The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The scene before the closed doors of the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs was that of increasing tumult. The six hundred Third Estate deputies, now referring to themselves as the National Assembly, paraded back and forth through the rain, their black coats dripping, their faces set alternately with rage and terror. The King's guards stood stiffly, not responding, their own presence a silent, foreboding confirmation of the Assembly's worst nightmares.

This was the moment of treachery. The King, their supposed hero, had betrayed them. The taste of victory from the proceedings of the opening day had been reduced in their mouths to dust. The whispers that had circulated for days—that the King was weak, that he was a prisoner of the Queen and his noble brothers—appeared to be absolute truth.

"This is the work of the Austrian and of the Comte d'Artois!" cried one of the delegates, his voice rough with indignation. "They have poisoned the King's mind against us!"

"He plans to dissolve us!" another shouted. "To send us home in shame! We cannot allow it!"

The radical faction, their cries rising above the din, had already been calling for direct action. "To the palace!" cried a young Paris lawyer. "Let us go to the King himself! Let us see if he will have the courage to shut the doors of his own palace to the representatives of his own people!"

The crowd of delegation poured, a dangerous, angry sea sweeping them toward the Chateau's main gates. Mirabeau, his sturdily-built frame a barrier against the flood, struggled to the front, trying to impose order. His people marching on the palace would be a suicidal error, a blatant insurrection that would give the Old Guard the best excuse for calling in the army to grind them to dust for good.

"Gentlemen! Brothers!" he bellowed, a lion's roar that for an instant checked the tumult. "To assault the palace is to become the mob they call us! A mob we are not! We are the National Assembly! We will not rage in the blind fury of a street riot, but with dignity and firmness, as a sovereign assembly!"

The rain began in earnest while he was speaking, a cold, wretched downpour that seemed to sneer at them. They needed a venue in which to assemble, a refuge from the physical and political tempest. It was another delegation, a doctor named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who pointed toward a building in the distance. It was a high, lengthy building with high, curved windows: the royal tennis court, the Jeu de Paume.

It was an ignominious, almost farcical proposal, but they had no other recourse. The delegates surged towards it, a vast, black-coated sea of men pouring into the vast, empty space. The interior of the tennis court was vast and bare. The air was cool and sharp, with the smell of earth and old perspiration. Naked walls rose to a high, wooden ceiling. There was no furniture, besides a few simple wooden benches against the walls. It was a hall for the frivolous sports of the aristocracy, and now, in the most unexpected fashion, it became the nursery of a revolution.

The delegates filled the hall, their anger and their fear temporarily put aside in the presence of the raw weirdness of their surroundings. The anger was superseded by the imperative need for them to do something, anything, that would reassert their mission and their unity in the face of this perceived royal unfaithfulness.

A moderate deputy, Jean-Joseph Mounier, his face tired but his voice strong, climbed onto an overturned wooden table. "Gentlemen," he bellowed, his voice echoing throughout the grand room. "We are locked out of our hall. We are treated scornfully. They expect to scatter us, to shatter our will, to make us crawl back to our provinces in ignominy. We must show them, we must show the King, we must show all of France, that the National Assembly will not be undone by the turn of a key! That our power is not in a room, but in the will of the people that we represent!"

He proposed a solution, a way of channeling their righteous rage into a common, irreparable act of defiance. He proposed that they all swear a common, serious oath. The paper was composed in haste upon a piece of paper, and the President of the Assembly, a man named Jean Sylvain Bailly, was raised up onto the table in order to read it.

He raised his right hand, his voice tremulous in the seriousness of the occasion. "I make the proposal that all the members of this Assembly shall hereafter take a solemn oath..."

The delegates, one after the others, put up their hands. A wave of arms arose out of the darkness of the tennis ground, an impressive, silent demonstration of unity.

Bailly's tone turned more assertive, ringing with historical emphasis. "...a sacred oath to never part, and to reunite wherever necessity demands, until the constitution of the kingdom is determined and fixed on solid foundations!"

A thunderous, unanimous roar of assent went through the six hundred men. "Nous le jurons! We swear it!" they yelled, their voices all mingling in one. They were no longer a council summoned by a king. They were an independent power, conceived in an instant of group insubordination, with power only in their own will and swearing to draw up a new constitution of France, whether the King would consent to it or not. The Tennis Court Oath was a declaration of revolutionary independence.

The news of the closed doors, the outrage of the Assembly, and their splendid gesture of protest circulated throughout the palace like a blazing fuse. A terror-struck page, having been an eyewitness of the scene, hastened into Louis's private chambers.

Louis listened to the panicked testament of the boy, his blood freezing. He was shocked. The barred doors weren't his doing. He had been in session with Necker all morning, not having the remotest idea of the sabotaging act of the court chamberlain. But he understood, with queasy certainty, how it would look. In the afterglow of his rallying call of support, this was an impressive, cynical backstabbing. The fragile confidence he had won with the Third Estate was shattering, hardening to scorn.

He had to do something, now, before the harm could not be reversed. He had to show them, prove them wrong, that he was not turning against them.

With but a small, specially unarmed retinue that included Lafayette, Louis made the unconventional decision that defied all the dictates of royal protocol and security. He would not issue a message. He would not summon their chiefs. He would pay them a personal call.

He walked, with swift, deliberate pace, out of the wealthy center of the palace, through the courtyards, and out into the rain-lashed streets of Versailles, in straight course for the tennis court. Courtiers and sentries stood in astonishment as their King moved among them, face set in grim determination, in the direction of the enraged, revolutionary monstre he had called into existence.

The huge wooden doors of the tennis court were open wide. Louis stood in the doorway, the gray light tracing the shape of his form.

The yelling and uproar in the hall died in an instant, and in its stead, a vast, shaking silence unfolded. Hundreds of faces turned to look at him. The faces contained a explosive mixture of indignation, shock, hope, and intense mistrust. He was a king who had gone, alone and unattended, into the face of a rebellion against himself.

Mirabeau, his long frame separating himself from the crowd of people, stepped forward. He made no bow. He stood on his own ground, his voice a low, defiant growl that reverberated in the silent hall.

"Sire," he said, his tone formal but not sycophantic. "Behold the official representatives of the French Nation. We have sworn. We discover that we are excluded from the chamber that you offered us. We have a question for you." He paused, his eyes meeting the King's. "Has the King of France declared war on his own people?"

Louis looked out into the sea of defiant faces, the hands that had so recently been raised swearing away his absolute power. He realized, in that moment, that the next thing he said would either recover for himself the role of leader of the revolution or forever seal him as its first and greatest enemy.