The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The storming of the Bastille had been an event so titanic, so world-changing, that for some time no words were forthcoming in the King's study. They were men lost at sea, their political atlases made irrelevant by a geologic upheaval. The prison had been greater than symbolic; it had been part of the royal imagination, an emblem of an immutable, five-hundred-year power. Its loss was more than strategic; it was conceptual. The term "impossible" had literally been beaten out of their political lexicon.

And yet the complete horror of the day had yet to be brought. The final courier of the evening rode in after dark. He was no professional messenger, but a frantic youth employed by the Paris city administration, a man who had himself beheld the day's ultimate atrocity. The youth lurched into the study, fine clothes stained with something dark, eyes bulging with a distress that transcended political outrage.

"Your Majesty," he started, his voice being a shaking, reedy sound. "The governor of the Bastille... the Marquis de Launay..."

"What about him?" asked Vergennes brusquely, impatience in his voice. "Is he staying at the Hôtel de Ville as agreed?"

The young clerk shook his head, a movement of deep, impotent negation. He could not shape the words. He gulped, staring at a spot somewhere on the far side of the room's distant bulk. "They never reached the Hôtel de Ville," he whispered.

He started to tell the story, and as he did, a shiver greater than any political terror fell on the room. The abstract entity of "the mob" was soon to be invested with a frighteningly concrete body.

The clerk had been part of the escort, a small detachment of the newly formed National Guard, attempting to hustle de Launay and the city's chief magistrate, the Prévôt des Marchands, Jacques de Flesselles, through the churning, screaming streets. The crowd, he explained, was not a disciplined body. It was a hydra, a thousand-headed beast roaring with a mixture of triumph, rage, and wine.

They had promised safe conduct for de Launay, yet only citizen militia leaders had issued the promise. The mob had issued no such promise. They did not see de Launay as being under any prisoner-of-war status. They saw only the man responsible for having shot at their sons and their brothers. They mobbed the small escort, chanting revenge.

"They dragged him down," the clerk explained, breaking. "In the Place de Grève. They were like wolves. They had knives, bayonets, bare hands as well... He implored for mercy. Then he swore at them. He kicked at a man, a cook, in the testicles. And then..."

The clerk's eyes closed as if attempting to repress the memory. "And then they were at him. I saw a man with a butcher's knife… and another with a sword… It was all over in a moment. But it wasn't. They were… cheering. A great, jubilant roar, as if they had won some magnificent war."

A feeling of illness seized Louis. The 21st-century mind, accustomed to sanitized violence on television or explained in matter-of-fact, clinic language in the paper, was fully incapable of being prepared for the brutal, medieval viciousness of the scene under description.

"And Flesselles?" asked Necker in an almost inaudible tone.

"The same," the clerk said, his voice dull with weariness. "They accused him of betrayal, of having intentionally dispatched them to the incorrect armories. They had discovered a note on him that they alleged was confirmation. They shot him on the steps of the city hall."

There was a long, terrible silence in the room. Louis listened to the frantic ticking of the great mantelpiece clock, each tick being a second in an intimidating new world.

But the clerk was not finished. "Then," he said, his voice dropping even lower, "they brought out the pikes."

He outlined the way the crowd had discovered a butcher who would perform the operation. The way the heads of de Launay and Flesselles had been cut off their bodies. The way they had been impaled on the sharp points of long pikes. And the way the mob, now turned macabre, celebratory procession, had set off carrying their bloody trophies through the Paris streets. He outlined the appearance of the heads, the bloody matted hair, the staring eyes, bobbing above the cheering dancing throng. Women reaching out to stroke dead men's faces, laughing.

Louis felt a violent, visceral reaction. He turned away, a hand clapped over his mouth, and fought the urge to be physically sick. The entire edifice of his revolution, the grand, intellectual project of building a just and rational state, of winning a clean victory in a courtroom, of managing public opinion through clever plays—all of it seemed like a naive, childish fantasy in the face of this.

This was not the enlightened "nation" he had instilled with power. This was not the rational citizenry he had learned of in the cahiers. This was something ancient, something savage. A mob thirsty for blood feasting on a human sacrifice. His internal dialogue was a shout of sheer astonishment and horror. These are the people I have been defending? This is the 'sacred will' of the nation? They are not rational citizens insisting on their rights. They are wild men.

A deep and profound fear began to bloom in his heart, a fear not of the nobles or the foreign kings, but of the very people in whose name this revolution was being fought. He had seen them as a force to be harnessed, a tool to be used against the Old Guard. He had been a fool. They were not a tool. They were a force of nature, a wildfire, and he had just spent the last year diligently soaking the entire kingdom in oil.

The other men in the room were equally shattered. The nobles, even the hawks like de Broglie, were subdued, their faces white. The raw, populist violence they had always abstractly feared was no longer hypothetical. It had a face, and it was on a pike.

It was Mirabeau, the consummate realist, at last who shattered the silence. He breathed a long, deep sigh, the sigh of a man gazing at an unsolvable problem.

"Well, gentlemen," he gazed at them with eyes dark with weary irony. "The people have taken matters into their own hands. The loss of a fortress is a political statement. A head on a pike... that is a declaration of purpose."

He gazed around the room until at last he set eyes on the King.

"The question is no longer whether the King shall condescend to head the revolution," declared Mirabeau, his words a cold, brutal encapsulation of their new world. "The question now is whether the revolution shall endure a king."

The power politics of the room, of the nation, of the world had all been turned on their heads, violently, bloodily, once and for all. Louis was no longer the strategist. At best, he was a piece on the board that had just caught on fire.