or _assignats_, should be taken at its real value, and that bargains
might be made in whatever currency people chose. The real value of
the _mandats_ speedily sank to about two per cent of their nominal
value and the only effect of this legislation seemed to be that both
_assignats_ and _mandats_ went still lower. Then from February 4 to
February 14, 1797, came decrees and orders that the engraving
apparatus for the _mandats_ should be destroyed as that for the
_assignats_ had been, that neither _assignats_ nor _mandats_ should
longer be a legal tender and that old debts to the state might be paid
for a time with government paper at the rate of one per cent of their
face value.[75] Then, less than three months later, it was decreed
that the twenty-one billions of _assignats_ still in circulation
should be annulled. Finally, on September 30, 1797, as the
culmination of these and various other experiments and expedients,
came an order of the Directory that the national debts should be paid
two-thirds in bonds which might be used in purchasing confiscated real
estate, and the remaining "Consolidated Third," as it was called, was
to be placed on the "Great Book" of the national debt to be paid
thenceforth as the government should think best.

As to the bonds which the creditors of the nation were thus forced to
take, they sank rapidly, as the _assignats_ and _mandats_ had done,
even to three per cent of their value. As to the "Consolidated
Third," that was largely paid, until the coming of Bonaparte, in paper
money which sank gradually to about six per cent of its face value.
Since May, 1797, both _assignats_ and _mandats_ had been virtually
worth nothing.

So ended the reign of paper money in France. The twenty-five hundred
millions of _mandats_ went into the common heap of refuse with the