Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [52]
Lean-to shacks were erected in alleyways and on rooftops and rented out for vast sums. As the throng continued to swell, local innkeepers, confectioners, and chefs charged huge prices for their services. Cafés opened nearby where aristocratic ladies and gentlemen could sip their tasse of coffee or chocolate and play quadrille while their brokers made them rich. All usual constraints of value were lost: a single chicken was said to change hands for 200 livres, and in one of the most bizarre and often repeated legends of the time, a hunchback was said to have earned 150,000 livres in a few days by leaning against a mulberry tree and renting out his hump as a writing desk on which to sign contracts.
A golden key, so the saying goes, opens any door, and many craved social acceptance along with their newfound wealth. Saint-Simon recorded the desperate lengths to which some would go to improve their status. The wealthy Mississippian d’André, who “had made mounds of gold,” used some of it to betroth his three-year-old daughter to the thirty-three-year-old Marquis d’Oyse, paying 600,000 livres and undertaking to make further annual payments of 20,000 livres until the child reached twelve, when an enormous estate would be made over as a final payment and the wedding would take place. The deal so amazed the haut monde that the lawyer Marais wrote in his diary, “The babies of Mississippians now cry for marquis instead of dolls.” D’André was one of many who subsequently lost his fortune, and the contract ended in an acrimonious lawsuit that was still dragging on fifteen years later.
Predictably Mississippians were drawn to unbridled luxury: a fine carriage trimmed with crimson velvet and gold fringing became the badge of success in the same way that a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, or Ferrari broadcasts prosperity today. The age-old symbols of wealth—jewels, expensive clothing, gold, silver, property, and prestigious furnishing—were avidly sought. A window into this world of unabashed materialism is revealed in the paintings of Watteau, in which flamboyant figures in shimmering pastel silks pose in stagey fêtes champêtres or, as in the famous painting L’Enseigne de Gersaint, shop for works of art. The diplomat Daniel Pulteney gasped at the excess: “It is certain that the commerce of people here increases every day and that all manner of luxury does too; the Hollanders have drawn several millions from hence for jewels, lace and linen; I was told yesterday that one shop had sold in less than three weeks lace and linen for 800 thousand livres and this chiefly to people who never wore any lace before.” Defoe was similarly staggered by Parisian consumer frenzy: “Money,” he said, “flows like the waters of the Seine.”
Goldsmiths and silversmiths, whose business had languished in the wake of Louis XIV’s financial crisis, now found themselves inundated with orders. Within three months, 120,000 silver plates and matching dishes to a total value of more than $11 million had been cast, chased, engraved, and sold. The weavers at tapestry workshops in the Gobelins, in the provincial town of Aubusson, and in the Savonnerie carpet factory were deluged with commissions. Porcelain, another eye-catching, luxurious status symbol, was imported in vast quantity to fill the tabletops, cabinets, and walls of the elegant salons of the newly rich. The ateliers of furniture makers such as Charles Cressent and the Boulle brothers, sons of the great Charles André, pandered to the burgeoning craving for articles of unrivaled ostentation and intricacy. Showpiece commodes, bureaux plats, and cabinets were expensively veneered in exotic tropical timbers