Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [36]
Some advisers suggested that France should simply declare herself bankrupt and start again. Law convinced Orléans that to do so would pitch the country into even worse distress. He had a better way. In October, bubbling with enthusiasm, he proffered his newest proposal to the regent: a plan for a state bank administered in the king’s name that would handle all revenues and issue paper money backed by coins. “The convenience will be such that everyone will be charmed to have these bank bills rather than money, because of the facility of making payments in paper, and the certainty of receiving the value whenever they wish.”
While Orléans pondered the scheme, Law lobbied the regent’s closest advisers for support. A brave few murmured wary encouragement, among them the Duc d’Antin, who said he was “struck by his ideas, they appeared to merit a most detailed attention.” At the end of the month the scheme was formally put to the council and a panel of thirteen of Paris’s most illustrious bankers and financiers. But still Law’s star failed to rise. Members of the business community remained scornful and distrustful, their criticisms concealing their underlying concern that if a state bank was allowed to open its doors, it would be at great cost to them. Nine of the thirteen voted against it. Noailles, defensive and resentful of Law’s effortless influence with the regent, also thwarted him. As Law waited, naïvely expecting to be told to proceed, his betrayal took place behind the closed doors of the council chamber.
Confronted by the massed hostility of the business community as well as his own advisers, Orléans concluded, regretfully, that he could not afford to back such a controversial scheme and risk upsetting so many at this delicate early stage of his regency. For the time being the scheme would have to be sacrificed. He made his closing pronouncement ceremoniously. “He had come there persuaded that the bank ought to be established; but, after the opinions he had just heard, he agreed wholly with that of M. le duc de Noailles; and it would be announced to everyone that same day that the bank would not be carried out.”
Law’s prickly response to the regent’s abandonment hid profound disillusionment. Banks were by now accepted in every prosperous country. How could anyone question their usefulness? he raged. The regent, all too well aware of the truth of this, and probably lamenting his volte-face even as he made it, dreaded that Law might return to his wandering, gambling life, or worse still, take his expertise elsewhere. While Law brooded in his Paris mansion, the regent ordered Noailles to pacify him. Law said later that Noailles made a few vague promises on the regent’s behalf, and that “I could still be useful to the state, and he hoped that this rejection would not make me want to leave France, that he wished to make my stay a pleasant one in every way he could, and that it was even the opinion of the council that he should engage me to stay, being able to be useful with the knowledge that I have.” Still bristling, Law retorted, “I have need of nothing having enough to live with ease, that my intention in proposing to serve His Royal Highness was to make myself useful to the state and not augment my own good. The truth of this was obvious by the nature of my proposition.” But as the regent had hoped, Law simmered down, secretly flattered by all the attention. “I would not have even thought of making a second proposition if he had not pressed me to do so,” he later wrote, with manifest self-righteousness.
In fact, the fire burning in Law was unlikely ever to have been extinguished by the rejection of a single council: he had been dreaming for far too long to give up. Yet again, he told himself, it was merely a matter of modifying his ideas, and waiting. If the regent was uneasy with the idea of a state bank, Law reasoned now that the answer must lie in a private scheme.
The revised plan that emerged was for a privately run bank, similar to the Bank of England, issuing banknotes and financed