A cliff‑top silhouette of towers and turrets, frozen above a river valley, set the template for Snow White’s palace and destroyed the king who ordered it. Conceived as a private retreat, the castle morphed into an all‑consuming project, absorbing resources faster than his treasury and political system could process the shock.
The monarch’s perfectionism pushed costs beyond any rational marginal effect: custom stonework, theatrical interiors and experimental heating and plumbing systems demanded constant redesign. With no modern tax base and little regard for fiscal discipline or opportunity cost, he borrowed heavily, treating public credit as an inexhaustible revenue stream. As debts mounted, bondholders and ministers feared a collapse in state solvency, the monetary equivalent of unchecked entropy, and moved to cap his spending.
That financial emergency became a constitutional crisis. Ministers framed the spiraling construction bills as evidence of unfitness to rule, weaponizing ledgers and psychiatric reports to strip the king of authority. The same soaring battlements that later inspired animators served, in his lifetime, as exhibits in a case for deposition, turning a fantasy of absolute control into the architecture of his political undoing.
The castle still stands, immaculate against the sky, while the king who imagined it survives only in shadows at its gates.
