Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [70]
The unfurling financial maelstrom had a further insidious consequence for which Law was also held responsible. Paris was engulfed in a crime wave. The unprecedented epidemic of holdups, kidnappings, violent robberies, and grisly murders was widely blamed on the avarice, envy, uncertainty, big wins, and big losses that Law had generated. In one particularly horrific incident, the watch discovered the body of a woman hacked into small pieces inside an overturned carriage. It was said that she had been murdered after being robbed of 300,000 livres in banknotes. Even Daniel Defoe was astounded by the scale of the villainy, reporting in early April, “No less than 25 bodies have been taken out of the filets of St. Cloud in about ten days. This is a net that’s put across a narrow part of the river Seine, from one side to the other . . . into which the murther’d bodies are carried by the stream that are thrown over the bridges in the city.”
By far the most notorious of all the horror stories to send shivers through Europe was that of a dissipated and unprincipled young aristocrat, Count Antoine Joseph de Horn. Greedy for money to gamble on shares, de Horn, in league with two others—Laurent de Mille, a Piedmontese soldier, and a courtier named d’Étampes—plotted to rob a rich stockholder called Lacroix, who was known to carry quantities of shares and large sums of money about with him. On the pretext of buying his shares de Horn agreed to meet Lacroix in the Épée de Bois, a tavern famous for its musical entertainment, on the corner of the rue de Venise and the rue Quincampoix. D’Étampes stood guard while the others lured the broker into a back room, threw a tablecloth over his head, and stabbed him several times in the chest. But hearing his cries, one of the tavern staff realized what was taking place and locked the attackers in the room. Despite his efforts, however, the assailants jumped from a window and escaped. D’Étampes ran to a nearby street where horses were waiting and got away. De Mille headed for the crowds of the rue Quincampoix but was quickly arrested. De Horn, who had sprained an ankle in his flight, tried to bluff his way out of trouble by saying that he was one of the victims, but when de Mille was brought to the tavern he was identified and arrested. The next day both men were tried, found guilty, and condemned to death by being broken on the wheel.
This particularly gruesome method of execution (later immortalized by Hogarth in his satirical engraving of the South Sea Company, which shows Self-Interest breaking Honesty on the wheel), usually reserved for common criminals, involved being spreadeagled on a wooden wheel and bludgeoned to death, limb by limb. A seventeenth-century visitor to France described the spectacle: “A place of execution made of timber, at the top whereof there is a wheel, whereon the bodies of murderers only are tormented and broken to pieces with certain iron instruments, with which they break their arms first, then their legs and thighs, and after their breast. That blow on their breast is called the blow of mercy because it does quickly bereave them of their life.”
Understandably distraught at the thought of their kinsman suffering such a death, de Horn’s noble family pleaded with the regent for leniency. As a distant relation of the royal family, they claimed, he should be spared, or at least executed in a more fitting way. Unusually, the regent remained resolute and, according to several accounts, replied, with the words of Corneille, “Le crime fait la honte, et non pas l’échafaud”—“It is the crime that is the dishonor, not the scaffold.” There was no reprieve.