Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance by Janet Gleeson Page B

sail into the Mediterranean “like swans on the river.” Over the following months the allies triumphed also at Ramillies, Barcelona, and Turin. As if to underline France’s waning fortunes, a total solar eclipse on May 11, 1706 signaled that seemingly even God had deserted the Sun King.
    Amid the unfolding political drama, the Laws based themselves in The Hague to await the birth of their first child. John Law hankered to make his next move, and the difficulty of traveling in war-torn Europe must have worried him, since he needed free passage to be able to sell his schemes. Over the next nine years, however, he crossed enemy lines with apparent ease, ignoring the usual formalities if necessary, reaching the enemy heartland of Paris several times, as well as visiting Vienna, Turin, Milan, Brussels, and Utrecht.
    Soon after the birth of their baby, a boy they named John, the Laws visited Vienna. Here, according to du Hautchamp, “he proposed his system to the Emperor, and although he was unsuccessful he did not leave without playing heavily and making large winnings.” Law did not shed many tears over his failure. By now he had focused his sights on Europe’s largest, most populous, but most severely impoverished nation: France.
    Superficially France seemed hardly to have changed for the past half century. Louis XIV had reigned for sixty-three years, during which he had raised his country to commercial heights that made it the envy of Europe, then ruined it with his penchant for military aggression, religious intolerance, and unrivaled extravagance. Lack of money lay at the root of all France’s evils. In the countryside the impoverished masses lived in abject misery, unshod, dressed in rags, forced to scavenge to survive. During severe famines in 1694 and again in 1709, following the worst winter in living memory, the poor made flour from ferns and grass stalks or roots such as asphodel. Children lived on “boiled grass and roots” and, according to one account, “crop the fields like sheep,” while the Princess Palatine, sister-in-law of Louis XIV, wrote, “The famine is so terrible that children have devoured each other.” A fortunate few could barter: a cabbage for a bag of corn, two pigs for a cow, and so on. In Versailles it was not so easy. In a feverish bid to pay for his army and feed his people, the king had to resort to sending his gargantuan golden dinner services and silver furniture to the mint to be melted down for currency. Now he ate off enamel or faience pottery, and his entourage was expected to follow suit.
    Various vain attempts had been made to replenish the treasury. Additional venal offices were created and each position, mostly entirely spurious, sold off to the highest bidder. Interest-bearing paper credit notes called
billets de monnaie
had been offered in return for coins and were later converted into government bonds. New taxes were introduced, old ones raised—there were so many taxes that it was feared even marriages and births would be taxed. The coinage was constantly tampered with. Between 1690 and 1715 the currency was revalued forty times to make the limited gold and silver available stretch further.
    But the situation did not improve. By 1715 France would be over 2 billion livres in debt, largely to a group of forty private financiers, who also controlled the collection of taxes. The government could not afford the interest repayments on its notes, let alone repay them in coin. They had become so discredited that when Louis wanted to raise a loan of 8 million livres in coin from one of the financiers of Paris he had to pay 32 million in notes. In the provinces few could afford the taxes; people even resorted to marrying or baptizing their children without a priest to avoid the extra levy they felt might soon be demanded.
    Law knew he had the answer. The problems of the country, he promised, all stemmed from a lack of available money. “Trade and money,” he had written in