Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [23]
For the visiting dandy, city life offered much. By day he might choose to follow the familiar tourist route, visiting the Louvre, or the King’s Library, promenading in the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, or Physic Garden, or hiring a coach to drive to “a great rendezvous of people of fashion,” the Cour de La Reine, a triple-avenued park bordering the Seine. As night fell, there was the opera at the Palais Royal or the Comédie Française or, during the season, the bustling fair of St. Germain, where stalls remained open long into the night.
Once settled, Law gravitated to the court of the erstwhile King James II. Reliant upon the generosity of Louis XIV for his subsistence, James was currently living in impoverished exile in St. Germain-en-Laye, a château outside Paris. The Jacobite court seethed with covert plots to reinstate him, and it is impossible to be certain how genuine Law’s sympathies were with his cause. He may have visited the court merely because he hankered for the company of fellow Scots; or, as he later suggested, to rejoin some of the friends who had helped him to escape from London; or, more questionably, to infiltrate the court in the hope of gathering intelligence of Jacobite schemes. Performing such a service might gain him favor with King William and help secure a pardon—which preoccupied Law throughout his years of exile.
Gaming, “a perpetual diversion here, if not one of the debauches of the town,” claimed his interest, and even more so than in London offered the easiest way to meet high society. As one visitor put it, “It is a great misfortune for a stranger not to be able to play, but yet a greater to love it. Without gaming one can’t enter into that sort of company that usurps the name of Beau Monde, and no other qualification but that and money are requisite to recommend to the first company in France.” Predictably, much of Law’s time was spent in stylish salons mingling with the elite, gaining their confidence with his insinuating charm and impeccable manners before fleecing them at faro and basset, two of the most fashionable and high-rolling games of the day, at which he excelled. The odds in both games are stacked heavily in favor of the banker—a role Law adopted whenever he could, possibly paying his hostess for the privilege. One acquaintance remembered that Law “never carried less than two bags filled with gold coins worth around 100,000 livres” and that the stakes were so high that his hands “were unable to contain the coins he wished to stake” and he had his own tokens minted, each worth eighteen louis d’or.
Travel, and the unfortunate affair with Mrs. Lawrence, had done nothing to blunt Law’s enthusiasm for romance. Perhaps it was after a particularly successful evening at the tables that he was introduced to Madame Katherine Seigneur, née Knowles, an expatriate outsider in the court of St. Germain who had married a Frenchman. Katherine was of noble birth, a descendant of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn and the sister of the Earl of Banbury. Law had probably met her brother, and if not had certainly heard of him while in the King’s Bench prison in London: he, too, had been involved in a fatal duel. There are no surviving original portraits of her, although she sat at least once for her friend, the famous Italian pastelist Rosalba Carriera, but a Dutch engraving, possibly made after one of the portraits, shows an immaculately dressed woman with dainty features, a generous bosom, and a minuscule waist. Judging by descriptions of her she was not, however, an obvious