At night, after his tutors retired and his mother believed him asleep, the Dauphin lit a candle, spread his charts, and read the coded letters sent from London and Amsterdam. He learned about tariffs, maritime insurance, shipping timetables, and the movement of commodities.
For him, it was not merely sabotage—it was a grand experiment in control.
He observed how a single forged contract could alter the rhythm of an entire empire. How a small deviation in weight or measure could ripple through thousands of miles of supply chain.
It fascinated him.
By early summer, the Phantom Cell was alive.
Letters bearing Finch's seal reached the Admiralty with perfect timing. Orders were placed, deliveries prepared. In Amsterdam, van Dijk's warehouses filled with the rot of Europe's forgotten stock. In Geneva, quiet clerks recorded sums that no one would ever trace.
Dupri reported daily to the Dauphin.
"Everything moves according to plan," he said one day.
The boy nodded, his expression calm.
"Good," he replied softly. "Then we are ready for the second phase."
Dupri hesitated. "Infiltration?"
"Yes," said the Dauphin, his voice steady. "We have touched their markets. Now we must touch their minds."
He turned his gaze to the window, where the sunset cast long bars of light across the parquet floor. "Let them trust us first. Then, when they lean upon our support… we will withdraw it."
There was nothing childish in his tone. Dupri, hardened soldier that he was, felt a chill.
For all its sophistication, the operation was a game played on the knife's edge. One misplaced coin, one intercepted letter, and the full wrath of two crowns would fall upon them.
Leblanc had warned him once, in private: "Sir, invisibility is not absence. It is balance. Too much activity, and someone will notice. Too little, and the system collapses."
Jean smiled faintly recalling the Dauphin's words. "We must be just visible enough to be ignored."
He understood already what few men of state ever did—that power was not in armies, nor in words, but in flow. Control the flow—of money, of goods, of information—and the world bends without knowing why.
By the end of July, reports began to trickle in. A shipment bound for the East Indies spoiled en route. An English contractor in Portsmouth found himself bankrupt after a mysterious delay. A Dutch merchant complained of sudden shortages.
To all appearances, these were ordinary failures of trade.
But in Versailles, in a quiet room behind the silk curtains of the Dauphin's study, every such report was recorded, annotated, and filed. The boy would trace lines between them on a great map, smiling faintly as patterns emerged.
He was learning. Testing. Measuring how far he could reach before the world noticed the tug of unseen strings.
And far away, across the sea, the first cracks in the British colonial machine began to form—hairline fractures that no one yet understood.
In time, historians would argue about why certain expeditions failed, why supplies rotted, why costs spiraled out of control. None would suspect that it began here, in the spring of 1785, under the curious gaze of a child prince and his band of silent conspirators.
A ghost had been born in the heart of Versailles, and it would haunt the empire for decades to come.