ways eluded him.

At last, one day when we were together by appointment, at Saint-Cloud,
seated upon the balustrade of the orangery, which covers the descent into
the wood of the goulottes, the Regent spoke again to me of the
Mississippi, and pressed me to receive some shares from Law.

The more I resisted, the more he pressed me, and argued; at last he grew
angry, and said that I was too conceited, thus to refuse what the King
wished to give me (for everything was done in the King's name), while so
many of my equals in rank and dignity were running after these shares.
I replied that such conduct would be that of a fool, the conduct of
impertinence, rather than of conceit; that it was not mine, and that
since he pressed me so much I would tell him my reasons. They were,
that since the fable of Midas, I had nowhere read, still less seen,
that anybody had the faculty of converting into gold all he touched;
that I did not believe this virtue was given to Law, but thought that all
his knowledge was a learned trick, a new and skilful juggle, which put
the wealth of Peter into the pockets of Paul, and which enriched one at
the expense of the other; that sooner or later the game would be played
out, that an infinity of people would be ruined; finally, that I abhorred
to gain at the expense of others, and would in no way mix myself up with
the Mississippi scheme.

M. le Duc d'Orleans knew only too well how to reply to me, always
returning to his idea that I was refusing the bounties of the King.
I said that I was so removed from such madness, that I would make a
proposition to him, of which assuredly I should never have spoken, but
for his accusation.

I related to him the expense to which my father had been put in defending
Blaye against the party of M. le Prince in years gone by. How he had
paid the garrison, furnished provisions, cast cannon, stocked the place,
during a blockade of eighteen months, and kept up, at his own expense,
within the town, five hundred gentlemen, whom he had collected together.
How he had been almost ruined by the undertaking, and had never received
a sou, except in warrants to the amount of five hundred thousand livres,
of which not one had ever been paid, and that he had been compelled to
pay yearly the interest of the debts he had contracted, debts that still
hung like a mill-stone upon me. My proposition was that M. le Duc
d'Orleans should indemnify me for this loss, I giving up the warrant