Louis XIV. having
left behind him, as the price of his glory, a debt of about a thousand
millions of dollars, the French ministry, with a view to reduce it,
ordered a re-coinage of the louis-d'or. An edict was promulgated,
calling in the coin at sixteen livres, to be issued again at twenty; but
Law, an acute and enterprising Scotchman, suggested that the end might
be more happily accomplished by a project for a bank, which he carried
in his pocket. He proposed to buy up the old coin at a higher rate than
the mint allowed, and to pay for it in bank-notes. This project was so
successful that the Regent took it into his own hands, and then began
an issue of bills which literally intoxicated the whole of France.
No scenes of stock-jobbing, of gambling, of frenzied speculation, of
reckless excitement and licentiousness ever surpassed the scenes daily
enacted in the Rue Quincampoix; and when the bubble burst, the distress
was universal, heartrending, and frightful. With millions in their
pockets, says a contemporary memoir, many did not know where to get
a dinner; complaints and imprecations resounded on every side; some,
utterly ruined, killed themselves in despair; and mysterious rumors of
popular risings spread throughout Paris the terror of another expected
St.
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