I had defeated armies and aristocrats, but I was about to be defeated by a piece of paper.
The headline on Jean's broadsheet was a punch to the gut, but a headline is just ink. I needed to see the blood.
I threw a rough cloak over my clothes, hiding the fine fabric of my coat. Jean grabbed a battered tricorn hat. We slipped out of a side door of the Tuileries, bypassing the guards, and walked into the gray Parisian morning.
We didn't have to go far. A bakery on the Rue Saint-Honoré was already besieged.
A line of fifty people snaked down the block. The mood was ugly. Shouting, shoving, the sharp scent of panic in the air.
I pushed my way to the front, keeping my head down.
A woman, her face thin and worn, was standing at the counter. She was holding a handful of the new Assignats—the paper money issued by my government. They were crisp, blue-inked, stamped with the seal of the Nation.
She held them out to the baker like a plea. "It's twenty livres," she said, her voice trembling. "It says twenty right there."
The baker, a burly man with flour in his beard, didn't even look at the money. He shook his head.
"Coin only," he grunted. "Or silver. I don't take the paper."
"But it's the law!" the woman cried. "The King said it's money!"
"The King can say the moon is made of cheese," the baker spat. "Doesn't make it true. That paper is trash. It lost half its value since yesterday. Bring me silver, or get out."
He gestured to the door.
The woman stared at the paper in her hand. It represented her wages for a month. Now, it couldn't buy a single loaf of bread. She crumpled, sobbing, and turned away.
I watched her go. The paper in her hand was a promise I had made. A promise I had broken.
The people didn't trust the currency. And if they didn't trust the money, they couldn't buy food. And if they couldn't buy food, they would riot. But this time, they wouldn't be storming a prison to free victims. They would be storming my palace to kill the counterfeiter.
Me.
I returned to the Tuileries and summoned the Finance Committee immediately.
The room was tense. Necker, the Finance Minister who had once been the darling of the people, looked like he hadn't slept in a week. Talleyrand sat by the window, drumming his fingers on the sill.
"It's a catastrophe," Necker wailed, throwing a stack of reports onto the table. "The currency has lost forty percent of its value in a week. Bread prices have doubled. Firewood has tripled."
"Why?" I demanded. "The land is there. The Church estates are worth billions. The money is backed by solid assets."
"It's the fakes," Talleyrand said calmly.
He reached into his pocket and tossed two Assignat notes onto the table. They looked identical.
"One of these was printed by the Royal Mint," he said. "The other was printed in London. Or maybe in a cellar in Koblenz by your brother Artois."
I picked them up. I couldn't tell the difference.
"They are flooding the market," Talleyrand explained. "The British, the émigrés... they are printing millions of fake notes and smuggling them into France. It's economic warfare. They are drowning us in paper to destroy confidence."
"We can't stop it," Necker moaned. "We can't check every bill."
I stared at the two notes. They were right. Paper was easy to copy. Trust was hard to earn.
I stood up and paced the room. My accountant's brain was whirring, looking for an angle, a loophole.
"We can't stop the fakes," I said. "So we change the currency."
"Reprinting will take months," Necker argued.
"Not paper," I said, turning to face them. "Metal."
They stared at me.
"Metal can't be printed in a cellar," I said, the plan forming rapidly. "It has intrinsic value. It rings when you drop it. The people trust weight."
"We have no metal!" Necker cried. "The mines are empty! The treasury is empty!"
"France is full of metal," I said. "We just have to harvest it."
I looked at Talleyrand. "The bells."
He raised an eyebrow. "The church bells?"
"There are thousands of them," I said. "In the monasteries we closed. In the chapels we nationalized. Bronze. Copper. Tons of it."
Talleyrand laughed, a dry, incredulous sound. "You want to melt the bells of Notre Dame? The people will stone you for sacrilege."
"Not the active churches," I said quickly. "Just the closed ones. The empty ones."
I paused. "And... the royal plate."
The room went silent.
"Your Majesty?" Necker whispered.
"The gold," I said. "The silver. The dinner services. The candelabras. The statues in the gallery. Everything in this palace that isn't nailed down."
"But... the history," Necker stammered. "The legacy of Louis XIV..."
"Louis XIV is dead," I snapped. "My people are hungry. If the King gives his gold, the currency is real. It's a signal. It says I am betting everything on this."
That afternoon, the courtyard of the Royal Mint became a furnace.
I stood there as wagons arrived from the Tuileries. Servants unloaded heavy crates.
I walked over to one. I pulled out a heavy, golden goblet, encrusted with gems. It had belonged to the Sun King himself. It was a masterpiece of art.
I walked to the crucible, where the molten metal bubbled and hissed.
A crowd had gathered at the gates. They watched in silence.
I held the goblet up. The sunlight caught the gold. Then, without hesitation, I threw it into the fire.
It sank into the molten soup with a heavy gloop.
A gasp went through the crowd. Then, a cheer.
"Melt it all!" I shouted to the mint workers. "Turn the past into the future!"
For the next week, the mint ran day and night. Smoke poured from the chimneys.
The first new coins were struck. They were rough, heavy bronze and copper pieces.
I held the first one in my hand. It felt warm.
It didn't have my face on it. I had ordered a new design. It showed a woman holding a scale. Liberty.
We flooded the markets with the new coin. We set up exchange booths. Bring in your paper, get metal.
It worked. Barely.
The panic subsided. The baker on Rue Saint-Honoré took the heavy copper coin, bit it, smiled, and handed over a loaf of bread. The prices stabilized. The hyperinflation halted.
We had stepped back from the edge of the abyss.
Late that night, I sat in my study, exhausted. The crisis was managed. I poured myself a glass of wine—from a glass bottle, not a gold goblet.
A knock at the side door.
It wasn't a guard. It was Jean, looking nervous. Behind him loomed a man I recognized instantly.
Georges Danton.
He was massive, scarred, loud, and terrifying. The leader of the Cordeliers Club. A man who could summon a mob with a whisper.
He didn't bow. He walked in and sat on the edge of my desk.
"You fixed the bread, King Louis," he rumbled, his voice like gravel in a churn. "Melting the bells. Smart. Very smart."
"Is that why you're here, Danton?" I asked. "To compliment my fiscal policy?"
"No," he said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a newspaper. It wasn't French. It was German. Printed in Vienna.
He slammed it onto the desk.
"I'm here to warn you," he said, his face grim. "You put out the fire in the bakery. But you lit a fuse in the powder magazine."
I looked at the paper. I couldn't read German, but I recognized the date. And the seal.
"Your letter to the Emperor?" Danton said, tapping the page. "The secret one? The one where you talk about your 'partnership' with Austria?"
My blood froze.
"It's all over Vienna," Danton said. "And by tomorrow morning, it'll be translated and all over Paris. The people know you're secretly writing to the enemy."
He leaned in close. "You saved the economy, Louis. But you just lost the trust of the street."
I stared at the paper. The messenger I sent was loyal. He wouldn't have leaked it.
The leak didn't come from the road. It came from the source.
Someone inside the palace—someone close enough to know the contents of that letter—was still working against me. I had caged my brother, fired the staff, and bricked up the doors.
But there was still a spy. And now, everyone knew my secrets.