Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [45]
Orléans had decided to surprise the Parlement with a meeting known as a lit de justice, in which the young king would assert his regent’s authority and override the Parlement’s remonstrance. Saint-Simon helped lay plans to crush the Parlement and only perceived Law’s anxiety when he was accosted by one of Law’s servants, who begged him to visit his master. He found Law in distress with Katherine. It may have been the first time she had seen Law’s vulnerability, and to judge from Saint-Simon’s account of this meeting, she had failed to allay his fears. Law was taut with the fear that the regent was abandoning him to his enemies, and it was only when Saint-Simon reassured him that there was nothing sinister in the regent’s behavior that he seemed “to breathe again.”
On August 26, the day of the lit de justice, Paris awoke to find Swiss guards, musketeers, cavalry, and household troops posted around the Palais Royal, the Tuileries, Law’s bank, and other strategic landmarks. The meeting began at ten in the Palais de Justice. Before the regency council, the Parlement, officers of the bodyguard, and a contingent of spectators “of consideration and mark,” the eight-year-old king mounted the small staircase to his throne beneath a tapestry baldachin. D’Argenson, as Keeper of the Seals, made the announcement on the boy’s behalf: “The King chooses to be obeyed, and obeyed on the spot.” Thus, with more than a dash of melodrama, the royal authority of the regent was upheld, and the sixty-nine rebellious magistrates of the Parlement quashed. Three refused to fall into line and were arrested. The rest sweated profusely into their powdered wigs and robes of ceremonial velvet and conceded, reluctantly, that their moment had passed. The challenge had failed: once again Law, the outsider, had eluded them.
10
FINDING THEPHILOSOPHER’SSTONE
There appears nothing but new clothes, new figures and an infinite number of families raised to new fortunes. They see 800 new coaches set up in Paris, and the families enriched purchase new plate, new furniture, new clothes and new equipage, so that there is a most prodigious trade there.
Daniel Defoe,
September 12, 1719
THE PARLEMENT’S THREAT TO HANG HIM SHOOK LAW profoundly but did not alter his resolve to put his master plan, the so-called system, into action. He was still fired by the gambler’s will to win, a philanthropic desire to improve, and the urge to experiment. Also, he was still obsessed with the rejection of his appeal for a pardon for the death of Wilson, and craved redemption. But Law’s sense of isolation at the Palais Royal seems also to have awakened a more profound, barely acknowledged need for social acceptance and belonging. Law the opportunist, once happy to live outside the conventions of society and to make use of his haut monde connections for his own ends, now longed to be properly part of them. As with many successful businessmen today, he was consumed by political ambition. Perhaps Katherine had something to do with this shift in his thinking: the death threat and the rapid turns in political events must have disturbed her and underlined the vulnerability of their position. Perhaps behind Law’s increasing desire for public office lay not only his ambition but concern that the family’s future should be made more secure. It is possible, too, that Katherine felt she had an important role to play: as a doyenne of society, she could forge alliances that would help to stabilize Law’s political career. One fundamental belief, however, she could not change: in money, he was convinced, lay the key to salvation and the answer to his aims.
As France’s premier banker, he was ideally poised to become a man