Page 16

A Time to Break

Nearly six months passed in slow decay.

August came after a bitter stalemate between the Parlements and the crown, and Minister of Finance étienne Brienne fell. Not from violence but exhaustion.

He had failed to sway the Parlements.

Failed to impose reform.

Failed to revive a dying economy.

The crown’s failures were no longer whispered behind fans or muttered in cafés. They were shouted from the street corners.

Then came the Parlement of Paris, which declared in bold defiance that the king’s will alone could not make law. They demanded the Estates-General—though they had always accepted taxation without it.

And in a panic, Louis reached for absolutism’s last dagger. At Minister Lamoignon’s urging, he tried to dissolve the Parlements and replace them with a Plenary Court—a new body loyal only to the crown. Louis took Rollant’s advice—six months too late and only half of it.

Rollant had stood in silence as the orders were given, knowing what would come. What might have steadied the crown years ago would instead sharpen its collapse.

Soldiers were sent to enforce the new court. But barricades rose in the streets, and stones rained from windows.

The Plenary Court collapsed before it could even assemble. Lamoignon was dismissed in disgrace. The crown could no longer borrow or bluff. And Brienne, with the coffers hollow at last, suspended payments and vanished from Versailles.

The nobles remained unbent, and Louis refused to raise taxes.

In desperation, the king summoned a name the people had never forgotten.

Jacques Necker.

The Genevan. The banker-turned-minister. The people’s idol. The common man’s illusion of salvation.

Rollant stood in the corner of the King’s Cabinet, silent and still. Duty bound him to Versailles, but his thoughts drew back to the streets of Paris, where hunger bred rage, and rage had learned how to fight back. He feared what would come next.

Necker’s blaring banker voice dipped and dove through the air. “The stock exchange has risen suddenly because of my appointment, and we have secured further loans to stave off bankruptcy.”

Louis interrupted the man’s report. “Our future is brighter with your appointment, that is certain. There is hope yet.” The king cast eyes on his newly appointed financial minister as if Necker’s words alone might reverse the kingdom’s fate and calm the storm rising beyond Versailles’ gates.

Rollant blinked long and slow at Louis’ fascination with Necker and repeated Louis’ word in his mind: Hope .

Necker had charmed the people nearly a decade ago with a report that masked the kingdom’s ruin behind glittering numbers.

His popularity had helped bring down Calonne’s reforms—and later Brienne’s—yet now he stood triumphant, granted the seat he had always coveted.

A savior in the king’s eyes. A saboteur, in Rollant’s.

Necker’s thin hands moved in grand, sweeping gestures—as if puppeteering France itself. His self-assured tone grated like splinters beneath the skin.

Before his reconnaissance trip to Paris, Rollant wouldn’t have cared what passed in the King’s Cabinet. He would have stood there, as he always had, indifferent, trapped in a monotonous life that would never end.

Necker’s voice cut through his thoughts. “I propose we convene the Estates-General to achieve the necessary tax reforms, and the Third Estate should receive equal representation to the First and Second.”

Rollant’s chin dropped slightly, and a small sigh passed over his lips. Necker was proposing the exact opposite of his advice to the king.

Louis nodded in agreement with Necker.

Rollant tried to remind himself that they would all be gone in a hundred years, and he would be left unscathed.

Glancing at the row of kings’ portraits on the wall, he tried to return to his prior mindset.

He tried to cling to his old callousness, repeating that nothing mattered. That everything was futile.

But the memory of élise lingered, stirring within the truth: even brief lives left marks. Lives—frail and impermanent—held meaning, and decisions made would echo long after the present generation was gone.

What happened in the King’s Cabinet or on the streets of Paris was important. He had known centuries of lives slipping past him, and none had touched him except élise.

Rollant glanced at the flickering hearth, his breathing steady and even, trying to anchor himself.

The room was warm, almost stifling, and he felt the tickle of sweat at his collar as Necker’s words continued to stir the urge to take action.

Rollant said nothing but shifted his stance toward the king, drawing all eyes—his silent plea not to summon the Estates-General.

Louis met his gaze—and turned away. He’d dismissed Rollant before, brushed off his warnings like dust from velvet.

Louis snapped his gaze back to Necker. Fabric rustling was the only sound echoing in the room as Louis adjusted himself in his seat. “Continue,” he finally said, making his decision, and did not look back at Rollant.

Necker’s voice droned on, an endless hum of debt and diplomatic promises. It might have lulled any other man to sleep.

The crown was doomed, and centuries of building power through blood and sacrifice would come to nothing. Rollant stood as powerless as the suit of armor in the hallway, and King Louis sat in a trap. They both seemed ensnared by forces they could have controlled but did not.

As he watched Louis hang on to the minister’s words, tap his fingers on his chair’s armrest, and fidget with his lock in the other hand, he wanted to ask the sorceress—whom he had not seen since the day she cursed him—what would happen if the crown fell.

Would the curse lift? Would he become mortal?

The thought eased his shoulders: a world where eternity no longer bound him. But the prospect of release, once enticing, now unsettled him. He had only just begun to feel alive again.

élise—she out of all those he had tried so hard not to care about—had stirred hope in him, unexpected and unwelcome, and not felt since the day the sun rose over Damascus as they laid siege to recapture the Holy Land some six hundred years prior.

But in the back of his mind, he knew for certain that hope had no place in a cursed man’s heart.

Rollant’s gaze dropped to the polished floor until Louis’ voice cut through. “Chevalier.” The king appeared before him and shoved him lightly on the shoulder.

Rollant blinked and scanned the room, realizing he was alone with the king. “Your Majesty,” he said with a dip of his chin and a stain of embarrassment on his cheeks.

Louis's eyes flickered with an impatient glimmer. “We are promising to hold the Estates-General in May. After the announcement, I need you in Paris once more. Be my eyes and ears. Observe the people’s moods, demands, and ambitions. Bring me word of the issues they mean to raise. Report to me on what stirs the Third Estate so I can be ready for the Estates-General.”

Rollant thinned his lips. He quieted the urge to speak. There was still time to engage directly with the Third Estate before the Estates-General, but the King would no longer listen to his advice. The King would deepen the divide.

Instead, Rollant nodded. “It will be done.”

* * *

The King’s announcement came at the end of the month, and Rollant found himself on his horse returning to Charonne in mid-September. He didn’t race along the path this time. His horse trotted, and his mind wandered—to élise.

He wondered if she was still alive and had endured the riots and the hunger that plagued the streets of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And if she was alive, would she remember him as fondly as he remembered her, or had the relentless grip of survival erased every memory of him?

He’d follow the King’s command. But he feared what he might find in Paris. And more than that—he feared what Paris might awaken in him.