Chapter 28 The Gamester by Rafael Sabatini
CATASTROPHE
Coming home from that triumph in the Rue Quincampoix, Mr Law found Catherine awaiting him in a fever. At sight of him, serene, if faintly flushed, she ran to meet him with something between a laugh and a sob.
William was with her, and no whit less anxious. Both spoke at once.
"Thank God you are safe, John."
"Safe?" He smiled, a little quizzically, upon this breathless solicitude. "Why, what was to be feared? Of course I am safe, and so, too, I think," he added, with a glance at William, "is the India Company. Before I left the Rue Quincampoix to the old cry of Vive Monsieur Lass, the stock was already rising again."
"You'll want to talk to Will," said Catherine. "I'll leave you now that I know that all is well with you. But I'll come back when he has gone."
He watched her from the room, his smile enigmatic.
The anxiety for him which she betrayed supplied a climax to a change that had been apparent in her ever since that talk of theirs following upon the last visit of Lord and Lady Stair. Penitence for her unwitting part in the events which had aroused the hostility against him and perhaps the assurances he had given her, had served to soften her. Her shrewishness had melted into a humility by which she sought to make amends.
"We grow considerate," he said, as the door closed upon her.
William's manner was a reproof in itself. "All morning the poor soul has been in hell for you, John. She was like a wild thing when she learnt where you had gone and the risk to which you might be exposed. She was bitter with me for having let you go, as if I or anyone under God could ever hold you back."
"Fearing, I suppose, what d'Argenson was praying for: that I should be torn in pieces."
The kindly William was reproachful. "Are you sure that you don't want for kindness towards her? A little tenderness and there's nothing you couldn't do with her. If I hadn't always known it, I'd have learnt it from her distress this morning."
Mr Law sighed. "A little tenderness and the termagant would reappear. There would be a renewal of her eternal groundless suspicions to fire her jealousies again. She's suffering from conscience at the moment. A passing ailment." He was pacing the room as he talked, and talking as if he thought aloud. "I think I know my Catherine by now."
William shook his head dolefully. "You constantly convince me that you don't. Will you never perceive how you fail to do her justice? Jealousy, after all, has its roots in affection."
"In affection for one's self. I know."
"Sometimes perhaps, and sometimes for another. It may not always be easy to distinguish, especially if you come to it with notions preconceived that distort your vision. Have you ever thought that jealousy is a torment, dear, to some women?"
"What then? Am I to be patient with that?"
"If you contribute to it."
"Is it possible that I have now become an homme à femmes in your eyes, too, Will? I thank you."
"There is your past," William reminded him. "That overgay youth of yours."
"That! Bah! The past is done with."
"The past is never done with. It is always and in all things there, to explain the present. Only by infinite patience could you have brought her to forget it."
"Patience! Faith, Will, I've always been accounted a patient man. But no patience is without limits. I bore with her groundless jealousies until they distracted me; then in self-protection I made myself impervious and insensible to them."
"And thereby sharpened them the more. She would explain your indifference in only one way. That made her resentful, and out of resentment she became shrewish; because she was shrewish you armoured yourself in yet stouter indifference. And so, each reacting upon the other, the gulf between you has steadily widened."
Mr Law stood still and looked at his brother, the quizzical smile once more on his thin lips. "You seem to be describing the inflation of values that is exercising us. But what is this, Will? Has Catherine made you more than ever her advocate?"
"By her conduct this morning," William agreed emphatically. "If you had seen her distress as I did, her very anguish at the thought of your peril, you could never doubt her affection for you. I was with her, John, and I tell you again as I've told you before that under all the seeming levity of her nature, under all her frowardness, that woman loves you. I'll never believe but that by gentle handling you could shape her to your will."
Still looking at him, with a lift of the brows, Mr Law took thought a moment; then slowly shook his head. "If I could believe that..." he began, and there broke off with a laugh. "No, no, Will. You overlook the alternative: that her distress was rooted in fear that if I were destroyed, the social eminence so dear to her would be destroyed with me. There would be an end to her salon, with its throng of nobles and its sprinkling of abbés and chevaliers, to pay their court to her; an end to playing the châtelaine at Guermande; an end to her lackeys, her equipages, her black boy, and the rest. Matter enough in all that to alarm Catherine."
William's eyes were sadly reproachful. "I'm wondering what proof of your error would satisfy you."
"I wonder with you," said the elder Law. He laughed again, without mirth, and upon that the discussion closed, for they were interrupted by the entrance of Laguyon to announce that dinner was served.
William stayed to dine with them, and the talk at table was of the morning's events in the Rue Quincampoix, with Catherine listening in alternating dread and satisfaction and an occasional interjection.
The stout and even gay confidence Mr Law derived from those events put heart anew into his doubting brother, so that when William departed it was in the conviction that he had been unduly mistrustful of the future, and that under the stimulus John had applied to the market and under his astute guidance a recovery might yet follow to give them the time they needed.
It did follow, and in the ensuing weeks the shares rose gradually once more from the point to which they had fallen. By the time, in the late summer when they had recovered to fifteen thousand livres, the belief was general that the slump had been no more than the manifestation of a transient and groundless panic.
At this level of fifteen thousand, however, a halt was called by the insidious underground campaign which d'Argenson had never relaxed. His strength lay in the fact that he fought with weapons of reality against a system built upon illusion.
Again both the timorous and the astute gave heed to the Chancellor's skilfully disseminated argument that in realization lay the only safe escape from an edifice that must inevitably crash. The recovery d'Argenson described as the mere up-leap of an expiring flame, and he went to work to prove it so.
When eventually the stock began once more to sag, and in a measure as it sagged, the price of commodities underwent a fresh increase, raising the level of wages with it, and these again driving the price of commodities still higher. And now the falling stock began ominously to drag down with it the value of the banknotes.
The beginning of a general loss of confidence set in.
Despite the edicts putting the paper currency at a premium over specie, it was being secretly exchanged at an ever increasing discount for gold and silver, which were being hoarded for the sake of their inalienable intrinsic value.
Fresh edicts, imposing fines and even imprisonment upon anyone holding more than five hundred livres in gold, were being secretly ignored. For no people will allow itself to be shamelessly plundered of its own without resisting. Rewards offered for delations and the domiciliary perquisitions that were being made aroused hot indignation, both against the Comptroller-General and against the Regent by whom he was supported.
Mr Law could no longer close his eyes to the mounting dangers of the situation. Considering that there were no real values to be set against that half-milliard in banknotes that remained uninvested in the hands of the creditors of the State, coercion was his only remaining weapon with which to combat the growing depression.
In despair he had further recourse to it. He subjected specie to a fresh devaluation, made the use of paper currency obligatory, imposed still harsher restrictions upon the manufacture of gold and silver articles of every kind, and forbade the use of jewels into which the paper currency was now being rapidly converted.
The result was that the government became entangled in and hobbled by the endless regulations which a government must impose when it attempts to interfere with the free and natural flow of values.
He was too astute not to be aware of the perils such measures must invoke; but he continued to take a gamester's chance, and rather than leave the India Company to its fate, as William pleaded, refused to divorce it from the Bank, which, once delivered of that incubus, might well have weathered the storm.
He still trusted desperately to time for his salvation in despite of those who were cogging the dice against him. But when in its slump, the price of the shares had come down to ten thousand livres, his enemies came out into the open. The general confusion which was ensuing and the increasing reluctance to accept the paper currency compelled the summoning of a Council of State to deal with the situation.
It met under the presidency of the perturbed Regent, in that same tapestried chamber of the Palais Royal, in which four years ago Mr Law had first expounded the system by which he proposed to rescue France from financial embarrassment. Its members were almost the same, including even the Duke of Noailles, who, whilst no longer of the Council of Finance, was still a member of the Council of State.
The Marquis d'Argenson, covering his malice with a mask of concern, and condoling with Monsieur Lass upon these adverse winds of fortune which were threatening destruction to a system that once had seemed of such fair promise, came with a plan worked out to the last detail calculated to accelerate its ruin.
He expounded that a situation which he described as ominous resulted at once from the inflated value of the India Company's stock and from the greatly excessive amount of paper money in circulation.
Whilst censuring in veiled terms the forced measures which were aggravating the ruinous course, he proposed that it should be arrested by pinning at five thousand livres the price of the shares and reducing gradually, month by month, the value of the banknotes, so that by the end of the year they should have reached a definite reduction of one-half their face value, at which it might be hoped to stabilize them.
Aghast at such a proposal, still more aghast at the manifest favour with which it was received, and perceiving the malice by which it was dictated, Mr Law controlled his indignation only with difficulty as he started up to protest against it.
"The Chancellor blames my forced measures for a state of things which he proposes to amend by forced measures infinitely more outrageous. I warn Your Highness and all you gentlemen that the decree for which the Chancellor now asks will precipitate a catastrophe. It will create a panic whose repercussions may be appalling. And since his intelligence is too acute not to perceive it, I make bold to ask is that what Monsieur d'Argenson desires?"
"A shameful question," Noailles reproved him.
"Indecent," mumbled old Villeroy. "Indecent is the least that one can say of it."
It required the intervention of the Regent to subdue the storm of outcries that beat about the Comptroller-General's head.
"Messieurs! Messieurs!" The Regent waved plump white hands to repress them. Then, gently, he remonstrated with Law. "My dear Baron, you must not, in the heat of the moment, impute to Monsieur le Marquis base motives which I know him to be incapable of harbouring."
Mr Law bowed his head. "I will withdraw a question which Your Highness assures me I was wrong to ask." He had recovered from his gust of anger. "As for the value of the India Company's stock, if it is definitely fixed, as Monsieur le Marquis proposes the least that can follow will be a further loss of confidence in it. Left to itself, the stock should ultimately find its real value, and this value in time--and before long, once the new colonists have shown their worth--may easily be as high as speculation has set it."
Someone laughed. Mr Law, however, paid no heed.
"When we come to the paper currency, however, it is easy to demonstrate the disastrous error of the Chancellor's proposal. Do not be deluded into believing that any decree will succeed in gradually reducing its value. Once the intention is known, the notes will depreciate immediately, amid not merely by the one-half that is ultimately intended. Consider now, I beg, that there are in circulation some two milliards in round figures.
"Of this, for one and a half milliards the Bank holds real value, in specie, in trade credits and in fiscal revenues. That leaves only a half-milliard--one quarter of the total--for which there is not cover, a half-milliard that would have been destroyed had it returned to the Bank through the India Company, as it must have returned had not the swift rise brought about by speculation prevented State creditors from buying the stock save at prices they were unwilling to pay."
"By whose fault?" growled d'Argenson.
"Oh, I will admit the fault," said Mr Law. "It was my one miscalculation in all this."
"Your one established miscalculation," Noailles amended.
"As you please, Monsieur le Duc." Mr Law was disdainful. "I am not to quibble. Permit me keep to the point. For the sake of this excessive one-quarter in the issue of notes it is proposed to depreciate the value of the total in circulation by one-half. Whom will that profit? Does it even make sense?"
"Not to me, messieurs," said His troubled Highness, and he looked round the board for support, but found only Saint-Simon's.
The little Duke, who is often prim but rarely coarse, tells us of the terms in which he denounced the proposal. "It amounts," he said, "to what in matters of finance and bankruptcy is known as montrer le cul. By the proposed decree we should exhibit it so uncovered that all would be accounted lost far beyond the reality."
But d'Argenson thundered that even this was better, in the face of the facts, than that the State should continue to support a falsehood which was fast becoming evident to all the world.
"And therefore," said Law, with biting sarcasm, "it is proposed to represent the falsehood as greater than it actually is. As a means of combating falsehood that possesses at least the virtue of originality."
D'Argenson's retort was violent. "Sneers, sir, are not argument," he cried, his heavy jowl thrust forward. "There are facts to be faced. They are not to be swept aside by sarcasm. We are confronted with the natural, the inevitable reaction from a transient prosperity--transient because false--induced by your system. The situation is desperate. Perhaps you do not yet choose to realize how desperate. It can be met only by desperate measures."
The Council's support was hot and unanimous, with the single exception of Saint-Simon; and even Saint-Simon did not further press the objection he had raised. Having expressed it, he conceived that he had done all that could be expected of him or that was permitted him by his resentment of Law's intervention, as he believed, in the case of the Count of Horn.
The end of it was that, however reluctant--for his faith in his Comptroller-General had as yet been only slightly impaired by the events--the Regent felt himself compelled to bow to the fierce unanimity of his council, and Mr Law went home in angry despair.
He was justified of this by what followed as soon as it became known that the edict had gone to the Parliament to be registered and what were the measures it decreed.
Whilst the profiteers--the "realizers," as they were called--who had converted into real estate and tangible values the fortunes they had made were more or less secure, the great mass of the people raised a storm of protest at this menace of arbitrarily cutting in half the value of the paper money of which their hands were full. Rich and poor alike, believing themselves ruined, assumed that Law was the real author of the edict. Uproar against him, and against the Regent for abetting him, were immediate and of a violence that swelled rapidly to formidable proportions.
A mob, made up from every class of society, in which the most clamant and virulent were the market women, blocked the approaches to the Hôtel de Nevers, not, as before, to acclaim Monsieur Lass and hold out its hands for the wealth of which he had been the dispenser, but to heap curses upon his name and to deafen him with its howl of threats and denunciations. It was held in check only by the stout gates of the courtyard until a detachment of musketeers, dispatched by the Regent, cleared the street and remained on guard there.
Meanwhile another mob was clamouring about the Palais Royal, swarming the iron railings to express in similar fashion its anger with the Regent.
Such was the general fury in the days that followed, so alarming were the street scenes, so hostile the siege of the Bank's premises, also guarded now by troops, and so scurrilous the lampoons and pamphlets inciting the people to fresh violence that d'Argenson himself began to be appalled by the storm he had raised.
When after five days of this turbulence, it still showed no signs of abating, he took his courage in both hands, and went off to wait again upon the Regent.
He had learnt that the Parliament in its latest session, in order to gratify its abiding rancour of Law, by whose influence it had been humbled, and at the same time to present itself in the cherished role of the people's buckler, had decided to refuse to register the offending edict.
The Regent received the Chancellor in his private cabinet, attended only by the elegant La Vrillière. His manner was unusually stern.
"I hope that having let hell loose upon us, you are now persuaded of your lack of wisdom, Monsieur le Marquis."
The big man bowed himself double. Agitation had mottled his rugged, swarthy face. "A desperate disease, monseigneur, demands a desperate cure."
"So you said before the Council. I fear you lack originality. Do you think to soothe me with stale apophthegms out of Montaigne?"
"If that were all, I should be less distressed, monseigneur." And at once he related what the Parliament was preparing.
His Highness received the news with a gust of angry laughter. "So! My old friends of the robe have discovered a way to win the popularity of the mob."
"Your Highness expresses it exactly. May I respectfully submit that you should deprive them of that satisfaction by anticipating them: cut the ground from under their feet by, yourself, revoking the edict."
"You submit that respectfully, do you?" His Highness shook with anger. "If you had been half as respectful in submitting your demand for the decree, we might have been spared this disgraceful uproar. You will permit me to tell you, Marquis, that I find your submission impudent?"
D'Argenson was now shaking in his turn. "Your Highness will do me the justice to remember that to a man the Council shared my view."
"But you were the advocate, Monsieur d'Argenson, and not even to be restrained by the arguments of Monsieur Lass, who precisely foresaw what must follow. A panic of appalling repercussions was what he foretold. And we have it. A wise man would have remembered the overwhelming proofs of prescience we have had from the Baron in the past. If I had been the king I should have insisted that he be heeded. Unfortunately I am only the Regent. However, it is idle to look back. This vicious edict shall be revoked, and we'll hope that it may do something towards arresting the evil. La Vrillière, you will give yourself the trouble of conveying that at once to the President de Mesmes."
At the same time, in the kindly hope of reassuring Law, whose distress he conceived, the Regent sent word of what he had done on his own responsibility: that the edict was cancelled and that the banknotes and the shares in the India Company were to be left at their current values.
Upon Law's mind the messages produced an effect the very opposite of that which was intended. Infuriated, he rang for Laguyon, and ordered his carriage.
Hearing of this, Catherine stood suddenly before him. Pale and worn and red-eyed from weeping, her delicate winsomeness had been sorely ravaged by the terror of these last days. "Where are you going, John?"
"To the Regent."
She remonstrated fearfully. She implored him not to leave the house. "The people's mood is horrible. They are like wild beasts. I am frightened, John. Only this morning, and in spite of the guards, I heard them shouting 'Death to Lass'!"
"Death to Lass!" he echoed, and laughed. "A month ago it was 'Long live Monsieur Lass'. Why heed the voice of the rabble with its 'Hosanna' today and 'Crucify' tomorrow'?"
"I will not let you go," she cried.
"Not let me?" He was suddenly stern. He seemed to grow taller under her pleading eyes. "That is mere folly, Catherine. Unless I act, unless I check the capers of those lunatics about the Regent, it will be the death of Lass, indeed."
He went past her to the door. But as he reached it, he turned. She was looking after him wild-eyed, huddled in the chair to which she had sunk, and her lips moved quiveringly, as if she were praying.
The spectacle touched him, and he may well have asked himself in that grim moment, when whilom adulatory friends were all falling away, leaving him to stand lonely and alone to face the seething hatred of thwarted greed, whether his brother might not be right, whether there was not here, as William protested, a faithful heart, under the levity and shrewishness which perhaps his indifference had provoked.
To reassure her he put on a confident smile, and his tone was suddenly gentle. "Courage, Catherine. Have no fear for me. I assure you there is not the need. I shall not be long away."
The grounds for her fears were soon to become apparent. Outside the Hôtel de Nevers the street was made safe enough by the guards. But in the space before the gates of the Palais Royal a small crowd of demonstrators was noisy, and execrations rained upon Mr Law when his liveries were recognized. To enter the palace by the ordinary way it would be necessary to drive through that mob, and since this might be provocative, he ordered his coachman to go on and set him down at the side entrance in the Rue de Richelieu.
He was obeyed, but the crowd came rolling in the wake of the carriage, swollen as it went by word that the detested Monsieur Lass was now within reach of its vengeance.
A half-hour later, to the Parliament then in session, the President de Mesmes was able to announce the glad tidings that the carriage of Monsieur Lass had been smashed to fragments in the street. Jubilation, however, was presently tempered by disappointment when further word was brought that unfortunately the Comptroller-General had no longer been in the vehicle when it was wrecked.
In fact, when the ugly incident took place, Mr Law was closeted with Dubois, demanding to be taken to the Regent, and inveighing against a revocation that could only serve, in his view, to pile confusion upon confusion.
To Dubois, no longer a merely titular abbé, but by now an ordained priest and Archbishop of Cambrai, to the see of which he had lately been raised, the reason for Mr Law's indignation was anything but plain. On the contrary, if there was poison in a given measure, a contrary measure should supply the antidote. The Regent was distressed enough already. Monsieur d'Argenson was with him at that moment, having been commanded, and Dubois displayed what he termed reluctance to trouble His Highness further on so vain an issue.
Mr Law's mood became savage. "You call it vain? My dear Archbishop, don't scruple to quarrel with me if it's to your profit. You will merely be in step with all those I have enriched. The gold with which I have gorged them has nauseated them, and they are now vomiting their spite over me."
"My God, my God! What are you saying? How you wrong me!" The weasel face was puckered in real distress. He looked more than ever like Monsieur de Voltaire. He had made great profit out of the system, and whether grateful or not had no wish to quarrel with one who if goaded might make revelations that would be awkward for any man, but doubly awkward for an archbishop. "Come to the Regent, then, if you insist. But upon your own head the consequences."
As it happened, engaged in a fresh discussion of the situation with the Chancellor the disquieted Regent actually welcomed Mr Law's arrival. His reception was of an affability seasoned with condolence.
"Ah, Baron, Monsieur d'Argenson is telling me that things continue to take an ugly shape."
Mr Law was blunt. "They'll take a still uglier one as a result of this revocation."
Behind him Dubois clucked deprecation. Monsieur d'Argenson breathed hard, whilst the Regent became haughty.
"Will you tell me what alternative remained considering the public clamour? Here!" He picked up a sheet from his writing table "Read this filth."
It was a lampoon of more than ordinary scurrility, telling the Regent what to do with his paper money. Mr Law ignored it.
"There never was an alternative to the edict, monseigneur, once it had done its mischief. All that remained was to ride out the storm it raised. Storms after all have a way of spending their fury. But now..." He spread his hands in a gesture of protest and hopelessness. "We cannot even count upon that. The hope is shipwrecked on this admission of dishonesty."
"Dishonesty!" Both Regent and Chancellor uttered the indignant exclamation together.
"Dishonesty," Mr Law insisted. "What else? To revoke an edict that halved the value of the currency is to confess that the edict was unnecessary. If unnecessary, if the banknotes may retain their face value, how is the attempted reduction to be regarded but as a dishonest means of profiting the Treasury?"
The Regent sat down suddenly, blank dismay on his face. He looked at d'Argenson and his voice shook. "Here is something that you left out of your calculations, Marquis."
"But...in the face of the public clamour..." d'Argenson was faltering when Mr Law broke in without ceremony.
"It is something that escaped the Council also. I foretold what must follow, that the people would not be content to accept the course of a gradual reduction, but would at once account the notes discredited, and that, faced with the dread of ruin, the public indignation would be terrible. Was anything else to be expected?"
D'Argenson reared his great head to meet the attack. Eyes blazing in a livid face, he confronted Law. "For the author of that ruin, sir, you permit yourself a singularly bold tone."
"It is yourself is the author of the ruin. When machinations to discredit the paper currency by a run on the bank for specie had been foiled, you had recourse to this still more disastrous expedient, dissembled by linking the notes with the depreciation of the India Company's stock."
The Chancellor turned angrily to the Regent. "I beg Your Highness to protect me from these imputations."
"How?" The Regent, already half-won by Law's forcefulness, looked coldly at the Marquis. "Are you no longer able to protect yourself? You have but to answer Monsieur Lass."
"Then I answer without fear of contradiction that if I advised the edict it was because the ruin had already overtaken us. Your Highness knows that we must go much further back to discover the source of this disaster. It springs from a crazy attempt to convert France into a single colossal stock company. The effect of such a system has been to enrich rascals of every class; to ruin the middle class, which is the most honest, industrious and useful class of all; to confuse the conditions of life, corrupt the public morals, and pervert the national character. That is what has been achieved by assuming control of commerce and removing it from the hands of the experienced merchants who had formerly conducted it on their own responsibility and at their own risk."
"Even if all that were true, which I am not prepared to admit," said Mr Law, "it still applies only to the India Company; and even then the ruin, which involved only the speculators, was by no means irreparable. But so far as the Bank is concerned, these allegations are utterly false. As I showed the Council, the Bank is fundamentally sound."
"With an issue of paper of a half-milliard beyond its resources!" roared the Chancellor, beside himself.
The Regent smacked the table, to call him to order. "Monsieur le Marquis, I do not like raised voices."
The Chancellor, in confusion, bowed his apologies. Mr Law became still more incisive. "Let me remind you again that that is only a quarter of the total issue, and that for the remainder, as I demonstrated, the Bank holds solid value. In no case was a cut of one half to be justified by a shortage of less than one quarter. As for this quarter, given time and prudence it could gradually be absorbed."
"Do you say so?" d'Argenson sneered. "Then you may easily prove it by taking time and prudence. By the revocation of the edict the situation is restored."
"Restored? Is it possible that you still believe it? Have you already forgotten my contention that by this revocation we shall be branded with dishonesty?"
"We have only your word for that, Monsieur Lass.''
"And when has my word not been verified by the ensuing facts?"
"By God! Your modesty!" ejaculated the Marquis.
But Mr Law never heeded him. His tone, invested with a slow forcefulness, preserved its quiet level. "At the meeting of the council I forecast that the edict would raise a storm. That storm may have exceeded your expectations. It has not exceeded mine. It reduced the paper currency at a stroke to half its value. My present forecast is that the revocation will render it quite worthless.''
"Peste! I hope not," cried the Regent.
D'Argenson could still assert himself "Your Highness need fear no such consequences."
The Regent's glance sought Dubois, who had remained a silent witness. "In God's name, Archbishop, why don't you say something? Have you no views?"
The fact was that for some moments the Archbishop's attention had been elsewhere. He had been intently listening to a swelling murmur outside which had escaped the other three, engrossed as they were. He raised a forefinger, his eyes wide with apprehension. "Harken!" he enjoined.
Even as he spoke there was a resounding crash, and the murmur, swelling suddenly, announced itself clearly as the roar of an angry multitude.
"I am afraid," said d'Argenson, "that the courtyard has been invaded."
The Regent rose. "Come with me," he commanded, and passed from his cabinet to the gallery that overlooked the court.
From one of its windows they beheld the place packed by a violently clamant mob. In the foreground, three stretchers were displayed, and on each there was a human body.
La Vrillière out of breath came hastening along the gallery. In gasps he brought out his ugly news. In the storming of the Bank that morning by a crowd that demanded specie for its paper, three men had been crushed to death. The mob had brought the bodies to the Palais Royal, as if to justify by them their angry demonstration. He also brought word that Mr Law's carriage had been reduced to fragments, but that coachman and footmen, at least, were safe within the palace.
"God help us!" said the Regent, but without any sign of fear. For all his softness, he was not without personal courage. "Find Le Blanc. Tell him to clear the courtyard. Let it be done without unnecessary violence. Come, messieurs."
Followed by the three he returned to his cabinet and flung himself ill-humouredly into the chair at his writing table.
"Well, Chancellor?" His voice rasped harshly. "Do you still insist that we need not fear the consequences foretold by Monsieur Lass?"
Within the frame of his black periwig the Chancellor's rugged swarthy countenance was almost green. For once his booming eloquence failed him. He stuttered before he brought out the answer: "Do me right, Highness! After all, the edict was your own."
"I see. So now you place the responsibility upon me. But I am not the King, as I told the Council. I am only the Regent, and I govern by a Council, whose unanimity I am not to withstand. In this disastrous affair the Council was swayed by you, by reliance upon your foresight, by faith in your calculations." He paused, his glance sternly upon the Chancellor, who for once in his life stood mute, confounded. Then he went on: "I will not ask, monsieur, how far those calculations were inspired by prejudice, to use no harsher word. But I must require of you that you bring me the seals of your office this afternoon."
"Your Highness!" gasped the broken Chancellor.
His Highness waved a hand. "You have my leave to withdraw."
After a moment's palsied hesitation d'Argenson bowed low, bowed as if under a crushing weight. Then drawing himself up, and without so much as a glance at the others, he marched heavily out of the room.
If his vindictiveness had opened an abyss for Mr Law, he was, himself, the first to hurtle into it in disgrace, his career shattered, his great ambitions wrecked.
There was a silence after he had gone. Then the Regent, dismissing the dark thoughts that absorbed him, looked at Dubois. "Monsieur de Cambrai, you will send today to Fresne, to require d'Aguesseau to return. In this pass we need a man of known integrity in the Chancellorship. I pray that it may serve to restore some confidence. That is all that I can do." His glance shifted to Law. "And now, Baron?" he asked.
Mr Law was again miraculously calm. "Your Highness will, of course, require me to resign the Comptrollership."
"If it is your wish to relinquish the helm at such a moment."
"Not if Your Highness thinks I can still be of service."
"I know of no one else whose knowledge of finance I would more surely trust."
Mr Law bowed. "Your Highness is very generous. Very magnanimous. My system, as your Highness perceives, has been laid in ruins. Still, if you command me, monseigneur, I will study means to make what repairs may yet be possible."
"May God guide and prosper you in that," was the lugubrious prayer, on which the Regent dismissed him.