From time to time various new financial juggles were tried, some of them ingenious, most of them drastic. It was decreed that all _assignats_ above the value of one hundred _francs_ should cease to circulate after the beginning of June, 1796. But this only served to destroy the last vestige of, confidence in government notes of any kind. Another expedient was seen in the decree that paper money should be made to accord with a natural and immutable standard of value and that one franc in paper should thenceforth be worth ten pounds of wheat. This also failed. On July 16th another decree seemed to show that the authorities despaired of regulating the existing currency and it was decreed that all paper, whether _mandats_ or _assignats_, should be taken at its real value, and that bargains might be made in whatever currency people chose. The real value of the _mandats_ speedily sank to about two per cent of their nominal value and the only effect of this legislation seemed to be that both _assignats_ and _mandats_ went still lower. Then from February 4 to February 14, 1797, came decrees and orders that the engraving apparatus for the _mandats_ should be destroyed as that for the _assignats_ had been, that neither _assignats_ nor _mandats_ should longer be a legal tender and that old debts to the state might be paid for a time with government paper at the rate of one per cent of their face value. [75] Then, less than three months later, it was decreed that the twenty-one billions of _assignats_ still in circulation should be annulled. Finally, on September 30, 1797, as the culmination of these and various other experiments and expedients, came an order of the Directory that the national debts should be paid two-thirds in bonds which might be used in purchasing confiscated real estate, and the remaining "Consolidated Third," as it was called, was to be placed on the "Great Book" of the national debt to be paid thenceforth as the government should think best. As to the bonds which the creditors of the nation were thus forced to take, they sank rapidly, as the _assignats_ and _mandats_ had done, even to three per cent of their value. As to the "Consolidated Third," that was largely paid, until the coming of Bonaparte, in paper money which sank gradually to about six per cent of its face value. Since May, 1797, both _assignats_ and _mandats_ had been virtually worth nothing. So ended the reign of paper money in France. The twenty-five hundred millions of _mandats_ went into the common heap of refuse with the previous forty-five thousand millions of _assignats_: the nation in general, rich and poor alike, was plunged into financial ruin from one end to the other. On the prices charged for articles of ordinary use light is thrown by extracts from a table published in 1795, reduced to American coinage.