Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [55]
Art was another passion. He collected Italian and Dutch masters and commissioned works from contemporary artists. The pastelist Rosalba Carriera became a family friend, who made portraits of Law, Katherine, and the children (her portrait of Kate entitled La Jeune Fille au Singe survives in the Louvre). He commissioned Carriera’s brother-in-law, the artist Antonio Pellegrini, who had just failed to secure the contract to decorate the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, to decorate the ceilings of the offices of the Banque Royale. Pellegrini’s masterpiece was every bit as ambitious as Law’s system, measuring a spectacular 130 feet by 27 feet. The design, an apotheosis of all that was dearest to Law, showed the child King Louis XV and the regent surrounded by personifications of Commerce, Riches, Credit, Security, Invention, Arithmetic, Bookkeeping, Navigation, and, naturally, the Mississippi. (The ceiling’s fate echoed Law’s: it fell in 1724.)
But compared with the excesses of the day, Law eschewed overt materialism: “Inordinate influence and fortune never spoiled [him], and . . . behaviour, equipments, table and furniture could never shock anyone,” Saint-Simon affirmed. Perhaps the stalwart Katherine and his children kept his feet firmly on the ground. His house was simply furnished, he dressed relatively plainly, and he still relished an evening with friends over a hand or two of cards. An old friend, Archibald, Earl of Ilay, remembered visiting Law’s house at around this time. On arrival he was shown into an antechamber crowded with visitors. When word reached Law that Ilay was waiting, the earl was ushered swiftly into Law’s private study, where he found the great man writing to the gardener at Lauriston—according to some accounts, about the cabbages he wanted planted in the garden. Law was delighted to see him, and the two sat and played piquet for some time before joining the assembled throng.
Law’s old obsession with improving public prosperity still preoccupied him. The effect of his policy proved beneficial throughout the nation. Du Tot, deputy treasurer at the bank, commented, “Plenty immediately displayed herself through all the towns, and all the country. She there relieved our citizens and labourers from the oppression of debts . . . she revived industry.” As the economy burgeoned, Law zealously effected reform. He set in train a dynamic program of public building, funded by the abundant supply of paper money. Bridges were constructed, canals dug, roads improved, new barracks built. In Paris a generous endowment was given to the university and a bequest made to the Scots College, where his father was buried.
More controversially, he set about streamlining a tax system riddled with corruption and unnecessary complexity. As one English visitor to France in the late seventeenth century observed, “The people being generally so oppressed with taxes, which increase every day, their estates are worth very little more than what they pay to the King; so that they are, as it were, tenants to the Crown, and at such a rack rent that they find great difficulty to get their own bread.” The mass of offices sold to raise money had caused one of Louis XIV’s ministers to comment, “When it pleases Your Majesty to create an office, God creates a fool to purchase it.” There were officials for inspecting the measuring of cloth and candles; hay trussers; coal measurers; inspectors of woodpiles, paper, and bridges; examiners of meat, fish, and fowl. There was even an inspector of pigs’ tongues.
This did nothing for efficiency, Law deemed, and served only to make necessities more expensive and to encourage the holders of the offices “to live in idleness and deprive the state of the service they might have done it in some useful profession, had they been obliged to work.” In place of the hundreds of old levies