may be worth mentioning that there was another financial
trouble especially vexatious. While, as we have seen, such enormous
sums, rising from twenty to forty thousand millions of _francs_ in
paper, were put in circulation by the successive governments of the
Revolution, enormous sums had been set afloat in counterfeits by
criminals and by the enemies of France. These came not only from
various parts of the French Republic but from nearly all the surrounding
nations, the main source being London. Thence it was that Count Joseph
de Puisaye sent off cargoes of false paper, excellently engraved and
printed, through ports in Brittany and other disaffected parts of
France. One seizure by General Hoche was declared by him to exceed in
nominal value ten thousand millions of _francs_. With the exception of
a few of these issues, detection was exceedingly difficult, even for
experts; for the vast majority of the people it was impossible.

Nor was this all. At various times the insurgent royalists in La Vendee
and elsewhere put _their_ presses also in operation, issuing notes
bearing the Bourbon arms,--the _fleur-de-lis_, the portrait of the
Dauphin (as Louis XVII) with the magic legend "_De Par le Roi_," and
large bodies of the population in the insurgent districts were _forced_
to take these. Even as late as 1799 these notes continued to appear. [80]

The financial agony was prolonged somewhat by attempts to secure funds
by still another "forced loan," and other discredited measures, but
when all was over with paper money, specie began to reappear--first in
sufficient sums to do the small amount of business which remained after
the collapse. Then as the business demand increased, the amount of
specie flowed in from the world at large to meet it and the nation
gradually recovered from that long paper-money debauch.

Thibaudeau, a very thoughtful observer, tells us in his Memoirs that
great fears were felt as to a want of circulating medium between the
time when paper should go out and coin should come in; but that no
such want was severely felt--that coin came in gradually as it was
wanted. [81]

Nothing could better exemplify the saying of one of the most shrewd of
modern statesmen that "There will always be money." [82]

But though there soon came a degree of prosperity--as compared with the
distress during the paper-money orgy, convalescence was slow. The acute
suffering from the wreck and rain brought by _assignats_, _m