Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [79]
Anti-Law venom enveloped Europe. There were scores more equally scathing compositions, mostly dwelling on the imagery of windmills, whirligigs, bubbles, bladders, cabbages, corruption, folly, and cruelty. Elsewhere satire surfaced in hundreds of ferocious poems, medals, pamphlets, plays, novels, and playing cards that circulated in the cabarets, taverns, coffeehouses, and meeting places of every town and city in Europe. Ironically, a series of silver coins was produced in Gotha, immortalizing Law in the very substance he had tried so hard to banish.
Law could avert his gaze from such vitriol, but he could not ignore its existence, nor that it sprang from a crystallization of public hatred. For a man whose intentions had always been benevolent, who had cherished dreams of bringing contentment to all, mass condemnation was deeply wounding. His behavior became increasingly erratic. One day he was full of the old bravura, attending a concert at the home of the financier Crozat with the regent and Katherine, convincing others, and himself, that the economy was improving, that he was in control, and telling friends that “what has been his is still, and that he would always be the master of all the money in Europe.” The next he was beset with doubt, unusually short-tempered and high-handed with members of the council, introducing ever harsher legislation to bring the system back on course. Occasionally, as if overburdened by responsibility, he withdrew totally. Remembering such a day spent in solitude in his apartment at the Palais Royal, when members of the royal family were out of town and staff had been instructed to admit no one, he wrote, “The idea came to me then, that one would be less unhappy to be enclosed in a town infested, like Marseille, than to be in Paris overwhelmed with people—as I usually was.”
He threw himself frenetically into work. Six hundred workmen were employed to build a new mint—presumably in the expectation that by the time it was complete there would be metal enough to make coin. The share market, which had reopened in the Place Vendôme, was now moved to the gardens of the Hôtel de Soissons, which was renamed the Bourse. The official opening took place on August 1, to a musical accompaniment of kettledrums and trumpets. As at some latter-day Field of the Cloth of Gold, the dealers, food sellers, jugglers, fire eaters, tricksters, prostitutes, pickpockets, and throngs of investors glided through a forest of streamered pavilions, embodying not royal puissance but the waning power of paper.
To bolster his reputation he published an anonymous defense of his system. When he came to France, he said, the country had been 2 billion livres in debt. Now, thanks to the Mississippi Company and other reforms, France was far stronger financially. But readers of this slickly argued pamphlet were infuriated by the fact that it skirted the current economic problems. Inflation, the fall in value of banknotes and shares, the shortage of coin, and the damage to investors were completely ignored. In short, said Pulteney, it was “very ill-timed as it pretends to show that people are richer and happier, while they complain with reason of want and ruin.”
Law meanwhile turned quietly for help to the one man whose financial acumen he deeply respected: his old friend Richard Cantillon. Since Cantillon had been banished from France under threat of incarceration in the Bastille, the two men had patched up their differences, and Law had been using Cantillon’s brokering services in Amsterdam to buy copper, probably with the intention of minting it into coins to help the ailing French economy. Now, with his system crumbling, Law tempted Cantillon, “with great offers of preferment,” to come and help him sort out the financial morass. The precise nature of the carrot Law tendered remains mysterious, but it was alluring enough for Cantillon to weigh it up carefully and ask his friends’ advice. Eventually, realizing the precariousness of Law