The vial in the physician's hand wasn't just a threat against my son; it was a declaration of war against my entire family, and I was about to answer it with a fury they had never imagined.
All the exhaustion, all the bone-deep weariness from the last three days, vanished in a single, silent roar of pure, lethal adrenaline. My mind went unnaturally calm. The world narrowed to that single point of light from the candle, glinting on the tampered glass.
The young physician, Dr. Gallard, was still measuring out the dose, his face a mask of professional concentration. He was innocent. I knew it instantly. He was a pawn, a tool. But he was a tool holding a murder weapon.
I stood up. My movement was slow, deliberate, silent. I didn't want to startle him into dropping it.
I walked over to him. I didn't say a word. I just held out my hand.
He looked up, confused by my sudden presence, my strange silence. "Your Majesty?"
I just kept my hand outstretched, my eyes locked on his. He was intimidated. Terrified. He looked from my face to the vial in his hand, and he placed it in my palm.
It felt cold. Heavy. The weight of my son's life.
I turned it over in my fingers, examining the tiny, hairline crack near the stopper. The sliver of dark, reddish wax. A sloppy, arrogant mistake. They thought no one would ever look that closely. They thought the King was a fool, surrounded by fools.
I looked up from the vial and met the doctor's frightened eyes.
My voice, when I spoke, was a low, terrifying whisper. A sound that didn't belong in a sickroom. "Who else has had access to this room tonight?"
Dr. Gallard's face went white. He was starting to understand that something was terribly wrong. "N-no one, Your Majesty," he stammered, his eyes wide. "Security has been absolute, on your orders. Only the head physician, Dr. Le Monnier, when he checked on the Prince an hour ago, and..." He hesitated. "And one of the Queen's ladies, the Comtesse de la Motte... she brought fresh linens not twenty minutes past."
The Comtesse de la Motte. A name I knew. A minor noble, clinging desperately to the edges of the court. A woman famous for her gambling debts and her bitter loyalty to the exiled Polignac faction.
They hadn't just tried to kill my son. The sheer, demonic evil of the plan hit me with the force of a physical blow. They had tried to do it in a way that would make it look like a medical accident. Or worse. They had used one of the Queen's own ladies-in-waiting, a woman who could get past any guard, to make it look like she was the one who poisoned her own child.
They weren't just trying to kill an heir. They were trying to destroy a queen. My queen.
I closed my fist around the vial. "Get out," I whispered to the doctor. "Tell no one what you have seen. Go to your quarters and lock the door."
He practically ran from the room.
I stood there for a long moment, the vial clutched in my hand, my son's soft, even breathing the only sound in the room. Then I turned and walked to the door. I didn't call the Royal Guard. I called for the only two men in this entire palace I knew, with absolute certainty, I could trust.
Captain De La Tour. And Jean the locksmith.
We didn't take her to a formal interrogation chamber. I chose a small, isolated antechamber, stripped of all its finery. A single candelabra on a plain wooden table was the only light. It felt like a room outside of time, outside of the law.
The Comtesse de la Motte was brought in. She was a woman in her late forties, her face a carefully constructed mask of powder and rouge. She tried to project an air of outraged innocence, but her eyes, small and dark, darted around the room like trapped rats.
I was not a king here. I was not her monarch. I was a father.
I sat opposite her. De La Tour and Jean stood by the door, silent as statues. I placed the small glass vial on the table between us.
I didn't speak. I just waited. The silence stretched, thick and heavy. It was a modern interrogation technique. Let the suspect's own guilt do the work for you.
"Your Majesty," she finally began, her voice a little too high, a little too brittle. "I do not understand this... this shocking treatment."
I ignored her. "The Dauphin's fever has broken," I said, my voice quiet, conversational. "He is going to live."
She forced a relieved smile, but it was a hideous, ghastly thing. "A miracle! God be praised!"
I leaned forward, my hands flat on the table. My voice dropped to a razor's edge. "So tell me, Comtesse. Will you praise God, or will you praise the Duke who paid you?"
Her mask cracked.
A single bead of sweat traced a path through the white powder on her cheek, leaving a tiny, glistening trail. She was a pawn. A stupid, hateful pawn who had been willing to murder a child for a bag of gold or a whispered promise. But she was the only link I had to the man who gave the order.
"I... I do not know what you mean," she stammered.
"Don't you?" I picked up the vial, holding it between my thumb and forefinger. "This contains a distillation of nightshade. Odorless. Tasteless. A few drops in the Prince's tonic, and his fever would have simply... worsened. His heart would have stopped. A terrible tragedy. An act of God."
I looked her dead in the eye. "But God, it seems, was not on your side tonight."
She broke. A choked, ugly sob escaped her lips. "He made me do it!" she cried, the carefully constructed facade collapsing into a mess of tears and smeared makeup. "The Chevalier... he said the Duke would ruin me! Expose my debts! He said it was my duty, for the good of the true France!"
The Chevalier de Sang-Froid. The "Knight of Cold Blood." A fitting name. He was a minor nobleman, a professional gambler and a hired sword. The Polignacs' favorite thug. And, I knew, a man with close ties to my exiled brother, Artois.
This came from the top.
A public trial was still impossible. The word of a disgraced, hysterical woman against the King's own brother? It would be a farce.
I needed to send a message. A different kind of message. Not a legal decree. Not a political maneuver. Something more... personal.
"Captain," I said, my voice devoid of all emotion. "Escort the Comtesse to the Bastille. See to it she has a comfortable cell. She will have a long time to contemplate her sins." I stood up. "Jean. Come with me. And bring your tools."
We found the Chevalier de Sang-Froid in a seedy, smoke-filled gambling den on the outskirts of Versailles town. It was a place where minor nobles and wealthy merchants went to lose their fortunes.
De La Tour's men, my loyalists, quietly secured the building. Jean, his face grim, picked the lock on the back room where the Chevalier was engaged in a high-stakes card game.
We cornered him in the back alley as he tried to slip out. The alley was dark, smelling of stale wine and refuse.
He turned, and the moonlight caught the smirk on his face. He was a handsome man, in a cruel sort of way. He was not surprised to see us. But he was surprised to see me.
"The King himself?" he said, his voice laced with arrogant amusement. He didn't even bow. "To what do I owe the honor? Have you come to arrest me for my debts?"
"No," I said, shrugging off my heavy royal coat and handing it to Jean. I drew my sword. The simple, unadorned practice blade I had been training with every single day since I arrived in this century. "I've come to collect one."
His smirk widened. He drew his own sword, a beautiful, silver-hilted rapier. "A duel? With you? This should be amusing."
He was a professional swordsman. A killer. He expected an easy victory against the soft, clumsy king.
He was wrong.
I wasn't fighting like a nobleman. I wasn't interested in style, or form, or honor. I was fighting with the desperate, brutal efficiency of a man with nothing left to lose. My modern understanding of leverage, of body mechanics, of controlled aggression, made my movements strange. Unpredictable.
He came at me with a flurry of elegant, lightning-fast thrusts. I parried, my arm jarring with the force of each blow. This wasn't a game. This was real.
He was faster. More skilled. But I was stronger. And I was fueled by a rage so pure and so cold it felt like a physical force.
He lunged, aiming for my chest. I twisted, letting the blade slice through the sleeve of my shirt, a line of fire searing across my forearm. I ignored the pain. I had the opening I needed.
I didn't parry. I didn't riposte. I drove forward, inside his guard, and rammed my own blade through the fleshy part of his sword shoulder.
He let out a high, shocked scream of pure agony. His beautiful rapier clattered to the wet cobblestones, the sound echoing in the silent alley.
He stumbled back, clutching his ruined shoulder, his face a mask of disbelief and pain.
I stood over him, the tip of my own sword dripping with his blood. I wasn't going to kill him. Death was too easy. A message needed to be read.
I pressed the tip of my bloody sword against his cheek. He whimpered, a pathetic sound. "Go back to my brother," I said, my voice a low, vicious snarl. I carved a single, deep line down his face, from his eye to his jaw. "Show him this."
I leaned in closer, my voice a whisper. "And you tell him that the next time he sends a dog to threaten my family, I will burn his whole kennel to the ground."
I returned to the palace near dawn. The adrenaline was gone, leaving behind a bone-deep weariness and a throbbing pain in my arm. My coat was stained with blood. My own, and his.
Marie was waiting for me in my antechamber. She hadn't slept. Her face was pale with worry.
She saw my makeshift bandage, the dark stains on my shirt, the look in my eyes. And she knew.
"Louis," she whispered, rushing to my side, her hands fluttering over my wounded arm, afraid to touch it. "What did you do?"
I looked at her, at her beautiful, terrified face. "I ended it," I said, my voice rough. "They will not touch our family again."
As I said the words, a royal page, a young boy, ran into the room, his face flushed, his chest heaving. He skidded to a halt, his eyes wide.
"Your Majesty!" he gasped, bowing low. "A message from the assembly! From the tennis court!"
I stared at him, my mind still caught in the violence of the alley.
"The Third Estate... they have been locked out of the hall!" the boy panted. "They have declared themselves the National Assembly. They are refusing to disperse. They have taken an oath..."