WebNovels

The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

WaystarRoyco
28
chs / week
The average realized release rate over the past 30 days is 28 chs / week.
--
NOT RATINGS
4.2k
Views
Synopsis
An American accountant in 2025 is reborn as King Louis XVI. He realizes he has one job: to avoid the guillotine by preventing the French Revolution at all costs. Fortunately, he has modern financial knowledge as well as a swell ability to analyze what the public thinks. The problem is that there are so many people who try to stop his fiscal reform—from his own beautiful wife to the hyenas across Europe. Will he succeed in the greatest economic turnaround in history and make France solvent again?
VIEW MORE

Chapter 1 - The Golden Cage

First in was the smell. It was a stifling, oppressive perfume, a heavy floral sweetness that seemed to have seeped into the actual air that he was breathing. It was the kind of aroma that a cruddy air freshener would leave if it was trying to cover up the stench of something that had died for seven days. Underneath that was the dry, wooden aroma of old cloth and old wood.

Arthur Miller's last memory was the comfortable familiarity of his worn-in leather armchair, the cacophony of cable television commentators bickering about the national debt a familiar, infuriating lullaby. He'd passed out there, half a glass of water on the coaster beside him, his thoughts still churning about prudent spending of the funds and bald-faced political posturing.

It was not his armchair.

His second experience was the sense of weight. A heavy, thick blanket fastened him down onto a bed so soft, it was like lying down in a cloud. His accountant brain, a finely-tuned machine developed by decades of locating the bottom line, made a reflex calculation. Thousand thread count? Goose down? This bed probably cost me more than my original automobile. It was an automatic thought, an ingrained habit that he couldn't break.

He forced his eyes open, a groan stuck in his throat. What he saw made him stunned, so absurd, so totally alien, that his brain simply couldn't believe it for a long while. Above, a ceiling of heavy crimson velvet, sewn with elaborate gold thread work, kept the light out. It was a repeating pattern of a stylized lily—fleur-de-lis.

Panic, cold and alert, finally penetrated the confusion. He pulled the coverlet off—it was silk, unimaginably heavy—and sat up with a lurch. The room was vast, a luxury cave. Patterned silk damask covered the walls, studded with gilt carved wood figures of cherubs and floral wreaths. Anything that might be gilt, was. An enormous cold fireplace, unused, hung on the far wall, its marble mantelpiece ornamental enough to be a museum piece.

His feet hung out over the edge of the bed and fell into a carpet so deep his toes disappeared. He was. peculiar. His body felt sluggish, doughy. His typical pains in his lower-back from sitting too much at a desk were gone, having been replaced by an unfamiliar, disorienting feeling of. softness. He stumbled towards an enormous, full-length mirror framed in even more gold.

It was not the face of thirty-eight-year-old Arthur Miller, with the tired eyes, receding hairline due to tension, and the nose tilted slightly from the baseball accident at high school.

He was the image of a stranger. A boy, still not much out of his teenage years, with a pale, fleshly face, a long, slightly beaky nose, and full, pursed lips that seemed stuck in an eternal expression of soft confusion. He had on a thin, white linen nightshirt, its cuffs and collar edged in dainty lace. Art raised his hand, and the soft, pale hand of the stranger in the mirror mirrored the movement.

He was inside this person. The concept wasn't a scream; it was a chilly, flat fact that landed in the pit of his stomach like a piece of ice.

Before the complete hysteria had a chance to get going, the huge double doors at the other side of the room swung open without a squeak. A procession of men entered, their movements noiseless, stiffly resolute, making Art's arm hairs stand up. They all were powdered and wigged, in immaculate livery of blue and silver. They did not look at him, not directly. They moved to preassigned positions around the room as if in a well-rehearsed play.

A crumpling white-bearded man, extremely stooping, bore a new shirt of the finest white cambric. Another was ready with a pair of silk breeches. Another bore a waistcoat so abundantly sewed in silver thread that it must have weighed something in the region of ten pounds.

Art stared, his panic damped down for a second by an infusion of pure, unadulterated professional indignation. This was the Lever, the King's official wake-up-and-get-dressed ritual, something his new brain provided without being asked. His own mind, the accountant mind, provided the commentary. Madness. Six men. Six highly-paid males to get a guy into his pants. What, in the name of God, are the dollar returns on the investment in this? It'd be a wholesale waste of human resources. A time-and-motion analysis in here would get people fired in droves and completely restructure the department.

The raw, maddening waste of the entire operation—manpower, time, the gold leaf flaking in the corner—ended in one, seething thought that gripped him. It was born of the essence of his being, the guiding precept of his professional existence.

"This entire ceremony is the most inefficient, money-burning charade I have ever witnessed."

As the thought peaked, the world flickered. A pane of translucent blue light, crisp and modern, materialized in his field of vision. It was clean, with sharp white text, like the user interface of a high-end financial planning software.

DECISION PROMPT: Abolish the Morning Dressing Ceremony (Lever)

Pros:

Annual Cost Savings: 75,000 livres.

Signals a shift away from frivolous tradition.

Popularity with Third Estate: +0.2%

Cons:

Popularity with High Nobility: -25%. (A grave insult to those whose ancient families hold these prestigious, lucrative ceremonial roles.)

Court Stability: -10%. (Breaks with centuries of tradition, showing unpredictability and perceived weakness.)

Immediate Risk: Alienates key power brokers on Day One.

Art physically recoiled, taking a step backward. He pinched his eyes shut and shook his head, thinking that he was hallucinating, that the tension had finally broken him into a full-on psychotic break. He mentally pushed the impossible blue screen away, and it was gone.

A bony, thin cough turned him around. A very old, very wizened lord whose eyes seemed to hold a century of intrigue at the royal court bowed deeply before him. He was one of the few that seemed to be granted permission to speak.

"You are perturbed, Your Majesty," the man said, his voice the sharp crinkling of aged parchment. "Does the new weight of the crown already press so heavily upon your conscience?"

He stared at him, his mind a panicking jumble of unconnected facts: the fleur-de-lis, the 'Your Majesty' title, the dressing ceremony, the impossible pop-up screen. He was lost, rudderless in a sea of gold and silk. He couldn't even begin to take in the etiquette, the history, the bare lunacy of the lot. He could only do the one, simple, overriding question in his head.

He let it go, his voice even and jarringly American in the silent, formal room.

"Who the hell are you?"

The old duke's face, the finely carved mask of aristocratic calm, wavered. For a moment, an expression of extreme, unsullied amazement appeared upon his face, to be at once repressed, his face once more unreadable beneath. But Art had seen. He had said the wrong thing. He had said the bitterly, destructively wrong thing.