Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [78]
Europe looked on compassionately but amid growing fears that the epidemic’s grasp would reach Paris, the Netherlands, and even London. “Large collections have been made and are making in the cities of France for the relief of the distressed people at Marseille and other places,” reported Defoe, who singled out for special mention the city of Genoa, which sent both money and a ship laden with food and medical supplies. Law and the regent also sent large sums to help.
To stop the spread, draconian quarantine restrictions were imposed. Ships were liable to weeks of delay: in one particularly extreme example in Holland, three ships arriving from the Levant were burned while their crews were forced to wade ashore naked and spend a period of quarantine on an island. Private travelers were also hampered by the inconvenience of being obliged to have health certificates stamped in every town through which they passed, and in certain areas such as Tyrol were still liable to be held in quarantine for weeks if they were known to have passed through France.
In the minds of many the plague became a metaphor for economic malaise, and Law, whose schemes had sparked the speculation contagion, was blamed. For his system the disease proved fatal. The key ports of Marseille and Toulon shut down, trade with Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean, until now flourishing, drew to a standstill. “Not a ship comes in to Marseille from any place that has heard of it,” remarked Defoe. “Commerce is universally stopped.” He could also have added that so had much of the income of the Mississippi Company. As a general slump in trade took hold, manufacturing dwindled, taxes on imports and exports diminished, holders of state investments could not be paid and thus had to sell Mississippi shares. “One cannot say what effect the demand for silver had but every prudent man sold some of his shares to have enough to feed his family during this public calamity,” Law later wrote. By the time the epidemic was over it had claimed over 100,000 lives and, as Law had feared, the system he had created.
16
THE WHIRLIGIGOF TIME
Cy git cet Ecossais célèbre,
Ce calculateur sans égal,
Qui par les règles de l’algèbre,
A mis la France à l’hôpital.
Here lies this famous Scot,
This peerless calculator,
Who by the rules of algebra
Has put France in the poorhouse.
Anonymous,
Paris (1720)
AMID THE MURKY INTERIOR OF JONATHAN’ S COFFEE-house in London’s Royal Exchange people gather to gossip, intrigue, bargain, or perhaps to gape at a new print strung on the wall before them. The image is profoundly disturbing. A billowing curtain is drawn back by Harlequin and Scaramouch—two well-known figures from the commedia dell’arte—to reveal hell on earth, the rue Quincampoix, in which a heaving tangle of anxious investors, arms flailing, eyes wild, mouths beseeching, wave serpentine banknotes overhead. Amid the mêlée, oblivious to the madness, three men, representing English, French, and German investors, stand complacently on a dais of paper. A supplicant figure—John Law—squats obscenely at their feet and allows them to pour coins in his gaping mouth, while from bared buttocks he excretes paper notes that are snatched by one of the frenzied figures in the mire below. In the foreground a caged figure of Mercury—symbolic of commercial prosperity and, in this case, of ruined speculators—weeps as a man in front performs various gambling tricks. The message, of venality, folly, degradation, chaos, is explicit and sickening—deliberately so. But by the time this engraving, from a famous series published in Holland in 1720 entitled The Mirror of Folly, was printed, disseminated,