The speculative madness that prevailed in the year 1719-20, the "bubble mania," as it was called, offered a fertile field to the satirist. The contagion was caught from France, where, about that time, John Law projected his celebrated Mississippi Company, and, by his wild financial manoeuvres, first rendered money a mere drug, then plunged Paris and France into the profoundest misery. The outline of Law's history is familiar to most persons. It will be remembered how, having killed a man in a duel in his own country, he broke his prison, and fled to France, met the young Duke of Orleans at the house of a courtesan named Duclos, and, being handsome, accomplished, and graceful, contracted with him an intimacy that led eventually to the hatching of the notable Mississippi scheme. The delusion began to flourish towards the middle of 1718, and was at its apogee at the close of the following year. The market for the shares was in an insignificant street, still existing in Paris under the name of the Rue Quincampoix, where every house was soon subdivided into an infinity of little offices, and a dwelling whose usual rent was of six hundred livres yielded one hundred thousand; where a cobbler gained two hundred livres a-day, by hiring out his shed to ladies who came to share in and look on at the game; and a hunchback earned a handsome income by lending his shoulders as a writing-desk. The five-hundred-livre shares rose to twenty thousand livres--to a premium, that is to say, of four thousand per cent. Money was for the time so abundant, that goods rose immensely, and articles of luxury were all bought up. Cloth of gold, a French writer tells us, became exceeding rare, except in the streets, where it was seen draping the plebeian persons of the newly-enriched speculators. A nobleman and a Mississippian disputed a partridge in a cook's shop: the latter obtained it for two hundred livres, or more than eight pounds! Beranger has devoted a witty stanza to that year of madness. "C'était la régence alors Et sans hyperbole, Grâce aux plus drôles de corps, La France étoit folle; Tous les hommes s'amusaient, Et les femmes se prêtaient A la gaudriole an gué, A la gaudriole."