This violence was, however, too excessive, and in every respect too
indefensible to last long; new paper and new juggling tricks were of
necessity resorted to; the latter were known to be such--people felt them
to be such--but they submitted to them rather than not have twenty crowns
in safety in their houses; and a greater violence made people suffer the
smaller. Hence so many projects, so many different faces in finance, and
all tending to establish one issue of paper upon another; that is to say,
always causing loss to the holders of the different paper (everybody
being obliged to hold it), and the universal multitude. This is what
occupied all the rest of the government, and of the life of M. le Duc
d'Orleans; which drove Law out of the realm; which increased six-fold the
price of all merchandise, all food even the commonest; which ruinously
augmented every kind of wages, and ruined public and private commerce;
which gave, at the expense of the public, sudden riches to a few noblemen
who dissipated it, and were all the poorer in a short time; which enabled
many financiers' clerks, and the lowest dregs of the people, profiting by
the general confusion, to take advantage of the Mississippi, and make
enormous fortunes; which occupied the government several years after the
death of M. le Duc d'Orleans; and which, to conclude, France never will
recover from, although it may be true that the value of land is
considerably augmented. As a last affliction, the all-powerful,
especially the princes and princesses of the blood, who had been mixed
up, in the Mississippi, and who had used all their authority to escape
from it without loss, re-established it upon what they called the Great
Western Company, which with the same juggles and exclusive trade with the
Indies, is completing the annihilation of the trade of the realm,
sacrificed to the enormous interest of a small number of private
individuals, whose hatred and vengeance the government has not dared to
draw upon itself by attacking their delicate privileges.