Note 18 — Chapter XI · PRECEDING HOGARTH.

When Louis XIV. died in 1715, after his reign of seventy-two years, he left the finances of France in a condition of inconceivable disorder. For fourteen years there had been an average annual deficit of more than fourteen millions of francs, to meet which the king had raised money by every paper device that had then been discovered. Having previously sold all the offices for which any pretext could be invented, he next sold annuities of all kinds, for one life, for two lives, for three lives, and in perpetuity. Then he issued all known varieties of promises to pay, from rentes perpétuelles to treasury-notes of a few francs, payable on demand. But there was one thing he did not do—reduce the expenditure of his enormous and extravagant court. In the midst of that deficit, when his ministers were at their wits' end to carry on the government from day to day, and half the lackeys of Paris held the depreciated royal paper, the old king ordered one more of those magnificent fêtes at Fontainebleau which had, as he thought, shed such lustre on his reign. The fête would cost four millions, the treasury was empty, and treasury-notes had fallen to thirty-five. While an anxious minister was meditating the situation, he chanced to see in his inner office two valets slyly scanning the papers on his desk, for the purpose, as he instantly conjectured, of getting news for the speculators. He conceived an idea. The next time those enterprising valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the purpose of paying off a certain class of treasury-notes. The news was soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the minister, anticipating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty millions of the same notes. The king had his fête; and when next he borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18]