Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [30]
But the situation did not improve. By 1715 France would be over 2 billion livres in debt, largely to a group of forty private financiers, who also controlled the collection of taxes. The government could not afford the interest repayments on its notes, let alone repay them in coin. They had become so discredited that when Louis wanted to raise a loan of 8 million livres in coin from one of the financiers of Paris he had to pay 32 million in notes. In the provinces few could afford the taxes; people even resorted to marrying or baptizing their children without a priest to avoid the extra levy they felt might soon be demanded.
Law knew he had the answer. The problems of the country, he promised, all stemmed from a lack of available money. “Trade and money,” he had written in Scotland, “depend mutually on one another; when trade decays money lessens; and when money lessens, trade decays.” The only way out of the downward spiral was through credit and by increasing the circulating money. Since there was a shortage of gold and silver in the country, the answer was to establish a national bank and issue money made from paper.
It was a beguilingly simple solution. The hard part was getting through to the king. In November 1706 Law managed a journey to Paris, where he submitted a four-part memorandum to Chamillard, Louis XIV’s incompetent and overworked controller general, who headed the ministries of finance and war. Law tried to keep his argument brief and to the point. “I know,” he wrote, “that these proposals are long and boring, because it is necessary to explain many aspects of money . . . what I will present will be shorter and easier to follow, I will attempt to include nothing that is spurious.” The harassed Chamillard tried to appear diligent, scribbling annotations in the margin. In truth he did not understand and only laughed at Law’s vision. The king was never told of the proposal, and without his approval Law reached an impasse. “Apparently the opinion is that what I propose does not merit discussion at the council. I am not surprised: a new type of money more suitable than silver seems impossible,” he wrote disconsolately. But the visit was not entirely wasted. During his stay in Paris he met the king’s nephew Philippe, Duc d’Orléans.
The two men had much in common. They were of similar age—Law was just three years Orléans’s senior, aged thirty-six in 1707—both were handsome, athletically built, and brilliant tennis players. Both enjoyed extraordinary success with the opposite sex. Orléans could outstrip even Law in his sexual conquests, although power and position were on his side. His numerous mistresses, whether stars of the opera, actresses from the Comédie Française, serving girls, daughters of diplomats, or, more rarely, aristocrats, were selected for good humor, voracious appetites for banqueting, drinking, and lovemaking, and lack of interest in politics. Looks mattered little—even the duc’s mother remarked wryly, “They do not have to be beautiful. I have often reproached him for choosing such ugly ones.” At night, in his Paris residence, the Palais Royal, he dismissed his servants and held soupers, notorious all-night revelries at which an eclectic assortment of courtesans, actresses, and his inner circle of dissolute male friends—the roués—gorged, drank to excess, and, according to Saint-Simon, “said vile things at the tops of their voices.” It was, said Saint-Simon, a ritual that “when they had made a vast deal of noise and were dead drunk they went to bed and began it all over again the next day.” Meanwhile they stimulated enough gossip to entertain the rest of Paris.
But Orléans was far more than just another debauched aristocrat. A multitalented man of abundant if mercurial intellect, he was a freethinker who was fascinated by developments in music, literature, philosophy, and science, including the science of money. Chemistry enthralled him, and he passed long hours experimenting in his private laboratory alongside the eminent Dutch chemist Wilhelm Homberg. He was intrigued by necromancy;