Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [77]
For his own protection Law moved into the Palais Royal. He was deeply shaken by the violence, and as before, the symptoms of acute distress were apparent. According to the regent’s mother, he remained “as white as a sheet” for several weeks after the incident. Even when he returned to his own residence the risk of assault still lingered. Youths said to have been employed by Law’s growing band of opponents kept watch on his every move, in the hope that a chance for vengeance would present itself. The children were still at Bourbon’s country estate, but Katherine was now a virtual prisoner in her home and the hostility with which Law and she were regarded must have seemed terrifying. From now on, according to Buvat, a watch on foot and horseback patrolled the house and the bank’s offices day and night. Law ventured out only with guards, and careful precautions were always taken. “When he removes,” wrote Daniel Pulteney, “it is not in his own équipage, and it is observed that the Swiss guards are dispersed about the streets he is to pass through.”
Throughout the riots, the Parlement was deep in session. Their president, hearing of the attack on Law’s carriage and driver, with a sudden (if improbable) burgeoning of poetic wit, is said to have told fellow members:
Messieurs! Messieurs! Bonne nouvelle!
Le carrosse de Lass est reduit en cannelle!
Sirs! Sirs! Good news!
Law’s carriage has been reduced to splinters!
The Parlement was supposedly pondering an edict to extend the trading privileges of the Mississippi in return for a substantial payment, which would allow further notes to be withdrawn. Swift to blame the disruptions on Law’s system, the members pushed home the advantage, refusing to register the edict, in the hope that their dissension, added to civil unrest, would finally topple Law. But the regent struck back, banishing them to Pontoise, a village forty miles from Paris. This was perceived by shareholders as a move in Law’s favor, and share prices rallied modestly. But the recovery was fleeting, soon overshadowed by frightening news: France faced an epidemic of plague.
The outbreak had begun in Marseille when crew members of a merchant ship from Syria, where the disease was rampant, evaded the usual rigorous quarantine restrictions and docked in port. Only after the cargo of silk and wool had been unloaded was the crew found to be infected. Eight people suddenly succumbed in the insanitary shanties surrounding the port. Slowly and insidiously the disease spread through the crowded dockside slums to the spacious villas of the well-to-do. “The fury of this distemper can’t be described,” wrote a terrified Defoe. “It begins with a light pain in the head, and is followed with a cold shivering, which ends in convulsions and death; and (which is more terrible) we are informed that not one person, no not one . . . touched with it, has been known to recover, and they seldom live above six hours after they are first taken.” At the end of July, an epidemic was formally acknowledged and a cordon sanitaire placed around the city, preventing people from leaving the infected area but also hindering supplies of food from reaching the inhabitants, who desperately needed it. As the disease ran rife, piles of rotting corpses were heaped so high that galley slaves were brought in to bury them, and since they were poorly supervised, looting broke out. By August a third of the city’s inhabitants—around 15,000 people—had perished from famine or disease and the cordon sanitaire had failed. The disease, like some exotic creeper, had spread its tendrils through Provence. In Toulon some 9,000 perished; a further 7,500 lives were claimed in Aix, a city, Defoe said, that was “utterly abandoned; the inhabitants poor and rich are fled to the mountains of the upper Provence, in hopes that the sharpness of the air, those hills being always covered with snow, may preserve them from the infection.” A month later the lawyer