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Early equity trading in Paris: "The French don't seem to have anything else on their mind"
Photo:
akg images
She was so hoping for quick fortune that she even risked her life for it: For three days, the French woman drove her back and forth through Paris to track down John Law - the man who issued the coveted Mississippi shares.
When she finally spotted the banker, she ordered her driver to hit a post to get Law's attention.
The man obeyed, the carriage overturned, Madame screamed, Law hurried over to help, she looked deep into his eyes - and confessed her cunning.
The womanizer immediately rewarded her with a share package.
Scenes like this, according to the Scottish chronicler Charles MacKay, were not at all unusual in the stock market boom in the early 18th century, when all of France was crazy about Mississippi Company stocks.
Dukes and counts, kitchen maids, lackeys and bishops - everyone wanted a piece of the cake, dreamed of the immeasurable windfall that Law had promised.
Day and night, a horde of investors lurked outside his front door in Rue Quincampoix, a winding, narrow alley on the western tip of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements.
There were regular fights and accidents;
repeatedly soldiers had to evacuate the streets by force of arms and send the would-be investors home.
"John Law, the new Plutus, had suddenly transformed into the most important man in the state ... No monarch had ever been flattered as he was", MacKay summed up in his 1841 work "Extraordinary Confusions and the Madness of the Masses" .
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