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by shareholders. Throughout a winter so cold that, according to the Princess Palatine, the regent’s mother, even the sea at Calais froze, Law briefed Orléans with renewed enthusiasm in conferences held at the Palais Royal and at Marly. In December he equated the introduction of credit with the discovery of the Indies, remarking that “if Spain had ceded the Indies [he meant the Spanish Americas] to the English, they would not have profited as much from them as they have from the use of credit . . . My banking project . . . will not bring the least prejudice to the King nor to the people; it is the quickest, safest and most harmless method of restoring the good faith and confidence of commerce; it is the true foundation of power in a state and the way by which one must begin to establish order.” When Law talked like this, money became the stuff of dreams, a magical cure-all, the embodiment of universal happiness rather than of sordid temptation. Orléans was captivated.

While the regent and Law were closeted together, it was left to Noailles to initiate more painful methods of improving the country’s finances. A year earlier, he had instigated the Visa, a drastic form of financial surgery, by which large swaths of royal debt were amputated. Long-term debt, which had largely financed Louis’s wars, mostly took the form of annuity bonds sold by Paris’s city government, the Hôtel de Ville, to financiers and other private investors. The bonds paid a set interest rate that was covered traditionally by an agreed source of government revenue. One of Noailles’s money-saving measures was to reduce the interest on bonds from 7 percent to 4 percent. He also converted the various forms of short-term debt into billets d’états, state notes worth only two-thirds of their former value. He cut salaries and pensions, and revalued the coinage at 50 percent of its previous worth.

In systems of currency based on the value of gold and silver, especially in France, adjusting the value of the coinage was a frequent royal scam. The French monetary system was based on the livre tournois, a unit of account (like the pound sterling in England) used to express prices, contracts, and wages, for which there was no single coin, and against which the value of gold and silver coins could be adjusted. French coins included the gold louis d’or and the silver écu, equivalent in England to the gold guinea and the silver shilling. In this case, Noailles raised the value of the louis d’or, stating that its value would increase from fourteen to twenty livres (and the écu from three livres ten sous to five livres), thus effectively devaluing the livre. This was an inflationary measure that would cause prices to rise, even though it reduced the value of the state’s debt by diminishing the amount of coins needed to repay it. Revaluations worked by demanding that the public bring all their coins to the mint either for endorsement with a new stamp, representing the increased value, or by reminting lighter coins with a higher valuation against the livre. In both cases the state appropriated part of the bullion in the process of stamping or reminting it, but concealed it against the adjustments in value. The public, well aware that the Crown was profiting from such transactions, was understandably reluctant to hand over coins and see them altered in this manner, hence the tendency to hoard them, adulterate them, or smuggle them abroad and sell them as bullion.

Noailles’s measures made the balance sheet look better but plunged the nation into further financial distress. By encouraging people to send coins abroad, they worsened the shortage; by reducing interest payments and the value of government securities, they forced people to sell to maintain a level of income and the market price plummeted 80 percent. Businesses already foundering from a shortage of money fell deeper into debt and shopkeepers closed their doors—how could they agree to buy or sell something when they were unsure from one day to the next what the livre would be worth? Hundreds were bankrupted, which