limitations would have been reasonable enough, so far as the working of the Mississippi region was concerned; but Law went on extending and extending the scope of its supposed operations, until it might almost as well have attempted to fold in the orb of the earth. The shares in his company went up with a sudden bound. He had the patronage of the Regent and of all the Court 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, and find almost as great a temporary success, and blaze, like Law's, the comet of a season.