The Queen's Gambit

When Beaumarchais's army of pen-stained mercenaries got their counter-attack rolling in Parisian streets, Versailles remained a poisoned atmosphere. It was a closed ecosystem, resistant to the people's mood in the city. It was where the Old Guard dominated. They waved their moral indignation like a battle flag, convinced in the belief that the King had found himself in an untenable position. It was a daily tutorial in psychological warfare, a continuous torrent of cold shoulders, biting whispers, snobbish commiserations.

Art felt lonelier than ever. His power beyond palace walls was being sharply challenged, within being entirely zero. He knew he had to reinforce support within the palace itself, to strip away the moderate noblemen who were biding their time, waiting, but he himself was the least capable man to do it. His own presence was polarizing. Any argument he made, however reasonable, would be denied as the self-interest of a man in a hole.

He was unloading his grievances onto Marie Antoinette one evening in the private apartments. The rooms were a sanctuary for him, the only room in the palace where he could strip away the mask of monarchship and speak his mind. She listened intently, hand on belly, serious face. Fear and uncertainty during the previous weeks had instilled a new toughness in her, a horrible, possessive essence for the family and the future in her.

When he finished, summarizing the seemingly impossible task for turning the undecided nobility, she didn't offer sympathy. She offered a strategy.

"You can't win them over, Louis," she stated, her voice firm and collected. "They won't trust you. They see you as an outsider, a revolutionary who speaks in a language of mathematics they are unfamiliar with. When you speak with them, they see a threat. But I... I'm one of their own. I speak their language. Invite me to host a salon."

The plan was so simple, yet so brilliant, that Art was stunned for a moment. A salon. It was the instrument of feminine power in Versailles, a battleground where war was fought with cleverness, with influence, with well-timed gossip, instead of with swords. As a queen, she could invite noblemen who would never accept a direct invitation from him. Her condition provided for the perfect cover: a string of "small, intimate parties" to grind down the days, away from the tensions of public life. It made absolute political sense, yet it was completely deniable.

"Are you certain?" he asked, a wave of protectiveness washing over him. "Opening yourself up to their venom..."

"Their venom is already directed at my husband and the father of my child," she said, her voice unmistakable. "It is my venom, too. I shall not sit over there knitting while they seek with every means possible to destroy our home, Louis. I shall fight."

And so began the Queen's gambit. Invites in the name of Marie Antoinette were written out on palace note paper. They were much-coveted passes. The first salon was a tutorial in political and social chess. It was a stringently edited guestlist, with invitations sent out not only to her adoring inner circle—the Princesse de Lamballe, the Duchesse de Polignac—but also, significantly, a handful of carefully chosen "undecideds." These were big, moderate aristocrats, men like the Duc de Liancourt, who were committed to tradition, yet cunning enough, realistic enough, to disbelieve in Vergennes's bare-faced power play.

The salon lay in one of the smaller, comfortable drawing rooms she maintained, filled with flowers and soft candlelight. Music, wine, and hushed conversation. Any passerby would notice nothing beyond a pleasant society evening. Yet beneath, a discreet operation went on.

Marie Antoinette knew how to be a perfect hostess. She floated through the room, a gracious word here, a shared secret there, making every individual in the room think he or she was the only one who mattered. She never directly discussed the proceedings. That would have been tacky. She steered the dialogue with the hand of a master tapestry maker, weaving a fabric of doubt and sympathy.

She spoke with deep feeling about hopes for her child, with a mother's loving sentiment in her tones. "I hope he has his father's serious mind," she said to one group, "but possibly a little bit of my dash, too. It is so terrible a burden he carries."

She explained the Duc de Liancourt, a man famous for his intellectual passions, about the hours of midnight in the study. "I must admit, I don't understand half of what he speaks of," she smiled sweetly, a hint of self-deprecation in her eyes. "Ledgers and deficits and... audits. But I can see the toll it takes on him. He is a man obsessed with a single, solitary purpose: to secure the kingdom for our son. To leave a house sound and whole, not one dying from the inside out."

She was transforming Art's entire character. He could no longer be the radical accountant, nor the cold-blooded reformer. He could only be the responsible monarch, the loving father, a man who bore the sins of the past for the future.

Her master move happened in the evening. She brought in the Duchesse de Polignac, a significant figure in her own faction but a woman notorious for adoring gossip and for her involvement with the Old Guard, into an innocent-sounding conversation.

"Dear Yolande," the Queen went on, in a girlish tone of curiosity. "You were so close to the dead King, his Majesty Louis XV. You knew his daily routines so intimately. Did he ever speak with you of these dark financial problems? Of furtive orders to his ministers? It all sounds so... unbefitting the big, glorious monarch whom I've only ever heard stories of. He was a man of balls and hunts, wasn't he?"

The question itself was a beautiful, inevitable trap. It put the Duchess in a bind. If she claimed to know anything about such secret transactions, she would be incriminating herself in a potential treasonous conspiracy. If she denied, as in fact she did, the deceased King ever spoke about such things and would never have bothered with the nitty-gritty details of forgery in the Treasury, then she would be personally disbelieving the sworn testimony of the Baron de Clugny.

She stuttered, completely taken off guard. "Why, no, Your Majesty... The King... his mind was preoccupied with weightier issues, of course..."

Marie Antoinette merely nodded, with a look of thoughtful assent in her eyes, and proceeded. Yet a seed of doubt had been placed in every mind where it had been overheard.

By the end of the salon, the tides were changing, not in a huge wave, but in a series of small, crucial currents. The uncommitted nobles left with a changed mind. They had come hoping to be shown a flighty, pouting Queen. They had been shown a clever, tenacious lady standing up for her clan. They began to perceive the trial as a dirty political trick on the part of Vergennes in order to bring down the new monarch for his own advantage, instead of a noble's word against a king's.

That night, when Art checked his internal metrics, he saw the fruits of his wife's labor, a small but incremental change in the political climate.

Court Faction: "The Moderates" - Popularity +10% (STATUS: RECONSIDERING).

Vergennes's Influence (Court): -5%.

He looked at his wife with a new understanding of profound respect and pride. She had opened a second front in his war, waging a war of insight and persuasion he could in no way have fought himself. She was his partner. She was his ally. And she was a highly adept one.