“I related to him the expense to which my father had been put in defending Blaye against the party of M. le Prince in years gone by; how he had paid the garrison, furnished provisions, cast cannon, stocked the place, during a blockade of eighteen months, and kept up, at his own expense, within the town, five hundred gentlemen whom he had collected together; how he had been almost ruined by the undertaking, and had never received a sou, except in warrants to the amount of five hundred thousand livres, of which not one had ever been paid, and that he had been compelled to pay yearly the interest of the debts he had contracted, debts that still hung like a millstone upon me. My proposition was--that M. le Duc d’Orléans should indemnify me for this loss, I giving up the warrants, to be burnt before him. “This he at once agreed to. He spoke of it the very next day to Law; my warrants were burnt by degrees in the cabinet of M. le Duc d’Orléans, and it was by this means I was paid for what I had done at La Ferté. M. le Duc d’Orléans also distributed a large number of the Company’s shares to the general officers and others employed in the war against Spain.” Law was by these means assured of the certainty of his coming proposals meeting with public approval, and the only step now remaining was to mature as speedily as circumstances would permit the arrangements he had been busily negotiating with the Regent and his advisers on the one hand and with the companies and the lessees of the various monopolies on the other. The Tobacco monopoly was the first of the privileges to be acquired by the company. Although by no means an extensive trade, it was an important and lucrative one. The transfer was effected on 4th September, 1718, under burden of an annual charge of 4,000,000 livres payable to the king. Shortly after, arrangements were completed for the absorption of the Guinea Company, whose business was largely composed of slave-dealing on the West Coast of Africa. This was finally carried through on 15th December of the same year. Then came the fusion of the French East India Company, established in 1664 by Colbert, and also a dormant monopoly issued in 1713 conferring the sole privilege of carrying on trade with China.