Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [99]
But even if Montesquieu failed to realize it, Law was profoundly changed. After seven long years the scrutinizing of his affairs in France dragged relentlessly on, no closer to conclusion. He had sustained his belief that eventually justice would prevail, but the news that a further commission had been appointed to reexamine his accounts forced him to the depressing conclusion that matters would never be resolved in his lifetime. With the realization, despair descended and his health became frail. As winter passed and another carnival drew to a close, Law fell gravely ill with pneumonia. He had suffered from a weak chest, rheumatism, and recurrent fevers for some years, and the dampness of the winter months in Venice must have made it worse. At the end of February he developed “a shivering cold fit which lasted him five or six hours, and that was succeeded by a violent hot one, which has never intermitted but continued upon him ever since.” Despite the usual medical ministrations of emetics and bleeding, his condition worsened. Everyone who saw him knew that his life was drawing to a close.
Death held no fears for him. On the contrary, he was “very desirous to die; believing his death would be of greater service to his family at this juncture than any other.” Only then, he confided to Burges, did he believe that the hounding of him and his family would end: “They will be more inclined to do him justice in France when they shall know how poor he dies, and that he has nothing in any part of the world but in that country and in the King’s hands.” Pragmatic to the last, he instructed his twenty-two-year-old son to go to France immediately after his death and throw himself on the king’s mercy.
Both Burges and the French ambassador, Gergy, realizing that the end was near, hovered around him, anxious that the minute his life was over they should be the first to examine his papers. He had mentioned in earlier letters to France that he was working on writing a history of his system, and they presumed that this document would be found among his papers. The French feared that if details of the system’s intricacies fell into the wrong hands, Bourbon and other powerful members of the French establishment might be embarrassed. It was also thought that the papers would include details of the secret fortune with which everyone still believed he had escaped. Gergy enlisted Jesuits to administer the last sacrament and keep vigil over the invalid. Despite a slight rally at the beginning of March, which gave “some sort of hope of Mr. Law’s recovery,” his strength continued to wane, and two weeks later Burges reported him “so ill that nobody expects his recovery.”
Nonetheless, he remained mentally alert and well enough to make a will in which he left his entire estate to Katherine. Although the fact that they had never married could not have been entirely secret, the elopement had been generally forgotten. The world at large believed Katherine to be his wife. Because she was not, and presumably to spare her embarrassment, Law made the bequest to her in the form of a deed of gift to Lady Katherine Knowles. There was no mention in the document of their children, nor of the fact that she was his common-law wife.
Two days later, on March 21, 1729, a month before his fifty-eighth birthday, the end came peacefully. “Mr. Law is dead, after struggling seven or eight and twenty days with his distemper, which was judged mortal by his physicians from the very beginning; he died with great calmness and constancy