Nor was this all. At various times the insurgent royalists in La
Vendee and elsewhere put _their_ presses also in operation, issuing
notes bearing the Bourbon arms,--the _fleur-de-lis_, the portrait of
the Dauphin (as Louis XVII) with the magic legend "_De Par le Roi_,"
and large bodies of the population in the insurgent districts were
_forced_ to take these. Even as late as 1799 these notes continued to
appear.[80]

The financial agony was prolonged somewhat by attempts to secure funds
by still another "forced loan," and other discredited measures, but
when all was over with paper money, specie began to reappear--first in
sufficient sums to do the small amount of business which remained
after the collapse. Then as the business demand increased, the amount
of specie flowed in from the world at large to meet it and the nation
gradually recovered from that long paper-money debauch.

Thibaudeau, a very thoughtful observer, tells us in his Memoirs that
great fears were felt as to a want of circulating medium between the
time when paper should go out and coin should come in; but that no
such want was severely felt--that coin came in gradually as it was
wanted.[81]

Nothing could better exemplify the saying of one of the most shrewd of
modern statesmen that "There will always be money."[82]

But though there soon came a degree of prosperity--as compared with
the distress during the paper-money orgy, convalescence was slow. The
acute suffering from the wreck and rain brought by _assignats_,
_mandats_ and other paper currency in process of repudiation lasted