valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the purpose of paying off a certain class of treasury-notes. The news was soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the minister, anticipating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty millions of the same notes. The king had his fête; and when next he borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18] [Footnote 18: "Law, son Système et son Époque," p. 2, par P. A. Cochut, Paris, 1853.] Two years after, the foolish old king died, leaving, besides a consolidated debt of bewildering magnitude, a floating debt, then due and overdue, of seven hundred and eighty-nine millions, equivalent, as M. Cochut computes, to about twice the amount in money of to-day. Coin had vanished; the royal paper was at twenty-five; the treasury was void; prices were distressingly high; some provinces refused to pay taxes; trade languished; there were vast numbers of workmen unemployed; and during the winter after the king's death a considerable number of persons died in Paris of cold and hunger. The only prosperous people were Government contractors, farmers of the revenue, brokers, and speculators in the king's paper; and these classes mocked the misery of their fellow-citizens by an ostentatious and tasteless profusion. [Illustration: Island of Madhead. "Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by a multitude of all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)] The natural successor of a king bigoted is a prince dissolute. The regent, who had to face this state of things on behalf of his nephew, Louis XV., a child of five, had at least the virtue and good sense to reject with indignant scorn the proposition made in his council by one member to declare France bankrupt and begin a new reign by opening a clean set of books. We, too, had our single repudiator, who fared no better than his French predecessor. But the regent's next measures were worthy of a prodigal. He called in the various kinds of public paper, and offered in exchange a new variety, called _billets d'état_, bearing interest at four per cent. But the public not responding to the call, the new bills fell to forty in twenty-four hours, and drew down all other public paper, until in a few days the royal promise to pay one hundred francs was worth twenty francs. The regent's coffers did not fill. That scarred veterans could not get their pensions paid was an evil which could be borne; but the regent had mistresses to appease!