and well connected; had followed
Law for love; had had a son and a daughter by him, passed for his wife,
and bore his name without being married to him. This was suspected
towards the end; after his departure it became certain. She had one eye
and the top of one cheek covered by an ugly stain as of wine; otherwise
she was well made, proud, impertinent in her conversation and in her
manners, receiving compliments, giving next to none, paying but few
visits, these rare and selected, and exercising authority in her
household. I know not whether her credit over her husband was great; but
he appeared full of regard, of care, and of respect for her; at the time
of their departure they were each about fifty and fifty-five years old.
Law had made many acquisitions of all kinds and still more debts, so that
this tangle is not yet unravelled by the committee of the council
appointed to arrange his affairs with his creditors. I have said
elsewhere, and I repeat it here, that there was neither avarice nor
roguery in his composition. He was a gentle, good, respectable man, whom
excess of credit and fortune had not spoiled, and whose deportment,
equipages, table, and furniture could not scandalise any one. He
suffered with singular patience and constancy all the vexations excited
by his operations, until towards the last, when, finding himself short of
means and wishing to meet his difficulty, he became quick and bad-
tempered, and his replies were often ill-measured. He was a man of
system, of calculation, of comparison, well and profoundly instructed in
these things, and, without ever cheating, had everywhere gained at play
by dint of understanding--which seems to me incredible--the combinations
of cards.

His bank, as I have elsewhere said, was an excellent thing for a
republic, or for a country like England, where finance is as in a
republic. His Mississippi he was the dupe of, and believed with good
faith he should make great and rich establishments in America. He
reasoned like an Englishman, and did not know how opposed to commerce and
to such establishments are the frivolity of the (French) nation, its
inexperience, its avidity to enrich itself at once, the inconvenience of
a despotic government, which meddles with everything, which has little or
no consistency, and in which what one minister does is always destroyed
by his successor.

Law's proscription of specie, then of jewels, so as to have only paper in
France, is a sy