circle. Gambling in shares became the fashion, the
passion of Paris, and, indeed, of all France. Shares bought one day were
sold at an immense advance the next, or even the same day. Men and women
nearly bankrupt in purse before, suddenly found themselves in possession
of large sums of money, for which they had to all appearance run no risk
and made no sacrifice whatever. Princes and tradesmen, duchesses and
seamstresses and harlots, clamored, intrigued, and battled for shares.
The offices in the Rue Quincampoix, a street then inhabited by bankers,
stock-brokers, and exchange agents, were besieged all day long with
crowds of eager competitors for shares. The street was choked with fine
equipages, until it was found absolutely necessary to close it against
all horses and carriages. All the rank and fashion of Paris flung itself
into this game of speculation. Every one has heard the story of the
hunchback who made a little fortune by the letting of his hump as a desk
on which impatient speculators might scribble their applications for
shares. A French novelist, M. Paul Feval, has made good use of {185}
this story, and London still remembers to what a brilliant dramatic
account it was turned by Mr. Fechter. Law was the most powerful and the
most courted man of his day. In his youth he had been a gallant and a
free liver, a man of dress and fashion and intrigue, who delighted in
scandalous entanglements with women. The fashion and beauty of Paris was
for the hour at his feet. Think of a brilliant gallant who could make
one rich in a moment! The mother of the Regent described in a coarse and
pungent sentence the sort of homage which Parisian ladies would have been
willing to pay to Law if he had so desired. St. Simon, the mere
_litterateur_ and diplomatist, kept his head almost alone, and was not to
be dazzled. Since the fable of Midas, he said, he had not heard of any
one having the power to turn all he touched into gold, and he did not
believe that virtue was given to M. Law. There is no doubt that Law was
a man of great ability as a financier, and that his scheme in the
beginning had promise in it. It was, as Burke has said of the scheme and
its author, the public enthusiasm, and not Law himself, which chose to
build on the base of his scheme a structure which it could not bear. It
does not seem by any means certain that a project quite as wild might not
be launched in London or Paris at the present day, an