last, with theslowly widening smile of gratitude on his countenance.

"I am just an accountant at heart, Doctor," replied Louis. "And it is the best deal on the table."

"Indeed it is," he admitted. "I shall be able to convince my colleagues, and the Congress, of the wisdom of this course."

The deal was struck. The logjam was cleared. But as Louis walked back to his office that night, he didn't feel triumphant. He just felt the tremendous, grinding weariness of the man who'd discovered winning the war was the simple part. It was the peace that wore him down.