There were the most extraordinary acquisitions of fortune. People suddenly enriched were called _Mississippiens_, and they behaved as the victims of sudden wealth, unearned, usually do. Men who were lackeys one week kept lackeys the next. A _garçon_ of a wine-shop gained twenty millions. A cobbler, who had a stall in the Rue Quincampoix made of four planks, cleared away his traps and let his boards to ladies as seats, and sold pens, paper, and ink to operators, making two hundred francs a day by both trades. Men gained money by hiring out their backs as writing-desks, bending over while operators wrote out their contracts and calculations. One little hunchback made a hundred and fifty thousand francs by thus serving as a _pupitre ambulant_ (strolling desk), and a broad-shouldered soldier gained money enough in the same way to buy his discharge and retire to the country upon a pretty farm. The general trade of the city was stimulated to such a degree that for a while the novel spectacle was presented of a community almost every member of which was prosperous beyond his hopes; for even in the Rue Quincampoix itself, although some men gained more money than others, no one appeared to lose any thing. And all this seemed the work of one man, the great, the incomparable "Jean Lass," as he was then called in Paris. It was a social distinction to be able to say, "I have seen him!" His carriage could with difficulty force its way through the rapturous, admiring crowd. Princes and nobles thronged his antechamber, a duchess publicly kissed his hand, and the regent made him controller-general of the finances. This madness lasted eight months. No one needs to be told what followed it--how a chill first came over the feverish street, a vague apprehension, not confessed, but inspiring a certain wish to "realize." Dread word, REALIZE! The tendency to realize was adroitly checked by Law, aided by operators who desired to "unload;" but the unloading, once suspected, converted the realizing tendency into a wild, ungovernable rush, which speedily brought ruin to thousands, and long prostration upon France. John Law, who in December, 1719, was the idol of Paris, ready to perish of his celebrity, escaped with difficulty from the kingdom in December, 1720, hated, despised, impoverished, to resume his career as elegant gambler in the drawing-rooms of Germany and Italy.