Her question—"Who are you, Louis?"—wasn't an accusation; it was an invitation. And I had to give her a lie that felt like the truth.
My heart was a jackhammer against my ribs. A dozen scenarios flashed through my mind, each one ending in disaster. The truth? Hi, I'm Alex Miller, an accountant from the 21st century. I woke up in your husband's body. The good news is I'm great with spreadsheets. The bad news is we're all slated for execution.
Yeah, that wouldn't work.
I needed an emotional truth, not a factual one. Something that would explain the jarring shift in my personality. Something that would make her see me not as an imposter, but as a changed man.
I didn't look away. I held her gaze, letting her see the genuine exhaustion and stress that were etched into this stranger's face I now wore. This was the most important sales pitch of my life, and my life was the commission.
"I am the man who finally woke up," I said, my voice low and raw.
Her brow furrowed in confusion. "Woke up?"
"Yes." I took a small, hesitant step closer. "For years, I was sleepwalking through my own life. Through my own reign. I let others guide me, tell me what to think, what to sign, what to eat." I gestured vaguely at the opulent room around us. "I was a king in name only."
The words felt surprisingly true. The historical Louis XVI was a passive man, a king who let things happen to him.
"And then…" I paused, letting the silence hang heavy. I let my gaze drift to a portrait of our children on the far wall. "I looked at our children. I looked at the real numbers in those ledgers. And I saw the cliff we were walking towards. The whole country. Our family."
I looked back at her, my eyes pleading for her to understand. "The fear… it was like a bucket of ice water to the face. It woke me up." I reached out, then stopped myself, letting my hand fall. "I am the same man, Marie. I just… finally opened my eyes."
It wasn't even a total lie. The shock of ending up here, of knowing the bloody end that awaited us all, was a wake-up call of the highest order. I was just leaving out the minor detail about the trans-century body-swap.
She stared at me, her blue eyes wide and searching, the reflection of the candelabra flames dancing in them. She was trying to reconcile the clumsy, indecisive man she had married with the intense, driven stranger standing before her.
Slowly, tentatively, she nodded.
She didn't say she believed me. She didn't have to. I saw it in the way the tension in her shoulders eased, in the way the suspicion in her eyes softened into a fragile, wary acceptance.
My lie had made a strange, emotional sense to her. And the personal barrier between us, that wall of ice, was replaced by a tentative, fragile bridge.
She clutched the blue leather ledger to her chest. "I will look at the numbers," she whispered, as if making a vow to herself.
The next day, Marie Antoinette went to war.
She locked herself in her private study, a room usually reserved for writing letters and reading novels. She dismissed her ladies-in-waiting. She ordered that she was not to be disturbed.
And she opened the ledger.
I wasn't there, but I could picture it perfectly. The sun streaming through the tall windows of her gilded room. The Queen of France, surrounded by silks and porcelain, sitting down to do something she had never done in her life: her own accounting.
At first, it was just a sea of numbers. Confusing. Boring. But then, her eye, sharpened by years of navigating court expenses for her own wardrobe, began to pick out patterns. Names. Signatures.
She ran a perfectly manicured finger down a long column of expenses submitted by the Polignac household. It was a list of luxuries and necessities for maintaining their status at court. Normal enough.
Then she saw it. A massive bill for "tapestry restoration" in the Duchess's apartments. One hundred and fifty thousand livres.
Marie frowned. She remembered that tapestry. A beautiful, ancient thing. But it hadn't been restored. It had been replaced entirely, a personal gift sent from her mother in Austria just last year. She knew this for a fact. She had overseen its hanging herself.
The bill was pure fiction. A ghost expense.
Her heart began to beat a little faster. She turned the page. Another line item caught her eye. Twenty thousand livres for new furniture for the Polignac children's nursery. But the Duchess had complained to her just last week that the old furniture was shabby and that the King's treasurer had denied her request for an upgrade.
So where did that money go?
She flipped through the pages with a growing sense of dread. It was everywhere. Bills for parties that were cancelled. Salaries for servants who didn't exist. Travel expenses for trips that were never taken.
Each fraudulent item was a small cut. But together, they were a thousand wounds, bleeding the treasury—her household budget—dry. And every single request was signed with the elegant, familiar handwriting of her best friend. Her confidante. Her sister.
The sense of betrayal was a physical blow. It left her breathless.
She knew what she had to do.
She summoned the Duchess de Polignac, Yolande, to her chambers. Not for a friendly chat over chocolate. For an explanation.
Yolande swept into the room, all smiles and silks. "Darling, I was just on my way to the gardens! You must join me."
Marie did not get up. She remained seated behind her delicate writing desk, the blue leather ledger open in front of her. It was a deliberate echo of the way Louis had confronted the nobles. A silent declaration that this was not a social call.
"Yolande," Marie said, her voice unnaturally calm. "I have a question about this expense. For the tapestry restoration."
Yolande waved a dismissive, gloved hand. "Oh, darling, don't trouble your pretty head with those dreary things. It's all frightfully complicated, numbers and such. Leave it to the men." She laughed, a light, tinkling sound that suddenly grated on Marie's ears.
Marie's voice, when she spoke again, was as cold as ice. "Explain it to me anyway."
The Duchess's smile froze on her face. Her eyes widened in shock as she finally, finally realized this was not a game. The Queen was not asking a casual question. She was demanding an answer.
"Well, I… the treasurer must have made an error," Yolande stammered, her arrogance faltering. "I shall have a word with him."
"You will not," Marie said, her voice cutting. "You will have a word with me. Now."
The confrontation was a disaster. Yolande offered a string of flimsy excuses and pathetic lies, growing more indignant and offended with every question Marie asked. The friendship, once the bedrock of Marie's life at court, cracked and shattered right there in that sunlit room.
After Yolande had stormed out, her face a mask of humiliation and rage, Marie sat alone for a long time. The hurt was a physical ache in her chest. But beneath the hurt, a new feeling was taking root. A cold, hard anger.
A footman entered with a stack of papers needing her attention. On top of the pile was a new request from the Polignac household. It was a proposed budget for an upcoming royal hunt at their country estate. The numbers were obscene. New horses, new carriages, a full orchestra to be hired for the evening's entertainment.
A week ago, she would have signed it without a second thought.
Today, she picked up her quill. But she didn't dip it in the black ink of approval. She reached for the small, rarely used pot of red ink, the ink of state corrections. Of vetoes.
She drew a single, thick, brutal line through the entire request.
Beside it, she wrote one word.
Refused.
The stark, bloody slash of red ink across the page was not just a denial of funds. It was a declaration of war, written in the language of accounting.
She had done it. She had made her first cut. And she knew, with a terrifying certainty, that the Polignacs would not take it lying down. The gravy train had just hit a brick wall named Marie Antoinette.
The Duchess de Polignac did not bother with pleasantries. She stormed into her husband's study, her face pale with a rage that made her beautiful features look sharp and ugly.
"She refused me," Yolande spat, throwing the rejected document onto his desk. The red line seemed to glow in the dim light. "The Queen! After everything we have done for her! After all the loyalty we have shown!"
The Duke picked up the paper. He looked at the red slash, his handsome face impassive, his eyes cold and dark. He was silent for a long moment, a chilling calm settling over him.
He looked past his fuming wife, to a shadowy figure who had been waiting in the corner of the room. A man with the quiet, unremarkable face of a clerk or a minor secretary.
"The King is winning the people with his cheap theatrics," the Duke said, his voice dangerously soft, almost a whisper. "And now he has turned the Queen against us. We can't attack him directly again. The last attempt was… clumsy." He looked at the agent. "It seems we underestimated his new resolve."
He tapped a finger on the rejected document. "So, we will destroy her instead. She is the weaker piece. The foreign one. The one they already hate."
He looked up at the agent, his eyes devoid of any warmth. "Find me a printer. A man with no morals and a fast press. We're going to tell the people of Paris a story about their beloved Austrian Queen. A story so vile, so filthy, that by the time we are done, even the King will not be able to stand the sight of her."