Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [101]
In the midst of the ascendant sorrows, Katherine derived one significant advantage from Law’s death and unconventional last testament. As he had predicted, his death helped his family: the authorities were at last convinced that no funds were hidden abroad and dropped all outstanding claims against him. Katherine and her daughter were issued with passports and, with pitifully few assets, were at last able to leave France. Young John had secured a commission in an Austrian dragoon regiment, and to be near him she settled first in Brussels, then Utrecht. Tragically, only five years after his father’s death, the son contracted smallpox in Maastricht and died. Having somehow managed to secure part of the art collection, Katherine sold fifteen pictures and moved into a convent, where she lived until her death in 1747.
Fate dealt more kindly with Law’s beloved daughter Kate, who married her cousin Lord Wallingford and lived the life of a doyenne of London society, in a grand house in Grosvenor Street. Horace Walpole admired her good looks and remarked how similar she was to her father, whose portrait by Rosalba Carriera graced his famous picture gallery at Strawberry Hill.
EPILOGUE
In our own day, we can devoutly wish that we may be spared the technically superlative disasters we have prepared for ourselves in order to enjoy the minor vicissitudes of the business cycle—of prosperity and depression and inflation and deflation. If we are so favored, we can count on some future period of prosperity carrying us on into a mood of exhilarant optimism and wild speculative frenzy. Instead of radio and investment trusts, uranium mines or perhaps portable reactors will be the new favorites. Or the speculative fever may strike land, oil, or even Boston.
J. K. Galbraith,
The Great Crash, 1929 (1955)
WITH JOHN LAW’ S DEATH EUROPE DREW BREATH. HE had come to France prosperous, captivating, brimming with dynamic energy and ambition, confident that he could engender an economic revival. While he had seemed set to succeed he had been the people’s hero, by his own admission one of the wealthiest, and certainly among the most powerful men in Europe.
In his eyes he had failed not because of any flaw inherent in his ideas or ability but because of his own impatience: “I do not pretend that I have not made mistakes, I admit that I have made them, and if I could start again I would act otherwise. I would go more slowly but more carefully; and I would expose neither the state nor myself to the dangers which must necessarily accompany disorder of the general system.” Yet this was only part of the reason for his downfall. The road to hell, so the old proverb warns, is paved with good intentions. In Law’s case the more fundamental defect he could never bear to face was his own idealism. In dreaming of utopia he ignored human frailty and never imagined that he was unleashing several monstrous genies—people’s desire to make as much money for as little effort as possible, their instinct to follow the herd, to hoard when threatened, to panic if confidence was shaken. These elemental, uncontrollable human traits, together with the enmity of the establishment and the tragedy of the plague, were ultimately what toppled him.
In the aftermath of his departure and the collapse of the paper-money system, a draconian return to the coinage took place. Along with his paper money, the reactionary backlash swept away most of the tax reforms he had engineered. But the effect of his system remained indelible. He had created rampant but, for the Crown, highly beneficial inflation, which devalued Crown debt by two-thirds, and in so doing relieved the need for high taxation. France was left with a viable economy that