f New Orleans were laid. Louisiana, hitherto
diffused through various petty cantonments, far and near, had at last a
capital, or the germ of one.

It was the sixth of September, 1717, when the charter of the Mississippi
Company was entered in the registers of the Parliament of Paris; and
from that time forward, before the offices of the Company in the Rue
Quincampoix, crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought from
morning till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders.
Within five years after, the huge glittering bubble had burst. The
shares, each one of which had seemed a fortune, found no more
purchasers, and in its fall the Company dragged down with it its ally
and chief creditor, the bank. All was dismay and despair, except in
those who had sold out in time, and turned delusive paper into solid
values. John Law, lately the idol and reputed savior of France, fled for
his life, amid a howl of execration.

Yet the interests of the kingdom required that Louisiana should be
sustained. The illusions that had given to the Mississippi Company a
morbid and intoxicated vitality were gone, but the Company lingered on,
and the government still lent it a helping hand. A French writer remarks
that the few Frenchmen who were famishing on the shores of the
Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico had cost the King, since the colony
began, more than 150,000 livres a year. The directors of the Company
reported that they had shipped 7,020 persons to the colony, besides four
hundred already there when they took possession, and that 5,420 still
remained, the rest having died or escaped.[313] Besides this importation
of whites, they had also brought six hundred slaves from Guinea. It is
reckoned that the King, Crozat, and the Mississippi Company had spent
among them about eight million livres on Louisiana, without any
return.[314]

The bursting of the Mississippi bubble did not change the principles of
administration in Louisiana. The settlers, always looking to France to
supply their needs and protect them against their own improvidence, were
in the habit of butchering for food the livestock sent them for
propagation. The remedy came in the shape of a royal edict forbidding
any colonist to kill, without permission of the authorities, any cow,
sheep, or lamb belonging to himself, on pain of a fine of three hundred
livres; or to kill any horse, cow, or bull belonging to another, on pain
of death.

Authority and order