The Ambassador's Gambit

American Envoy to France

You arrived in Paris in December 1776, a seventy-year-old man sent to beg a king for help. But you are no ordinary beggar. You are Benjamin Franklin, the most famous American alive, and you have turned your celebrity into a weapon. The French adore you. They buy medallions with your face. They wear fur caps in imitation of yours. Voltaire himself embraced you at the Academy. But adoration is not alliance. Louis XVI fears that supporting a revolution against a king will inspire his own subjects. Count de Vergennes, the Foreign Minister, wants to bleed Britain but not enough to risk open war. You have been sending dispatches home for over a year, each one promising progress. What you have not told Congress is that someone in your own household is copying those dispatches and delivering them to the British Ambassador. You suspect everyone. You trust no one. And the clock is ticking, because if Britain offers the colonies a reasonable peace, France will never enter the war.

The gilded salons and shadowed corridors of Bourbon France. Paris is the center of European culture and power, a city of philosophes, courtesans, and spymasters. The American Revolution hangs in the balance, and France holds the deciding card. Louis XVI wavers between his hatred of Britain and his fear of revolution. Every conversation at Versailles is a negotiation, every ball a battlefield.