While Law was publicly carrying through transactions in such a manner as to rouse enthusiasm and inspire confidence in his projects, he was also at the same time engaged in securing by every possible means the good offices of those in high places without whose favourable support his plans would not likely reach maturity. The Duc de Saint-Simon reveals the nature of the efforts by which Law endeavoured to engage the good opinion of himself and others. “Law,” he says, “often pressed me to receive some shares for nothing, offering to manage them without any trouble to me, so that I must gain to the amount of several millions. So many people had already gained enormously by their own exertions that it was not doubtful Law could gain for me even more rapidly. But I never would lend myself to it. Law addressed himself to Madame de Saint-Simon, whom he found as inflexible. He would have much preferred to enrich me than many others, so as to attach me to him by interest, intimate as he saw me with the Regent. He spoke to M. le Duc d’Orléans, even so as to vanquish me by his authority. The Regent attacked me more than once, but I always eluded him. At last, one day when we were together by appointment at Saint Cloud, seated upon the balustrade of the orangery, which covers the descent into the wood of the goulottes, the Regent spoke again to me of the Mississippi, and pressed me to receive some shares from Law. “The more I resisted the more he pressed me and argued. At last he grew angry, and said that I was too conceited, thus to refuse what the king wished to give me (for everything was done in the king’s name), while so many of my equals in rank and dignity were running after these shares. I replied that such conduct would be that of a fool, the conduct of impertinence, rather than of conceit; that it was not mine, and that since he pressed me so much I would tell him my reasons. They were, that since the fable of Midas, I had nowhere read, still less seen, that anybody had the faculty of converting into gold all he touched; that I did not believe this virtue was given to Law, but thought that all his knowledge was a learned trick. A new and skilful juggle, which put the wealth of Peter into the pockets of Paul, and which enriched one at the expense of the other; that sooner or later the game would be played out, that an infinity of people would be ruined finally, that I abhorred to gain at the expense of others, and would in no way mix myself up with the Mississippi Scheme. “M. le Duc d’Orléans knew only too well how to reply to me, always returning to his idea that I was refusing the bounties of the king. I said that I was so removed from such madness that I would make a proposition to him, of which assuredly I should never have spoken but for his accusation.