The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

July 14th was a sultry, hot day at Versailles. The King's study was hot and still, oppressive with suffocating terror. The philosophical argum ents of the National Assembly seemed a long-gone lifetime's nonsense. The revolution today was not about articles of constitutions and ideas of philosophy. It was a savage, animalistic, and awfully distant growl, a storm gathering over Paris and they, the representatives of the people or so they thought themselves to be, could only gaze on the lightning and wait for the thunder.

Louis stared down a large Paris map and his hands were locked behind his back. The study was again a crisis room but a crisis room of a different kind. In past crises Louis had been the motor, the man who decided. He was now merely a spectator, a general away from the battlelines and dependent on the discordant and incongruous reports of his scouts.

He was surrounded by the most influential men of France and they were all equally powerless. Necker strode and wrung his hands, his face the image of financial distress and almost certainly running the cost of the assaulted properties through his mind. Lafayette paced and appeared torn between the King and the people's entreaties, his uniform seeming all the more clean and tidy for the commotion. Mirabeau leant against a shelf of books, his lazy eyes drinking it all in and his face a mask of grim intellectual curiosity, as a naturalist who is watching a volcano prior to blowing its top.

A group of horsemen on horseback, their horses riding hard, arrived every half hour or so with a new, more terrifying chapter of the story. Each communication was read aloud and contributed another layer to their combined terror.

This first report, arriving mid-morning, was shocking but hardly apocalyptic. "A huge but disorderly crowd, consisting of thousands of people, has gathered in front of the Bastille," the courier gasped, his chest swelling and falling. "They carry pikes and axes. They demand the governor surrender the fortress's gunpowder and the prisoners be released."

A hardliner general, the Duc de Broglie, a man who thought all problems to be nails and the answer the hammer of the troops, started. "A rabble. That is all. Issue the command, Your Majesty. The Swiss Guards are loyal. One disciplined charge with bayonets and the streets will be cleared in an hour. Force must be used to re-establish order before the cancer gets out of control."

Even before Louis could process the suggestion, another horseman rode in looking white with shock. "Fired on!" he announced, collapsing into the room. "The Bastille garrison... they fired on the crowd! Bodies in the square! The people are enraged! The French Guards who have deserted us... they're bringing cannons up and aimed directly at the fortress walls!"

The room immediately became colder. This was no longer a riot; this was an armed uprising.

Lafayette hurried on. "Your Majesty, no! To put the troops out now would be to light the fuse of a civil war! It would be a bloodbath! We cannot shoot the people of Paris! I must go to them. We must show ourselves, speak to them, try and calm them down! Common sense must assert itself!"

"Reason?" snarled Mirabeau from his corner, his tone heavy with sarcasm. "You'll find no reason in that square, Marquis. Fury and gunpowder only. Too late for words."

A third courier entered, his account a confusing combination of hope and fear. "The commander of the fortress, the Marquis de Launay, attempts to negotiate. He has sworn not to fire if the crowd retreats. But they will not obey. The people attempt to raise the drawbridge!"

These generals in the article were paralyzed, ensnared in a debate of the powerless. All options were a stain on the planet. To turn to violence, as de Broglie demanded, was an atrocious crime, a king demanding his own people be murdered. The HUD reinforced the instinct of Louis, its red text being an obvious warning against the general's suggestion.

PROPOSED ACTION: Send in the Swiss Guards.

PROBABILITY OF RESTORING ORDER: 20%.

PROBABILITY OF MASSACRE & FULL-SCALE CIVIL WAR: 80%.

But to do nothing, just remain here twelve miles away while the capital of his kingdom plunged into bloody anarchy, was a disgraceful failure to do his duty. He was the King. He was the fountainhead of order, the absolute sovereign. And all he was capable of doing was remain immobile.

He looked from face to face. The hawk justifying bloodshed, the idealist justifying rationality, the pragmatist justifying doing nothing. All of them were trapped, the authority they exercised an illusion. The real authority now lay in the hands of an indignant faceless, nameless crowd. He felt the control over "his" revolution, the revolution so finely controlled from his throne, slipping away from his hands like grains of sand. It never belonged to him. Now it belonged to the streets.

The final report of the afternoon was delivered by a man who was not a military courier but a shaken, tired Paris municipal employee who ran from the riot. His clothes were torn apart, and a smear of soot disfigured his cheek.

"It's over," he gasped, his throat burned raw from shock. "The fortress... it fell."

He recounted the last hours. The crowd, enraged about the previous shooting, had poured into the inner court. The tiny garrison of largely veteran troops had been overmatched. The governor, de Launay, had surrendered on the condition that he and his men would be permitted to march to the Hôtel de Ville.

"And the prisoners?" Necker asked, still clutching to the crowd's one of the original demands.

He snarled in a vicious, hysterical laugh. "The prisoners? Seven of them. Four forgers, two lunatics, and one compromised aristocrat imprisoned on the orders of his own family. That was the extent of it." He shook his head, his eyes convulsed. "The crowd's inside now. Tearing the structure apart limb from limb. They threaten to leave not a stone standing on another."

A dense, heavy silence hung over the study. The unthinkable had happened. The Bastille, the colossal rock memorial to monarchical authority that over the course of four centuries towered over the Paris sky line, a fortress that outlasted siege from overseas armies, was taken from the authorities by a mob armed with pikes and with fervor. It was a blow physical and emotional from which the monarchy might never recover. The revolution of the mind and the argument was over. The revolution of blood and violence was only just begun.