Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [51]
It is good to come to the country when Plutus is turning all heads in the city. Have you really all gone mad in Paris? I only hear talk of millions. They say that everyone who was comfortably off is now in misery and everyone who was impoverished revels in opulence. Is this reality? Is this a chimera? Has half the nation found the philosopher’s stone in the paper mills? Is Law a god, a rogue or a charlatan who is poisoning himself with the drug he is distributing to everyone?
Journals and memoirs of the time recount scores of tales of Mississippians propelled from poverty to wealth overnight. As with today’s lottery winners, writers of the rags-to-riches stories reveled in the difficulties of those who found the transition hard to make, often ridiculing them for daring to aspire to luxurious living. There are tales of a footman who earned so much that he was able to buy himself a fine carriage, but when it was delivered forgot his changed circumstances and found himself taking up his old position at the rear. A baker’s son from Toulouse was said to have bought an entire shop full of silver plate for 400,000 livres, and sent it home to his wife with orders to invite the local gentry for dinner and use the silver. The woman was unused to such luxurious objects but did as instructed. When her guests arrived they collapsed in mirth to see soup served in a church offertory basin, the sugar dispensed from an incense burner, and the salt from chalices.
Of the fabled Mississippi investors who came from modest backgrounds the most spectacular success was that of the widow Chaumont from Namur, who came to Paris to collect a debt, which was paid to her in billets d’états. She invested them in Mississippi stock and swiftly made several million livres. She spent part of the proceeds buying the Château d’Ivry, and every week held legendary banquets where guests consumed “an oxen, two calves, six sheep and numerous fowls.”
Law’s own coachman was said to have made such profits that he tendered his resignation, having employed two drivers, one for himself and one for Law—he offered his ex-employer first choice. Another much-recorded incident relates the story of an exquisitely dressed woman who was observed descending from an immaculate carriage. When the aristocratic spectators asked who she was they were told “a woman who has tumbled from a garret into a carriage.”
Many of the servants who grew wealthy did so when their employers commissioned them to sell on their behalf at a certain sum. Often they arrived at the rue Quincampoix to find the price far higher than expected, in which case they could pocket the difference and use it as capital to trade. One of the many diarists of the time tells of a gentleman who sent his servant with 250 shares and instructions to sell at 8,000 livres. The servant sold them for 10,000, making a profit of half a million livres in a morning, then reinvested and a few days later found himself worth 2 million.
By October the share price was 6,500 livres. The rise was not, however, without vacillation. In the tumult of rue Quincampoix, traders operated independently and unregulated; prices at one end of the street varied dramatically from those at the other, and fortunes made in one hour could be reversed during the next. The Princess Palatine, the regent’s mother, recalled wryly that when the royal physician, Monsieur Chirac, heard that his stock had fallen dramatically he muttered, while taking a patient’s pulse, “Good Lord, it’s going down, it’s going down.” Fearing she was about to die, the lady began to sob. Chirac hastily consoled her: “Your pulse is splendid and you are quite well. I was thinking of the Mississippi shares on which I am losing because they are going down.”
Along with the share-trading frenzy came an orgy of property speculation. Houses in the rue Quincampoix