Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [80]
Law was rapidly becoming an embarrassment Orléans could ill-afford. He too was tainted by Law’s bad press and he felt uncharacteristically sensitive to the deluge of criticism and malice. Death threats and accusations of incest and of murder had been directed against him; his mother had been threatened and advised to poison her own son. In the past he had shrugged off the slanders. Now they began to hit home. The anonymous publication of one particularly vicious play riled him so much that he offered a reward of 100,000 livres for the name of the culprit. The only response this elicited was another cheeky couplet:
Tu promets beaucoup, O Régent.
Est-ce en papier ou en argent?
You promise much, O Regent.
Is it in paper or in silver?
Real economic recovery, the regent now felt, would never take place while the people were determined that Law and his paper system were untrustworthy, and while the Parlement, the financiers, and the wealthy elite were so determined to oppose him. Behind the scenes he began to make discreet overtures for assistance, appealing to private bankers and financiers in the hope they would offer his stranded regime hard money. Their response was not what he hoped. Though keen to ingratiate themselves with the Crown, they were aware that any loan might help save Law. They volunteered no tangible assistance, only the well-worn advice that all the problems would be swiftly solved with a return to the old metallic system of money and the abandonment of paper credit. The seed that had been scattered many times before now began to take root.
On September 15 Law’s career plunged to new depths with the publication of one of his most detested edicts. “The pen falls from one’s hands and words fail to explain the measures of this decree, which withdrew all the horrors of the dying system. Poison was in its tail,” wrote the lawyer Marais as he mulled over the new regulations, which stipulated that high-denomination notes would soon cease to be legal currency; that, with immediate effect, all banknotes could only be used if 50 percent of the payment was in coin; that bank accounts, compulsory since August, were to be reduced to a quarter of their present value, and shares were to be pegged at 2,000 livres. In sum, said Marais, painfully picking over each clause, it was a bankruptcy of three-quarters of the bank and five-sixths of the Mississippi Company.
Economic historians still quibble over whether the edict was in fact the brainchild of Law or whether, as seems likely, it was the outcome of the regent’s consultations with the private financiers. What is not in doubt is that the public perceived the ideas as Law’s and blamed him for their suffering. “The desolation,” wrote Marais, “is in every family. They have to pay for half of everything in coins and there aren’t any; and moreover everything is going up in price instead of coming down.”
Soaring inflation was worsened by profiteering merchants and members of the aristocracy who formed cartels, stockpiled staples, and then charged extortionate rates for them. Some of the worst offenders were Law’s supporters: “The distress people are under by the excessive prices of all things is very much increased by certain monopolies which some of the great favourites of the system have got; the Maréchal d’Estrées has the coffee, Mr. William Law the lead, others