PTER XVI

_Paris under the Regency and Louis XV.--The brooding Storm_

Under the regency of the profligate Philip of Orleans, a profounder
depth was sounded. The vices of Louis' court were at least veiled by a
certain regal dignity, and the Grand Monarque was always keenly
sensitive, and at times nobly responsive, to any attack upon the
honour of France; but under the regent, libertinage and indifference
to national honour were flagrant and shameless. The Abbe Dubois, a
minister worthy of his prince, was, says St. Simon, "a mean-looking,
thin little man, with the face of a ferret, in whom every vice fought
for mastery." This creature profaned the seat of Richelieu and
Colbert, and rose to fill a cardinal's chair. The revenues of seven
abbeys fed his pride and luxury, and his annual income was estimated
at 1,534,000 livres, including his bribe from the English Government.

Visitors to Venice whose curiosity may have led them into the church
of S. Moise, will remember to have seen there a monument to a famous
Scotchman--John Law. This is the last home of an outlaw, a gambler,
and an adventurer, who, by his amazing skill and effrontery, plunged
the regency into a vortex of speculation, and for a time controlled
the finances of France. He persuaded the regent that by a liberal
issue of paper money he might wipe out the accumulated national
deficit of 100,000,000 livres, revive trade and industry, and
inaugurate a financial millennium. In 1718 Law's Bank at Paris after
a short and brilliant career as a private venture, was converted into
the Banque Royale, and by the artful flotation of a gigantic trading
speculation called the Mississippi Company, the bank-notes and company
shares were so manipulated that the latter were inflated to twenty
times their nominal value. The whole city seethed in a ferment of
speculation. The offices of the Bank in the Rue Quincampoix were daily
besieged by a motley crowd of princes, nobles, fine ladies,
courtesans, generals, prelates, priests, bourgeois and servants. A
hunchback made a fortune by lending his back as a desk; lacqueys
became masters in a day, and a _parvenu_ foot-man, by force of habit,
jumped up behind his own carriage in a fit of abstraction. The
inevitable catastrophe came at the end of 1719. The Prince of Conti
was observed taking away three cartloads of silver in exchange for his
paper; a panic ensued, every holder sought to realise, and the
colossal fabric came down wi