target for Law’s attentions. The Duc de Saint-Simon recalled candidly that she was “rather handsome,” but that her beauty was flawed by a birthmark like a wine stain “covering one eye and the upper part of her cheek.” Katherine had another crucial distinction: among the overpowdered, overrouged, coquettish ladies of fashionable Paris, Saint-Simon noticed, “she was proud, overbearing and very impertinent in her talk and manners, seldom returning any of the polite attentions offered to her.” Although in England overtly intelligent women were not generally esteemed—most men would have tended to agree with Samuel Johnson’s later quip that “a man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner on his table than when his wife talks Greek”—in France it was different. Amid Parisian society, women enjoyed a greater level of independence. “It is observable,” wrote one visitor, “that the French allow their women all imaginable freedoms, and are seldom troubled by jealousy; nay, a Frenchman will almost suffer you to court his wife before his face, and is even angry if you do not admire her person.” Perhaps Law, having learned to respect his mother’s formidable business acumen, had an unusual regard for clever, outspoken females, and this daunting, difficult, striking woman reminded him of his awe-inspiring mother Jean—or, accustomed as he was to easy conquests, he simply found her hauteur challenging. In any event, he pursued Katherine with determination, and she, evidently dissatisfied by her marriage, must have responded. Yet even had she not been married, such a relationship would have caused consternation: Katherine was of noble birth, while Law was a gamester whose family circumstances were shrouded in mystery. Society frowned on such alliances, and most people sympathized with Lord Sandwich, who later remarked that a father would rather see a daughter “with a pedlar’s bag at her back” than marry beneath her. To Law and Katherine, however, far from home and their families, there was little to stand in the way of their mutual attraction. Certainly, Katherine’s husband (about whom nothing is known apart from his name) seems to have offered no impediment—although the most obvious explanation for his apparent inertia is that he was absent when she and Law met. The liaison blossomed.
Meanwhile, Law’s mastery of dice and cards had unfortunate but unsurprising repercussions. No one wants to stake money against someone who hardly ever loses, and, as it had in London, Law’s knack for winning brought him enemies along with gains. Whispers of his “sharpness” at cards, his dubious past, and his possible involvement in espionage began to circulate and brought him to the attention of the authorities. Clearly the time had come for Law to move on; only Katherine held him back.
In the sophisticated world of which both Law and Katherine were habitués, discreet infidelities, however ill-advised, could be quickly forgotten—but there was a chasm between a clandestine affair and an elopement. Both must have known that the latter would cost Katherine her reputation and that there would be no turning back. It is, therefore, a mark of the usually guarded Law’s feelings that he asked Katherine to leave Paris with him. The decision cannot have been easy, but perhaps feeling that travel offered the only way for such an unconventional partnership to evade the usual social restrictions, she agreed, in Gray’s words, “to pack up her awls, leave her husband, and run away with him to Italy.” From then on Katherine Seigneur was known as Mrs. John Law even though marriage, for the time being at least, was impossible. As no doubt they had feared, the story of their flight made headlines in the Paris press and Horace Walpole later wrote of “an account in some French literary gazette, I forget which, of his [Law] having carried off the wife of another man.”
Their destination was Italy, the birthplace of European banking. They went first to Genoa, where, according to Gray, Law was able to find “cullies [suckers] enough to pick up a great deal of Money from,