Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [100]
For young John Law, who had been at his father’s bedside when he died, the sorrow of bereavement was profound. He wrote poignantly to his mother, describing Law as both father and friend and outlining his bequest. “He departed this life on Monday last 21st of this month, giving us all his blessing; and has made a general gift to your ladyship of all he had and all pretensions whatsoever, with full power of disposing, acting, contracting, etc., in short doing what you think proper of all.”
To spare young John the pain of remaining in the house in which his beloved father had died, Gergy sympathetically invited him to stay. In truth he was more concerned about “the secret papers which ’tis reported Mr. Law has lodged in the hands of a friend” and the contents of the will than the boy’s suffering, and hoped that with John close he would soon get a chance to examine them. John voluntarily handed over to him several of his father’s letter books, one of which survives in the Bibliothèque de Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, but anxious that the French might try to appropriate the art collection, he tried to keep the contents of the deed-of-gift document secret. As soon as he was installed in Gergy’s residence and safely out of the way, Gergy found and copied the will and sent it to the French minister of foreign affairs: “I wished to be informed surreptitiously concerning the testament which everyone said the deceased had made, there fell into my hands a copy (which I take the liberty of sending you) of a deed of gift executed on the 19th of this month, of all M. Law possessed in favour of her who passes as his wife, although, as you will see he does not describe her as such in this deed.”
A day after his death, John Law’s body was taken to the ancient Venetian church of San Gemignano in the Piazza San Marco. He was buried the next day following a requiem Mass sung by the papal nuncio. Nearly eight decades later, while Venice was under Napoleon’s rule, the church was ordered to be demolished. By a strange quirk of fate, one of the French governors of the city was John Law’s great-nephew Alexander Law. Before the church was razed he ordered that his illustrious forebear’s remains be moved to the nearby church of San Moise. His tomb remains there still—a stone’s throw from Florian’s and the Ridotto, where once he passed his days—a fitting resting place for a man who spent so much of his life in sampling the city’s pleasurable pursuits, and who, in the end, became a tourist attraction himself.
Even in death Law’s wishes were thwarted. His brother William’s resentment still burned, and the news of John Law’s death and unconventional will offered a final outlet for his rancor. William disputed the deed of gift and claimed Law’s estate for himself. His grounds were that Katherine had never been married to his brother, that her children were illegitimate, and that therefore he, as next of kin, was Law’s legal heir. The French judiciary found against Katherine, but since William was not naturalized, declared that William’s children, John Law’s nephews, who had been born in France and were thus French citizens, should inherit.
One can hardly imagine Katherine’s reaction to the news of Law’s death and his brother’s subsequent actions. Apart from the sorrow of Law’s death after such a prolonged separation, she had to endure the embarrassment of scrutiny of their private circumstances, exactly what Law had tried to avoid. She had visited and supported William while in prison, and helped her sister-in-law as far as she could. To be repaid in such a manner must have seemed a desperately cruel blow.