In order that the Company and the Bank might be housed in a style of magnificence befitting the brilliance of their careers, the Hotel Mazarin had been purchased at a cost of one million livres. Both were now under one roof, and Law was thus enabled to devote himself, with greater ease and less inconvenience, to their management. This was all the more necessary since the Bank and the Company, although nominally distinct and separate undertakings carrying on different classes of business, were yet in reality part and parcel of the same system, engaged in accomplishing the same ultimate objects and working in co-operation in all their transactions. Of both, Law was the controlling spirit. The Bank, now the property of the Crown, was placed entirely under the management of its founder upon whom no restrictions were laid, and the Company although under the directorate of thirty proprietors was equally in his hands. Their will was invariably his wish, and in everything they yielded with ready compliance to the suggestions of the great financial genius. While the Hotel Mazarin was the centre from which the fuel for the prevailing excitement was distributed, its intensity was only really felt and displayed in another quarter. When the day of issue of shares arrived, the Rue Vivienne in which the Company’s offices were situated, and all the adjoining streets and squares, were crowded by speculators of all degrees. Unseemly rushes took place amongst the throng. Each one regarded his neighbour as a rival for the possession of the coveted scrip, and crushed and jostled himself though the crowd towards the enchanted building so that he might be amongst the first to enter when its doors were opened to hand over the shares to successful applicants. Lemontey compared them to a phalanx which “advanced for several days and nights towards the Exchange office, like a compact column, which neither sleep, hunger, nor thirst could destroy. But at the fatal cry which announced the delivery of the last share, the whole vanished at once.” So great was the number of applicants that on several occasions considerable difficulty and delay were experienced in compiling the lists of allottees. Public patience at these times was thoroughly exhausted, and gave way to frantic disorder and not infrequently to scenes of violence. The aristocracy, in order that they might not be compelled to mix with the crowds on the street in their patient wait to know the result of their efforts to secure allotment, rented rooms and houses in the Rue Vivienne, and so great was the demand for accommodation that fortunate proprietors were in a position to charge the most exorbitant rates.