"Your Highness, it's been eighteen years."
Archduke Charles replied.
In truth, their meeting eighteen years ago had not been a pleasant one.
Louis Philippe had just claimed the French throne through revolution, and Archduke Charles had brought threats, not congratulations.
Austria was an empire, after all, and had no wish to see an oddity emerge on its doorstep.
But the Austrian Empire's power had been limited at the time, and the Great Powers had all been pursuing their own agendas. In the end, those threats had amounted to nothing more than a joke.
Today, eighteen years later, they stood on the same side, and they let bygones be bygones.
"Please don't call me Your Highness anymore. I'm no longer King of France. The Count of Paris is, but they drove him out.
I'm only the Duke of Alsace-Lorraine now.
I owe it to Archduke Franz that I was able to hold on to the power I still have."
Louis Philippe carefully chose his words, but there simply weren't any that quite fit, so he sounded a little awkward.
Still, he was deeply grateful to Franz. Fleeing to Alsace-Lorraine had indeed allowed him to retain some of his power and spared him the same fate as Louis XVI.
Since Louis Philippe had not fled to Britain as he had in history, and the French Provisional Government had made one blunder after another, they were eager to kick the former French king while he was down and boost their morale.
Repeated attacks and assassination attempts had convinced Louis Philippe that the French Second Republic would never let him go.
So he had not refused the invitation to Innsbruck.
His two sons were still carving out fiefdoms in Algeria, but dreaming of using those few troops to retake mainland France was pure fantasy.