Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [50]
Canny and ambitious though the scheme undoubtedly was, Law seems to have naïvely ignored the effect of his plans on the tax farmers and financiers, and the court nobility who backed them. The double blow—denying their lucrative tax profits and significantly reducing their income from their government bonds—was bound to spark an angry response and make them determined to undermine his reforms. Law disregarded the danger at his peril.
The shares were traded in the company’s new offices in Paris’s ancient commercial heartland, the rue Quincampoix, a street that today crouches under the shadow of the Centre Pompidou, in the Les Halles district. The rue Quincampoix is a long, thin thoroughfare, terminating at the rue aux Ours to the north and the rue Aubry le Boucher to the south. The road had long been a center for money changers, businessmen raising capital to start new ventures, and, during the reign of Louis XIV, traders in the unpopular billets. Its tongue-twisting name comes from one of its twelfth-century money-dealing residents, Nicolas de Kiquenpoit.
In volatile markets news is an essential tool that helps traders anticipate where prices might move next. Today’s brokers have at their disposal data vendors such as Reuters and Bloomberg offering a mass of up-to-date analysis, research, prices, and charts. The eighteenth-century equivalent was gossip. News of the colonies, government policy, and Law’s next move was endlessly anticipated and assessed in the rue Quincampoix. So many gravitated here to talk and trade that the surrounding streets were paralyzed by horses and carriages. D’Argenson, the finance minister, whose official residence was also in the street, was infuriated when one day in November he spent more than an hour stuck in a traffic jam. Eventually carriages were banned, gates erected to control the crowds, and guards posted to prevent night dealings, which disturbed residents. In another futile attempt to restore some semblance of order, one entrance was reserved for speculators of quality, the other for everyone else.
At the sound of a morning bell, the gates opened and convention vanished. Aristocrats jostled with their footmen and maids; bishops and priests vied with courtesans, opera singers, and actresses; magistrates did business with pickpockets; Italians, Dutch, and English mingled with the French. Daniel Defoe described the extraordinary scenes: “Nothing can be more diverting than to see the hurry and clutter of the stock-jobbers in Quincampoix street; a place so scandalously dirty, as if it had been not the sink of the city only, but of the whole kingdom. . . . The inconvenience of the darkest and nastiest street in Paris does not prevent the crowds of people of all qualities . . . coming to buy and sell their stocks in the open place; where, without distinction, they go up to the ankles in dirt, every step they take.” Even the nine-year-old King Louis XV was caught up in the frenzied mood. When a plan of Paris was laid before him, he was said to have demanded that Quincampoix be highlighted in gilding.
The Parisian elite was startled by the extraordinary number of people from the lower orders who prospered spectacularly from Mississippi speculation. Money was easy to borrow, and since you only needed put down a 10 percent deposit to play the market, people from all walks of life rushed to sell their châteaux, their diamonds, their cows, and their crops to join in. The privileged greeted the new social mobility with diffidence,