Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [73]
15
REPRIEVE
Lundi j’achetai des actions;
Mardi je gagnai des millions;
Mercredi j’arrangeai mon ménage;
Jeudi je pris un équipage;
Vendredi je m’en fus au bal;
Et samedi à l’Hôpital.
My shares which on Monday I bought
Were worth millions on Tuesday, I thought.
So on Wednesday I chose my abode;
In my carriage on Thursday I rode;
To the ballroom on Friday I went;
To the workhouse next day I was sent.
LARGELY THROUGH DRAWING ON THE OLD GAMBLING strategies—masking emotion, following a set plan—Law overcame his dread and resisted the challenge. His victory was typically audacious. The morning after his dismissal from office, with a contingent of guards camped outside his door and sundry investigators nosing through his private papers at the bank, he had sent word via Lord Peterborough requesting an urgent audience with the regent. The response was swift: the Duc de la Force had been sent to escort him to the Palais Royal, where he was left to wait in a small gallery. Eventually, after several hours, an equerry informed him that the regent was unable to see him. Law returned to his house, aware that the public humiliation had been intentional—and that his critics were exultant.
Yet the regent, despite appearances to the contrary, had not forsaken him. Public unrest had allowed Law’s enemies—most notably d’Argenson, whom Law had so spectacularly trounced on numerous occasions, and the Pâris brothers, deprived by Law of their lucrative tax farms—to pressure him to abandon Law and his system. Only three years of his regency remained to Orléans before Louis XV came of age, and the Parlement was whispering that they might try to oust him sooner. Fearful for his own survival, he had decided to play them along, to give them rope and watch them become ensnared in it. His rejection of Law, even though Law failed to realize it, was part of the charade. He had invested too much in his protégé’s ideas to abandon them without a fight. Only if all else failed would Orléans sacrifice Law.
For Law a resurgence of hope, and an inkling of the regent’s underlying regard for him, came late that night when he was summoned clandestinely to the Palais Royal where Orléans greeted him warmly, according to Law with “mille amitiés,” and listened approvingly to a torrent of ideas for resolving the problems of the bank and company.
The next day, the guards were withdrawn, and Law’s allies felt bold enough to champion him as “the only man capable of getting them out of the maze they were in.” Law, under secret instruction to return to duty, worked continuously for the next forty-eight hours, returning to his original idea of maintaining credit but placing it under firm control. At a council meeting two days later, much to the astonishment of those assembled, Law entered as if the drama of the past days had never happened. His strategy, he announced, was ready.
Law’s adversaries were flabbergasted. Somehow he had evaded confinement, emerged from disgrace, and, moreover, the regent airily informed them, was about to return to high office—as intendant général du commerce and managing director of the bank and the Mississippi Company. The Duc d’Antin testified to the general astonishment of such a turnaround: his diary entry for June 2 reads, “We saw this day a rare thing: a minister deposed for several days, who had been placed under arrest by a major of the Swiss Guards, returned on Sunday to council to propose a policy and to be approved by the entire assembly.”
But return to royal favor, though welcome, did not mean that Law’s worries were over. Loyalties ebbed and flowed daily amid shifting tides of political ascendancy. Bourbon, Conti, and de la Force, aware of how much they had gained, fearful of how much they could lose, usually rallied round him, but their support vacillated according to their appraisal of the current political situation. No one wanted to be associated with failure and thus jeopardize his own position.
Law’s return to