The Crown Coup Quotes

An account by a Dominican Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, is more forthcoming. The exterminations were provoked by the discovery of a lepers’ plot to overthrow the French Crown. “You see how the healthy Christians despise us sick people,” a coup leader is alleged to have said when the plotters met secretly in Toulon to elect a new king of France and appoint a new set of barons and counts. It is not entirely clear how the plot first came to light, but by Holy Week 1321 nearly everywhere in southern France one heard the same story; the lepers, “diseased in mind and body,” were poisoning local wells and springs. Alarmed, Philip V, “the Long One,” ordered mass arrests. Lepers who confessed complicity in the plot were to be burned at the stake immediately; those who professed innocence, tortured until they confessed, then burned at the stake. Pregnant lepers were allowed to come to term before being burned, but no such stays were offered to lepers with children. In Limoges a chronicler saw leprous women tearing newborns from their cribs and marching into a fire, infants in arm. Almost immediately, the populace concluded that the Jews were also involved in the plot. This popular verdict was based on guilt by association. Like the lepers, who wore a gray or black cloak and carried a wooden rattle, Jews were required to dress distinctively. Additionally, both groups were considered deceitful.

You look too good to be this nervous.” “It seems like whenever I look this good, something terrible happens.” “You may have a point there. I’ve survived a few coups now and you looking good was a factor in at least two of them.

What had, moments ago, appeared a dangerous gambit, now seemed an elegant coup de maître.

Louis was restored to the crown in another family coup a year later.

That’s the nature of Valley success, however: you try ten things, based mostly on random hunches, a few key product insights, and whatever internal mythologies your culture reveres. Seven of them fail miserably, are discontinued, and are soon quietly swept under the rug of “forever today” forgetfulness. Two do OK, for more or less the reasons you thought, but they don’t blow the doors off your success metric. And one, for reasons you discover only after the fact, becomes a huge, transformational success. The amnesiac tech press weaves the narrative fallacy around the proceedings, fabricating a make-believe dramatic arc from steely-eyed product ideation to flawless and unhesitating technical execution. What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary. The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one. When the next usage or revenue crisis hits, you repeat the experiment, rolling your set of product dice on the big Valley table.

Altering the rules of succession and coups d’état is all fun and games until the crown actually hits the hairline. Then somebody’s gonna get hurt.

Careful, Egrette,” the man warned. His voice sounded a world away. “You can’t kill her yet.” Egrette. I’d heard that name before. Distantly, it clicked together. The House of Shadow had a princess, too. A second heir, sister to the man I’d killed. But this knowledge flew by, lost beneath her assault on my mind. I barely heard her response. “She’ll die soon anyway. Before she does, I want to see how she did it.” She tore through my memories of that party—the coup, when Raihn had been kidnapped and Oraya disappeared. Pushed past the images of the Bloodborn guards dragging me away and locking me up, a gift for the Shadowborn prince’s favor. And then she stopped—right there, right at the moment it happened. I had the prince against the wall. Oraya was behind me. His hands were on my throat. I was so, so angry. This man had taken everything from me. He had Turned me into a beast undeserving of everything I’d devoted my entire life to. He was the reason I had lost my magic. He was the reason my god had abandoned me. I thought about nothing but that hatred as I grabbed the sword Oraya had given me. As I drove that blade straight through his chest and kept going, and going, and going, until I couldn’t push anymore—until the prince’s perfect face went slack⁠— Egrette stopped. Her magic clung to that image—her brother in his moment of death. She smiled. “Poor, poor Malach. How very sad.