“Thank God!”
Fouche leapt from the carriage, his mind flashing back to the Crown Prince’s last words to him before he left Paris, “Go forth with abandon, this may well be the most glorious moment of your intelligence career.”
“Yes, the most glorious moment!” he licked his lips like a beast about to taste its prey.
He strode toward the cabin and asked the Police Affairs Department officer beside him,
“Can we begin tomorrow?”
“Yes, Commissioner.” The latter immediately nodded, “The speeches started two days ago. People have already reached the peak of their anger.”
Fouche suddenly recalled Necker’s tunnel and frowned,
“Have you confirmed whether there are secret passages around?”
“It’s difficult to confirm, Commissioner. But the Earl of Thierry rarely stays there, so he probably hasn’t made many arrangements. Besides, we have also deployed men in the surrounding buildings.”
The officer paused, then looked at Fouche, “Commissioner, there is another thorny issue.”
“What is it?”
“The Duke of Orleans’s guard numbers over a hundred men, and they are well-trained. If a conflict really breaks out, even a thousand rioters might not stand a chance against them.”
Fouche frowned, “What about our men?”
“The Police Affairs Department has gathered over sixty people. You know, our men are not good at head-on combat. The secret police are even less reliable.”
Fouche arrived in the hall on the first floor, where the busy personnel of the Police Affairs Department promptly stood at attention to salute him.
Fouche casually lifted his hat and went straight to the map of the Armor District, gazing intently for a long while, yet still slightly shaking his head.
“No, there must be a way…”
He paced anxiously back and forth inside the cabin, his gaze catching the distant lighthouse’s gleaming light.
Suddenly, he stopped walking, an excited smile curling at the edge of his mouth,
“Right, this is Brittany! There are ships and shipyards everywhere; that thing must be around.”
He immediately summoned the officer in charge of the operation and whispered a few orders.
The latter showed a shocked expression, hesitated, and said,
“It should be possible to get it, but… our people might not be very skilled at using that thing.”
“No problem.” Fouche smiled, “This is Brittany. It shouldn’t be hard to find a few experienced sailors or veterans among the citizens.”
The following afternoon.
The familiar process started once more, with speakers gathering citizens in the city, and people in the crowd explaining the contents of pamphlets to everyone.
“When that man told the Earl of Thierry that this might lead to a surge in the price of bread, do you know what he said?” The young speaker gestured, “He said, ‘If they have no money, they should eat straw’!”
“This devil!” Anger erupted from the crowd, “He’s the one who should be eating grass!”
“This man is a murderer!”
“Kill him!”
The people of Brittany are notoriously fierce and unyielding. Two to three hundred years ago, piracy had been the mainstay here.
Members of the prearranged “Iron Helmets” group took advantage of the situation to lead the crowd toward the Earl of Thierry’s manor. He was the “Eight of Spears” ranked at number 30 on Joseph’s “deck of cards”[Note 1].
Then, unsurprisingly, over thirteen hundred citizens looking to settle accounts with the Earl of Thierry were blocked outside the manor. They faced two rows of guards, numbering over sixty, with shiny new Charleville 1776 model flintlock guns pointed at them.
For a moment, nobody dared to approach—the aura emanating from the guards was exceptionally formidable; one look could make one’s skin crawl—but they also did not intend to retreat. The citizens simply surrounded the manor’s gate from a distance, continuously hurling curses.
As the stalemate continued, a group of women arrived, driving two carts.
They uncovered the straw on the carts, revealing the dark metal cylinders underneath and boasted,
“The ‘Buckskin Boot’ was just about to have these installed. We dragged it here from the shipyard!”
A cheer burst from the crowd, and more than a dozen burly men laboriously moved the wooden frames and metal cylinders off the carts, as others skillfully assembled them.
A six-pound cannon, commonly used on armed merchant ships, suddenly appeared before everyone.
“Who can use this thing?”
Before the special agent from the Police Affairs Department even finished speaking, several people pushed their way through:
“Let me handle it, I’ve dealt with this old friend for twenty years on ships.”
“I can use it too, I served in the artillery.”
“And me…”
Several people clumsily completed the loading process. The middle-aged sailor used a hammer to knock the wedge-shaped wooden pin on the gun carriage to adjust its height, then extended his thumb and aimed in the direction of the manor:
“Hmm, that’s good.”
The crowd of onlookers immediately scattered to both sides. Only then did the guards at the door notice the very conspicuous black object one hundred fifty paces away.
“It’s a cannon!”
The captain of the Duke of Orleans’s guard screamed in terror.
However, before the guards could react, a young sailor far away pressed the linstock against the touchhole.
With a “bang,” a loud boom ensued, flames shot in all directions, and smoke from the gunpowder rose.
A six-pound iron ball whistled past the column of guards, instantly shredding three men with its tremendous impact. Nearby, two others were knocked unconscious by the flying limbs of their comrades.
The cannonball continued its relentless trajectory, striking the manor’s gatepost head-on and collapsing a large portion of the gate in an instant. The scattered debris then killed two more guards and wounded another in the leg.
Over a distance of one hundred fifty paces, this naval cannon hardly needed to be aimed, as its straight trajectory ensured a very high hit rate.
The remaining guards were horrified and scrambled to spread out in an attempt to evade.
In less than a minute, another thunderous roar followed. Enjoy exclusive chapters from empire
This time, the cannonball didn’t directly hit the guards but instead went through a stone fence, bounced after hitting the ground, and continued forward, finally slamming hard against the villa’s wall.
The Count of Théole’s manor wasn’t large; there were only about 300 meters from the gate to the villa, so the cannonball still retained considerable force when it hit, shattering a corner of the outer wall to pieces.
On the second floor of the villa, the Duke of Orleans was discussing with the Count of Théole and another noble whether they could exploit the conflict about “the abolition of privileges” at the Palace of Versailles to gain political benefits.
The three men suddenly heard a distant roar and immediately stood up, astonished.
As the captain of the guard rushed into the room and told them that the mob was bombarding them with a cannon, the villa shook violently once more, followed by the excited shouts of the rioters.
With the third shot fired, the Duke of Orleans’s guard could no longer hold on and turned to run into the villa—one could not expect even the most elite forces to have the courage to face a cannon at such close range, especially with more than a thousand rioters surrounding the cannon.
The furious citizens immediately followed with a shout, catching up to the slower guards, taking them down, and unleashing a barrage of blows.
It wasn’t until the crowd neared the villa and was halted by the threat of bullets flying from the windows that their advance stopped.
“These bastards wanted to starve us to death before, now they want to kill us!” someone roared angrily.
“Break in, I want revenge for my child!”
“But they have guns…”
“Drag the cannon over, let them taste its power!”
The Duke of Orleans watched in shock as rioters besieged the villa. He stood at the window and shouted:
“I am Louis Philippe II, your Duke of Orleans…”
However, the roaring anger of the rioting citizens easily drowned out his voice, and no one paid any attention to the man in the blue frock coat speaking at the window.
“My lord, it’s dangerous!” the captain of the guard hurriedly dragged him back into the living room.
Soon, the cannon arrived less than two hundred paces in front of the villa, the citizens skillfully stuffing gunpowder and projectiles into the muzzle.
“Bang—”
The black iron ball, carrying the breath of death, flew straight towards the second floor of the villa.
[Note 1]In the culture of French playing cards, the suit of “Spades” is known as “Pikes”.