The Rescue at Place Royale is the failed execution in Paris, 1717 A.D.A., that sparked the revolt and opened the Paris arc of Les Libertateurs.
| Type | Event |
| Date | 1717 A.D.A. |
| Place | Place Royale, Paris |
| Spanish entry | El rescate de Place Royale |
Events
The child king Louis XV was absent, entertaining the visiting Tsar Peter the Great. Three convicts, “republican libertarians”, were to be executed. Infiltrated among the executioner’s assistants and covered by a timely fog, the liberators freed one of the three. In the tumult a false Bluebeard — the patron disguised for the coup — plunged the face of the Chief Executioner into boiling lead, and the Grand Inquisitor was left sputtering, speechless. The crowd surged; culverins and cannon fired from the Bastille; a man with a two-handed sword was impaled by pikemen “like a revolutionary on a maypole”; and a spectral crow flew out of the fog — no one saw that a woman had transformed.
Aftermath
- Two of the three convicts were recaptured and taken to the Bastille.
- The necromancer Steve Reyes, last seen with the false Bluebeard, was arrested and tortured on the strappado until the royal veto invoked by the spy Ganibal stopped the interrogation (see Tower of Heva).
- The thieves’ brotherhood of the sewers bore the blame for the dead; the executioner’s public retraction before Notre-Dame was still to come; Host Poker was the next threshold, leading to the Double Invocation.