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Excerpt from John Law, the Projector, Vol. 15 About noon on a charming day towards the latter and of May, 1705, a sedan-chair was set down opposite Whites Coffee-house, in Saint James's-street. There was nothing unusual in the circumstance. Two or three chairs, indeed, had just discharged their freight on the same spot without attracting the slightest attention; but the case was very different with the emarkably handsome man who emerged from the sedan in question, and stepped lightly upon the pavement. On taking out his purse, this gallant-looking personage could find nothing in it but gold, and as the glittering pieces caught the eyes of the chairme, who were evidently from the Sister Isle, one of them said, in a coaxing tone, and touching his weatherbeate hat: "Bless yer hon'r's handsome face, giv us one ov them yallow boys. Shure an it wouldn't become a fine jon-tleman like yerself to pay like common folk. 'Twould be a raal pleasure to Pat Molloy - that's my brother cheerman here - and to myself - Terry O'Flaherty," again 'ouching his hat, "to carry yer hon'r for nothing at all. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous man in Europe. Born in Scotland in 1671, he was convicted of murder in London and, after his escape from prison, fled Scotland for the mainland when Union with England brought with it a warrant for his arrest. On the continent he lurched from one money-making scheme to the next - selling insurance against losing lottery tickets in Holland, advising the Duke of Savoy - amassing a fortune of some £80,000. But for his next trick he had grander ambitions. When Louis XIV died, leaving a thoroughly bankrupt France to his five-year-old heir, Law gained the ear of the Regent, Philippe D'Orleans. In the years that followed, Law's financial wizardry transformed the fortunes of France, enriching speculators and investors across the continent, and he was made Controller-General of Finances, effectively becoming the French Prime Minister. But the fall from grace that was to follow was every bit as spectacular as his meteoric rise. John Law, by a biographer of Adam Smith and the author of Frozen Desire and Capital of the Mind, dramatises the life of one of the most inventive financiers in history, a man who was born before his time and in whose day the word millionaire came to be coined.