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The Swan King wore white, and blue robes, and jewels on his hands and neck, and he walked around his own gardens with a swarm of musicians, friends and other entertainers bribed to like him. He saw a private play every day. He built countless castles that he never slept in. He had many servants whose names he did not know, and Jacob Bergmann was one of them. Jacob was a coin man, an accountant essentially, who cleaned up his highnesses’ poem, and opera fuelled purse-fire, which made each day a swing closer to having to tell Der Marchenkonig of his majestic, or drunken dive toward bankruptcy. A man who could not feel heat burning him alive as he sought to become an amateur firewalker. Jacob was no higher up in the Bavarian court, because his highnesses’ siblings and puppets held ghost titles and limitless salaries. Jacob was a leading Bureaucrat, and advisor to advisors. The friends of the king had enough sense to make the royal tasks actually done via the second, or often third (at least 25% of the time fourth) order of delegation, but not enough to realize that they would be safe doing it themselves. Jacob knew, or thought that he was the most powerful man in the country. He provided the largest sum of marks for the crown, more than any other dogishly loyal courtsman, though he would not place himself under the category of dogish in his own words. The King was the dog who pissed the floor.

Each coin for the debts had to be pressed, or smuggled into existence, or purse, only so many only so fast. Business was really the way to do it. Jacob Itched his noise and stared into a check he had signed in the king’s name. He would not dare sign off on a check for a wagon of coins for himself, because he would be out of a job in an instant as Bavaria would bankrupt itself. Embellezzlement was limited by bankruptcy and the inability for you to ever actually get your money from the the Bavarian crown, only a waterfall of IOUs. Worker ants sustaining The King’s illusion could not possibly take out the time for an unnecessary personal illusion or self-entertainment. It was paper after paper, and meeting after meeting on plans of how to dig The King, who fancied himself as some fairy tale hero out of a hole that was itsself already inside of a deeper more hopelessly abyssal hole.

Recently 34 year old, King Ludwig started each day with wine, that he did not know was not the fine vintages the bottles said they were and instead had been replaced with something cheap. He proceeded to hear the same poem read to him everyday, and if his friend the musician Wagner happened to be in town they would chat anywhere from twenty minutes to three hours. He would then start his more general and chaotic charade of “rulership”. He played at mock court and laughed himself silly as actors he was well aware of being his friends dressed in rags and begged for advice. Jacob generally worked exclusively in Munich, near the Winter Residence. There he could access libraries and on the occasional day off debate philosophy in coffee houses, and at night attended lectures on purer mathematics, or sciences. All of those were his hobby.

The oncoming fear of more work was what distracted Jacob the most. This made more work later on. Jacob was antsy about this issue aswell, which was maybe the second biggest distraction. He had not gotten to where he was by making more work for himself. It was that now work was a measure of how much work you can conceivably do later. He had impressed the deputy assistant vice-minister of finances the Graf von Wiesbacher, who had never met the King, with a good not idea, not good work ethic. The King lived in one castle one, or two months at a time. So they could be toured by commons, or rented by Merchants, when his highnesses was not looking. Of course sale was an absurd idea, because the King did not necessarily chose to sleep in the best few castles on repeat.

Jacob figured that he was more of a rational enlightenment type man than a Romantic dreamer type. Romanticists got lost in poets and meaningless emotions or dreams. The king in a speech to an audience called himself a “dreamer of the highest hopes of god, and man”, and “a connoisseur of the architecture of the fae”. Jacob was a real dreamer, some type of dreamer of people, not a dreamer of elves, or valkyries. He figured that if he just though up the best idea possible he could escape both of the big debt holes in almost one scope. If only he didn’t need to work, he though to himself. Then he believed that he could really dedicate full time to dreaming the biggest economic idea that the world had ever seen. If only he enough time to read a few of the treatise’s of the science of economy. He would just need all day everyday for maybe a year or two and certainly the ideas would pop out directly. He was confident in his genius’s integrity. Everyone knew that the king was just insane. Maybe if Jacob solved the problem he would get some type of title….. He wondered about this little dream of his. The idea was so nice, if the highest hopes of god had been rested on him, from the Swan King’s rather long arms. Each morning that was how he got himself to wake and going to bed he hoped he would find.

Jacob liked summers, and winter less than each other. He swore he wished it was summer in the winter, and winter in the summer. The King did the same, longing for beautiful snows, and sleigh rides, or fantasizing about playing in gardens. Jacob in winter wanted to not have to walk through miles of slush to save his job, and in summer wanted to be able to stop sweating on the papers. Jacob liked the sounds of drier springs, and the smells of fat autumns. He wanted to sit, and listen to the lectures on Newton’s mechanics for hours outside of those prized months. He wanted to avoid work in the good times, so that he good walk by festivals smelling the scents, and eating the foods. The king in autumn wanted to spend less time drinking, and more time working on the arts, but never quite was amble to remember that he wanted to do so. Jacob hated that The King’s expenses seemed to go up around those prized months. He only drank during celebrations in those months, slowing the things down. In his rare excessive drunkenness he wished aloud for a King, who drank instead of building tall towers of marble.