At last, one day when we were together by appointment, at Saint-Cloud, seated upon the balustrade of the orangery, which covers the descent into the wood of the goulottes, the Regent spoke again to me of the Mississippi, and pressed me to receive some shares from Law.

The more I resisted, the more he pressed me, and argued; at last he grew angry, and said that I was too conceited, thus to refuse what the King wished to give me (for everything was done in the King’s name), while so many of my equals in rank and dignity were running after these shares.  I replied that such conduct would be that of a fool, the conduct of impertinence, rather than of conceit; that it was not mine, and that since he pressed me so much I would tell him my reasons.  They were, that since the fable of Midas, I had nowhere read, still less seen, that anybody had the faculty of converting into gold all he touched; that I did not believe this virtue was given to Law, but thought that all his knowledge was a learned trick, a new and skilful juggle, which put the wealth of Peter into the pockets of Paul, and which enriched one at the expense of the other; that sooner or later the game would be played out, that an infinity of people would be ruined; finally, that I abhorred to gain at the expense of others, and would in no way mix myself up with the Mississippi scheme.

M. le Duc d’Orleans knew only too well how to reply to me, always returning to his idea that I was refusing the bounties of the King.  I said that I was so removed from such madness, that I would make a proposition to him, of which assuredly I should never have spoken, but for his accusation.

I related to him the expense to which my father had been put in defending Blaye against the party of M. le Prince in years gone by.  How he had paid the garrison, furnished provisions, cast cannon, stocked the place, during a blockade of eighteen months, and kept up, at his own expense, within the town, five hundred gentlemen, whom he had collected together.  How he had been almost ruined by the undertaking, and had never received a sou, except in warrants to the amount of five hundred thousand livres, of which not one had ever been paid, and that he had been compelled to pay yearly the interest of the debts he had contracted, debts that still hung like a mill-stone upon me.  My proposition was that M. le Duc d’Orleans should indemnify me for this loss, I giving up the warrants, to be burnt before him.

This he at once agreed to.  He spoke of it the very next day to Law:  my warrants were burnt by degrees in the cabinet of M. le Duc d’Orleans, and it was by this means I paid for what I had done at La Ferme.

Meanwhile the Mississippi scheme went on more swimmingly than ever.  It was established in the Rue Quincampoix, from which horses and coaches were banished.  About the end of October of this year, 1817, its business so much increased, that the office was thronged all day long, and it was found necessary to place clocks and guards with drums at each end of the street, to inform people, at seven o’clock in the morning, of the opening of business, and of its close at night:  fresh announcements were issued, too, prohibiting people from going there on Sundays and fete days.