Twenty years elapsed from the time of his flight from a London prison. He was forty-four years of age, possessed nearly a million and three-quarters of francs in cash, producible on the green cloth at a day's notice, and was the most plausible talker on finance in Europe. This last was a bad symptom, indeed, for it is well known that men who remain victors in finance, who really do extricate estates and countries from financial difficulties, are not apt to talk very effectively on the subject. Successful finance is little more than paying your debts and living within your income, neither of which affords material for striking rhetoric. Alexander Hamilton, for example, talked finance in a taking manner; but it was Albert Gallatin who quietly reduced the country's debt. Fifteen days after the death of the old king, Law was in Paris with all that he possessed, and in a few months he was deep in the confidence of the regent. His fine person, his winning manners, his great wealth, his constant good fortune, his fluent and plausible tongue, his popular vices, might not have sufficed to give him ascendency if he had not added to these the peculiar force that is derived from sincerity. That he believed in his own "system" is shown by his risking his whole fortune in it. And it is to his credit that the first use he made of his influence was to show that the spoliations, the debasing of the coin, and all measures that inspired terror, and thus tightened unduly the clutch upon capital, could not but aggravate financial distress. His "system" was delightfully simple. Bear in mind that almost every one in Paris who had any property at all held the king's paper, worth one-quarter or one-fifth of its nominal value. Whatever project Law set on foot, whether a royal bank, a scheme for settling and trading with Louisiana, for commerce with the East Indies, or farming the revenues, any one could buy shares in it on terms like these: one-quarter of the price in coin, and three-quarters in paper at its nominal value.