Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [72]
The betrayal struck Law to his heart. Years later he wrote of this moment:
When M. le D [Bourbon] demanded the revocation of the arrêt of 21 May with such rage, he believed he was acting for the public good. When M. le D harangued me in the council, he did not believe that he was acting against his own interests. When the different parties joined together to rid themselves of me, the old court, the keeper of seals etc., each believed their own business would benefit. They were wrong. The Regent, who knew the situation better than anyone and who in his heart wanted to be fair to me, yielded out of fear of a greater ill. But he was wrong.
The battle was lost. Conscious that if he remained in office, the Parlement’s defiance would escalate, Law tendered his resignation. The regent did not accept it. A week later, however, yielding to the anti-Law cabal, Orléans ordered that the legislation reducing the value of paper and shares be revoked, and both were restored to their former worth. Law knew such a reversal would destroy public confidence even further. “Happy for France if those who forced the revocation of this arrêt had given the same time as the Regent and to themselves to reflect on the consequences of what they asked,” he wrote despairingly. A few days later all the earlier limits on owning silver and gold were lifted. But as one wag wryly commented, “The permission comes when nobody has any left.”
Terrified by the seesawing developments, investors scrambled to sell Mississippi shares and put their money somewhere safer, even if it meant sustaining hefty losses to do so. Prices went into free fall, plunging within a week to 4,000 livres. Defoe reported from Paris that “Country people run with as much precipitancy from Paris as ever they flocked to it.”
France’s ruin was England’s gain. Numerous bruised Mississippi shareholders chose to reinvest in English South Sea shares. The previous month, with a weather eye to developments in France, the South Sea Company managed to beat its rival the Bank of England and secure a second lucrative deal with the government whereby it took over a further $48 million of national debt and launched a new issue of shares. A multitude of English and foreign investors were now descending on London as they had flocked less than a year earlier to Paris “with as much as they can carry and subscribing for or buying shares.” In Exchange Alley—London’s rue Quincampoix—the sudden surge of new money also bubbled a plethora of alternative companies launched to capitalize on the new fashion for financial fluttering. Many of them, like the “company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is,” were as fictitious as the emerald mountain of Mississippi.
In Paris, euphoria vanished and the atmosphere was sinister. By the end of the month, the regent’s secretary of state, Claude Le Blanc, accompanied by sixteen Swiss Guards, informed Law that the regent had decided to dismiss him from his position as France’s controller general. Law was ordered not to leave his house. The guards were to remain outside the Place Vendôme mansion for his own protection. Or so Le Blanc said. It was clear, however, that to all intents and purposes Law was under house arrest.
Sensing the net drawing closer, Law blanched but retained his composure. Privately, though, he was immobilized by the real fear that his enemies’ next move would be to demand his