Chapter 1 · 1783 to 1789
The Gilded Cage
Salons, pamphlets and masked assassins against a rich but broke crown. The Bastille still stands. Oil lanterns light one street in five.
- Map
- 12 districts
- Newspaper
- Gazette de Paris
- Street lighting
- Oil lanterns
The levels
- The Necklace15 August 1785
- Salons of the Palais-Royal2 October 1786
- Hail and Hunger13 July 1788
- Masks at the Opera14 February 1789
- The Wallpaper Riot24 April 1789
- The Summons6 December 1788
- Interlude 1
After the finale of chapter 1: The Gilded CageBreak the seal
The booklet opens
The Gilded Cage
In the autumn of 1783 the lamps of Paris are lit at dusk by men on ladders, one street in five. Six hundred thousand people live inside the city, most of them in houses older than anyone can remember, in streets so narrow that two carriages cannot pass.
King Aurèle III has won a war across the ocean and lost the money to pay for it. His finance minister, Baron Valmont-Hesse, borrows from the tax farmers to pay the interest on what he borrowed last year. At court nobody speaks of the deficit; in the cafés nobody speaks of anything else.
In the Palais-Royal, the king's cousin the Duc de Montclair rents his arcades to booksellers, gamblers and girls, and the police may not enter without his leave. In a salon on the Rue Saint-Honoré, Madame Célestine Arnaud serves supper to men who write things that cannot be printed in France. Somewhere in the city, a person who calls herself La Corneille wears a mask.
The factions
The Revolution
- Moderates
- The Philosophes' lodge: lawyers, savants and reforming gentlemen.
- Voices
- Pamphleteers and the salons that feed them.
- Underground
- The Brotherhood of the Mask, led by La Corneille.
- Radicals
- Faubourg agitators. Few for now.
The Law
- Government
- The Crown and its ministers.
- Force
- The Gardes, French and Swiss.
- Order
- The Watch, under the Comte de Vaudray.
- Shadow
- The Cabinet Noir, which opens private letters.
- Purse
- The tax farmers, who lend the Crown its own taxes.
Neutral factions
- Church
- Merchants
- Gazettes
- Foreign-printed gazettes smuggled into the city.
- Underworld
- Smugglers working the new customs wall.
- Duc de Montclair
- The king's ambitious cousin, owner of the Palais-Royal.
- The Crowd
Characters
- King Aurèle III
- Queen Isaure
- Comte Hugues de Vaudray
- Baron Valmont-Hesse
- Duc de Montclair
- Madame Célestine Arnaud
- Jacques Lerouge
- La Corneille
The booklet closes
After the finale of chapter 1: The Gilded CageSealed so it does not spoil the story for you.Break the seal
The lamp on the corner
If the Revolution won The Summons
On the night the Estates opened, someone climbed the lamp post at the corner of the Rue de la Ferronnerie and tied a tricoloured ribbon to the lantern. Nobody took it down.
Otherwise
On the night the Estates opened, the lamplighter came as usual to the corner of the Rue de la Ferronnerie, filled the lantern with oil, and lit it for the king.
It was an ordinary lantern, a glass box hung on a rope across the street, and it had been lit every evening for a hundred years. It would not be ordinary for long.
Then the city moves on The summer of 1789: the crowd marches on the Bastille.