enormous wealth. No opinion, however, could be more erroneous. With
more generosity than could have been expected from a man who during
the greatest part of his life had been a professed gambler, he had
refused to enrich himself at the expense of a ruined nation. During
the height of the popular frenzy for Mississippi stock, he had never
doubted of the final success of his projects, in making France the
richest and most powerful nation of Europe. He invested all his gains
in the purchase of landed property in France - a sure proof of his own
belief in the stability of his schemes. He had hoarded no plate or
jewellery, and sent no money, like the dishonest jobbers, to foreign
countries. His all, with the exception of one diamond, worth about
five or six thousand pounds sterling, was invested in the French soil;
and when he left that country, he left it almost a beggar. This fact
alone ought to rescue his memory from the charge of knavery, so often
and so unjustly brought against him.

As soon as his departure was known, all his estates and his
valuable library were confiscated. Among the rest, an annuity of
200,000 livres, (8000 pounds sterling,) on the lives of his wife and
children, which had been purchased for five millions of livres, was
forfeited, notwithstanding that a special edict, drawn up for the
purpose in the days of his prosperity, had expressly declared that it
should never be confiscated for any cause whatever. Great discontent
existed among the people that Law had been suffered to escape. The mob
and the Parliament would have been pleased to have seen him hanged.
The few who had not suffered by the commercial revolution, rejoiced
that the quack had left the country; but all those (and they were by
far the most numerous class) whose fortunes were implicated, regretted
that his intimate knowledge of the distress of the country, and of the
causes that had led to it, had not been rendered more available in