soil, the facility offered for trade by the extensive and rapid stream of the Mississippi; it was by the name of that river that the new company was called at first, though it soon took the title of Compagnie d’ Occident, when it had obtained the privilege of trading in Senegal and in Guinea; it became the Compagnie des Indes, on forming a fusion with the old enterprises which worked the trade of the East.  For the generality, and in the current phraseology, it remained the Mississippi; and that is the name it has left in history.  New Orleans was beginning to arise at the mouth of that river.  Law had bought Belle-Isle-en-Mer and was constructing the port of Lorient.

The Regent’s councillors were scared and disquieted; the chancellor proclaimed himself loudly against the deception or illusion which made of Louisiana a land of promise; he called to mind that Crozat had been ruined in searching for mines of the precious metals there.  “The worst of him was his virtue,” said Duclos.  The Regent made a last effort to convert him, as well as the Duke of Noailles, to the projects of Law.  It was at a small house in the faubourg St. Antoine, called La Roquette, belonging to the last named, that the four interlocutors discussed the new system thoroughly.  “With the use of very sensible language Law had the gift of explaining himself so clearly and intelligibly that he left nothing to desire as concerned making himself comprehended.  The Duke of Orleans liked him and relished him.  He regarded him and all he did as work of his own creation.  He liked, moreover, extraordinary and out-of-the-way methods, and he embraced them the more readily in that he saw the resources which had become so necessary for the state and all the ordinary operations of finance vanishing away.  This liking of the Regent’s wounded Noailles, as being adopted at his expense.  He wanted to be sole master in the matter of finance, and all the eloquence of Law could not succeed in convincing him.”  The chancellor stood firm; the Parliament, which ever remained identified in his mind with his country, was in the same way opposed to Law.  The latter declared that the obstacles which arrested him at every step through the ill will of the Council and of the magistrates, were ruining all the fruits of his system.  The representations addressed by the Parliament to the king, on the 20th of January, touching a re-coinage of all moneys, which had been suggested by Law, dealt the last blow at the chancellor’s already tottering favor.  On the morning of the 23d M. de La Vrilliere went to him on behalf of the Regent and demanded the return of the seals.  D’Aguesseau was a little affected and surprised.  “Monseigneur,” he wrote to the Duke of Orleans, “you gave me the seals without any merit on my part, you take them away without any demerit.”  He had received orders to withdraw to his estate at Fresnes; the Regent found his mere presence irksome.  D’Aguesseau set out at once.  “He had taken his elevation like a sage,” says St. Simon, “and it was as a sage too that he fell.”  “The important point,” wrote the disgraced magistrate to his son, “is to be well with one’s self.”