[A parable, of a sort.]

Your Highness,

It is with no small sense of urgency that I write these words, with the hope that they will be received by your magnanimous spirit with grace. This letter I write not in the spirit of criticism which certain upstarts have made the mode of the age, but out of a deep love for my sovereign and his nation.

I trust you know that I am the most loyal and devoted of your subjects, and that I have laboured ceaselessly with regards to matters of the just stewardship of the state, and that I have been awarded for my efforts through election to the Académie française. To master such a complex topic I have committed to memory the works of Plato, Seneca, Cicero, and Montaigne, whose discourses and methods I have made my daily bread. Now in the eleventh hour I write to you again, as I did to you three years ago, concerning the matter of certain existential dangers to the French state and her noble ruler. [...]

[Continued here]