Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/307

Rh of a rich stock-jobber, committed here on the 22nd of March, 1720, by a young Flemish nobleman, occasioned the proscription of that street as a place of business, and the transference of the stock-jobbing to the Place Vendome, and finally to the hotel de Soissons, which Law is said to have purchased from the prince of Carignan for the enormous sum of 1,400,000 livres.

Innumerable anecdotes are on record of the extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune which took place during this season of marvellous excitement; footmen stepped from the back to the inside of carriages; cooks appeared at the public places with diamond necklaces; butlers started their berlins; and men educated in poverty and of the lowest rank suddenly exchanged the furniture and utensils of their apartments for the richest articles which the upholsterer and silversmith could furnish. Law himself, now arrived "summa ad vestigia rerum," shone super-eminent above all the other attractions of the day; princes, dukes, marshals, prelates, flocked to his levees, and counted themselves fortunate if they could obtain a smile from the great dispenser of fortune's favours; peeresses of France, in the excess of their adulations, lavished compliments upon the Scottish adventurer which set even decency at defiance; his daughter's hand was solicited by princes; and his lady bore herself with hauteur towards the duchesses of the kingdom. Land in the neighbourhood of Paris rose to eighty or a hundred year's purchase; the ell of cloth of fifteen livres sold for fifty; coffee rose from fifty sous to eighteen livres; stock-jobbers were known to treat their guests to green pease at a hundred pistoles the pint; every yard of rich cloth or velvet was bought up for the clothing of the new élèves of fortune; and the value of the silver plate manufactured in the course of three months for supplying the demands of the French capital amounted to £7,200,000! The regent, sharing in the general delusion, wished to place the wonderful foreigner at the head of the finances of the kingdom; but then, in addition to his being an alien, he was a protestant also; so l'Abbé de Tencin was charged with the important duty of his conversion, and this ecclesiastic succeeded so well in the task assigned to him, that on the 5th of January, 1720, all obstacles being removed, Law was elevated to the comptroller-generalship of the finances of France, and for some time after his elevation to the premiership, governed France with almost absolute power. Law's fame had now reached its acme; his native city of Edinburgh hastened to transmit to her illustrious son the freedom of citizenship in a gold box of the value of £300; the earl of Hay re-published some of his works with an adulatory preface; British noblemen disdained not to pay their court to so successful an adventurer; even the earl of Stair, then the British ambassador at Paris, trembled at the idea of Law's overweening influence in the affairs of France, and viewed his boastful speeches in so serious a light, as to deem them matter of grave communication and advice to his government,—a piece of good faith for which the meritorious and discerning minister met with small thanks.

The great drama, however, which Law was now enacting before the astonished eyes of all Europe, was soon to shift; the glittering bubble on which he had fixed the eyes and expectations of all France was rapidly attenuating to its explosion; the charm by which he had swayed the mind of the million lay not in the rod of the magician, but in the implicit faith which people reposed in the skill and the power of its master,—and, that faith once shaken, the game of delusion was over.

We have said that the shares of the India company had risen to 10,000 livres each in the month of November, 1719. So long as they kept at this elevation, the credit of the bank remained unshaken. Its notes were found so very convenient in conducting the rapid negotiations of the Rue Quincampoix, that they were sought after with avidity, and even bore a premium of ten per