Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [63]
Increasing displeasure was voiced over the brutality of the archers. Poorly supervised, ill disciplined, and corrupt, they were soon universally detested and feared. If too few people from the designated categories were captured, the archers were known to arrest anyone unfortunate enough to stumble into their path. According to Pulteney, their fiendishness was exacerbated by financial temptation. They were paid commissions for every captive, and the system was widely abused. With a word in the ear of an archer and few sous slipped in his hand, it was all too easy for an unwanted relative, awkward son, inconvenient competitor, or demanding spouse to be dispatched to the swamps of Louisiana. There was even a popular song to warn husbands of the danger:
O vous tous, messieurs les maris,
Si vos femmes ont des favoris,
Ne vous mettez martel en tête;
Vous auriez fort méchante fête.
Si vous vous en fachez, tant pis:
Vous irez a Mississippi.
O all you husbands
If your wives have favorites
Don’t get worried;
You will have a terrible celebration.
If you get angry, too bad:
You will go to Mississippi.
Despite growing public concern, archer chicanery showed no sign of diminishing. Even infants were reported to have fallen prey: “I have heard that they have taken children out of houses; some they release again for money, those who cannot or will not pay a ransom are carried to a prison whence they are to be sent to the Mississippi,” Pulteney lamented. Those who could not escape were abysmally mistreated: “Not the slightest pains were taken to provide for the subsistence of these unfortunates on their journey, or at the places where they disembarked; they were shut up at night in barns without food, or in cellars from which they could not issue. Their cries excited both pity and indignation,” recorded an outraged Saint-Simon. The injustice of impressment would find most famous literary expression in the novel Manon Lescaut, published in 1731 by Abbé Prévost. The story charts the life of a young girl, Manon, during the Regency era, who is diverted from life as a nun by the appeal of money. Manon betrays her first suitor, who loves her and wants to marry her, takes numerous lovers, and is eventually arrested and deported to Louisiana, where she dies from the hardship she encounters.
The groundswell of disapproval did not diminish Law’s quest for settlers, but conscious of the problems created by deportations, he concentrated his efforts on enticing volunteers—especially young married couples—to the colony. On visits to Paris hospitals he offered generous dowries to couples who would marry and emigrate. “They took 500 boys and girls from the hospitals of Bicêtre and de Salpêtrière . . . the girls were in wagons and the boys on foot escorted by 32 guards,” noted Buvat. But the most bizarre event Law engineered took place in September 1719, when the pealing bells of the St. Martin quartier of Paris proclaimed the mass nuptials of eighty young girls of doubtful repute and eighty specially pardoned criminals. While the marriage took place the couples stood shackled together in heavy iron chains. Afterward, under the watchful eye of a company of archers, they were paraded, still in chains, through the streets of Paris before being sent to La Rochelle for transportation to Louisiana. The chains caused consternation among the public, and a similar mass wedding, in which couples were linked with flowers—presumably to symbolize the fecundity that awaited them—took place soon after in a blaze of publicity.
Publicity stunts and propaganda fueled much gossip and filled pages in the journals but had little impact. Inevitably, rumors of the sufferings of colonists penetrated even the institutions from which many were culled. The promise of freedom could not overcome the mounting terror of transportees—some became so reluctant to emigrate that they were willing to risk life and limb to avoid