a ready ear to the Delphic promise of the
Scottish adventurer, who calmed the eager
mob by telling them that, if they would have
a little patience, he would take all they had
(soyez tranquilles, on vous prendra tout,
on prendra tout à tout le monde!). Amongst
the miracles which Law performed, in the
way of extracting money, that certainly was
the greatest which drew gold from the
pockets of the poets. Amongst those who
lost their all in this way, were Louis Racine,
the son of the great dramatist, and the writer
Marivaux: the latter, however, was the
more fortunate of the two, for his patrimony
being entirely engulfed in the Mississipi
scheme, he turned his attention to the stage,
and not only recovered himself by his
writings, but acquired an enduring fame. Fatal
as the bank in the Rue Quincampoix was to
thousands, there is no more tragic story
connected with it than that which attaches
to the name of the Count de Horn. It is as
follows:

In the early part of the month of
March, of the year seventeen hundred and
twenty, there lodged at Paris, at the Hôtel
de Flandre, in the Rue Dauphine, the Count
de Horn, twenty-three years of age, a younger
son of the Prince de Horn, a relative of the
Emperor of Germany, of the Dowager Duchess
of Orleans, and of the Duke-Regent himself.
He had a yearly allowance from his father
of twelve thousand livres. As he had lost
much money at the fair of Saint Germain,
where play was very high that year, owing
to the great quantity of banknotes that were
in circulation, two rascals, old officers of the
count's acquaintance (Dulaure, in his History
of Paris, names them as Laurent de Milly
and De l'Estang), put him up to a way of
filling his pockets again, by suggesting the
robbery and assassination of a rich
stockjobber, who always carried a great deal of
money on his person. This man occupied a
room on the second floor of the Wooden
Sword in the Rue de Venise, and thither, on
the twentieth of March, De Horn and his
confederates secretly repaired. They found
their victim seated at a table, with a sum of
one hundred and fifty thousand crowns
spread out before him, of which he had,
apparently, been taking an account. De
Horn seized and tried to strangle him with
a napkin, but the poor wretch made so much
noise and resistance, that the assassins had
recourse to other means and stabbed him in
twenty places. At the first outcry, De
l'Estang, who was keeping watch on the
stairs, made off to his own hotel in the Rue
de Tournon, where he collected every thing
that was portable, and effected his escape.
But the noise had alarmed a waiter of the
cabaret, who ran up to the stockbroker's
room, and seeing him stretched on the floor,
bathed in blood, raised a hue and cry and
hastily double-locked the door: not, however,
in time to prevent De Milly from rushing
past him. The Count de Horn, finding
himself shut in, attempted to escape by the
window, and, favoured by some timber which
shored up the house, reached the ground in
safety; but he committed the inconceivable
folly of going straight to the commissary of
police to lay a complaint against the owner
of the cabaret for having attempted to
assassinate him! His story was scarcely told,
when a crowd of people brought in his
accomplice, De Milly, whom they had
arrested as he was escaping by the Rue
Quincampoix. Thereupon, the commissary
sent them both to prison. The greatest
exertions were made by all the nobility to
save De Horn: the families of Chatillon,
Egmont, Epinay, and others, interceded for
him in vain, for Law was implacable—-having
the rights of property so dearly at heart,—-
and the regent was inflexible. De Horn and
De Milly were convicted and condemned to
be broken alive on the wheel and afterwards
beheaded, and the sentence was carried into
execution. Amongst the solicitations made
to the Duke of Orleans to save the life of
De Horn was the representation that he was
the regent's kinsman. " Very well," said the
prince, "I will take my share of the
disgrace: that ought to console the rest of his
relations." He then recited the well-known
line of Corneille, " Le crime fait la honte,
et non pas l'échafaud " (the crime and not
the scaffold makes the shame).

The inn called the Hôtel Royal, in the Rue
des Mathurins, was also the scene of a very
bloody adventure. In the month of January,
seventeen hundred and fifty-three, a person
wearing the dress of an abbé, and giving
himself out as one, went to the shop of a rich
jeweller, named Vallat, and telling him that
he had an immense quantity of gold lace to
dispose of, made an appointment at the hotel
mentioned. Vallat, punctual to the time agreed
on, drove in his coach to the place, and went
upstairs to the abbé, whose first inquiry was
if he had brought the money? Vallat showed
him a bag containing three thousand livres in
gold which he had brought, on which the
reverend man seized the jeweller by the
throat, and, drawing out a dagger, threatened
him with instant death unless he delivered
up the money, for that, for his part, he had
no lace to sell. Vallat struggled, and got
hold of the dagger; the abbé then caught up
a razor, and inflicted gashes innumerable on
the unhappy jeweller, whose cries at length
brought some one to his aid. The abbé
escaped by the window, and took refuge on
the roof, hiding behind a stack of chimneys,
but so placing himself that his shadow
betrayed his place of concealment. He was
quickly captured, and, judgment in such
cases being speedy, soon afterwards closed
his clerical career on the square of the Grève.
Barbier, who tells this story in his amusing
journal, quaintly adds that he thinks " it was
very imprudent on the part of Vallat, to go