Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [42]
Orléans capitulated and authorized Law to make the final negotiations. A price of 2 million livres was agreed, but since there was no money to buy the diamond outright, a loan was secured against other jewels. Ever since, the Regent Diamond has adorned the regalia of France. Stolen during the revolution, it was recovered in time to sparkle on the ceremonial sword of the first consul in 1801, and it remains in the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, a gleaming testimony to Law’s determination to make his mark and the regent’s irresolution in the face of temptation.
The spectacular diamond was a mere diversion compared with the mammoth drama to which Law had hinted in letters to the regent: “The bank is not the only nor the greatest of my ideas. I will produce a work that will surprise Europe by the changes which it will produce in France’s favour,” he wrote, a few months before the bank was inaugurated.
The idea that would rock the world and immortalize its inventor seemed innocuous enough. Law’s rapacious eye had focused on the wealth promised by the Indies, Africa, and the Americas, and he wanted to form an overseas trading company to exploit it. The Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English had all reaped immense fortunes from their fleets laden with silk, ebony, ivory, lacquer, coffee, tea, chocolate, spices, gold, silver, porcelain, and myriad other luxurious and lucrative cargoes. Now, said Law, France should share the harvest.
So far the French had enjoyed little success overseas. Cardinal de Richelieu, Louis XIII’s great minister, had set up East and West Indian companies a little less than a century earlier. Under Colbert, in Louis XIV’s reign, further ventures had been tried in Canada, the Caribbean, Newfoundland, the French Americas, and the coast of Senegal. None had flourished, and overseas trade had been handed over to private enterprise. Among those who grasped the colonial baton was Robert Cavalier de la Salle, a native of Rouen, who in 1682 set out from Montreal, found and navigated the Mississippi, and was murdered while trying to establish a colony in Louisiana. The Canadian-born captain of a naval frigate, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville, continued the quest, and when he died, Robert Crozat, a wealthy Parisian financier, took over. Crozat had come closer than anyone before him to succeeding, plowing 1.5 million livres into his enterprise. But when he came under the beady eye of the Chamber of Justice and found he owed taxes of 6.6 million livres, he decided, with some reluctance, to relinquish his Mississippi concession in part payment of his dues.
Here was Law’s great chance. The trading privilege that had reverted to the Crown was for the French colony of Louisiana, a territory many times larger than France, stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi for three thousand miles north, encompassing what is now Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of Canada. This vast tract was uncultivated, largely unexplored, and inhabited only by tribes of Indians. No one knew what riches lay beneath its soil or within its forests, and most of France did not even know where the colony was, but it was whispered that this new El Dorado was copiously endowed with seams of gold and silver and with emerald mountains.
The ingenious scheme was baited to entice both the regent and the private investor. The reason most other overseas ventures had failed, Law said, was because they were undercapitalized and badly directed. His venture would be amply funded and inspirationally managed and would earn such huge revenues that France would again become the most powerful nation in the world. He would raise the necessary capital of 100 million livres by selling 200,000 shares, each valued at 500 livres. If he formed a stock company and sold shares to the general