Free Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance by Janet Gleeson

gamester whose family circumstances were shrouded in mystery. Society frowned on such alliances, and most people sympathized with Lord Sandwich, who later remarked that a father would rather see a daughter “with a pedlar’s bag at her back” than marry beneath her. To Law and Katherine, however, far from home and their families, there was little to stand in the way of their mutual attraction. Certainly, Katherine’s husband (about whom nothing is known apart from his name) seems to have offered no impediment—although the most obvious explanation for his apparent inertia is that he was absent when she and Law met. The liaison blossomed.
    Meanwhile, Law’s mastery of dice and cards had unfortunate but unsurprising repercussions. No one wants to stake money against someone who hardly ever loses, and, as it had in London, Law’s knack for winning brought him enemies along with gains. Whispers of his “sharpness” at cards, his dubious past, and his possible involvement in espionage began to circulate and brought him to the attention of the authorities. Clearly the time had come for Law to move on; only Katherine held him back.
    In the sophisticated world of which both Law and Katherine were habitués, discreet infidelities, however ill-advised, could be quickly forgotten—but there was a chasm between a clandestine affair and an elopement. Both must have known that the latter would cost Katherine her reputation and that there would be no turning back. It is, therefore, a mark of the usually guarded Law’s feelings that he asked Katherine to leave Paris with him. The decision cannot have been easy, but perhaps feeling that travel offered the only way for such an unconventional partnership to evade the usual social restrictions, she agreed, in Gray’s words, “to pack up her awls, leave her husband, and run away with him to Italy.” From then on Katherine Seigneur was known as Mrs. John Law even though marriage, for the time being at least, was impossible. As no doubt they had feared, the story of their flight made headlines in the Paris press and Horace Walpole later wrote of “an account in some French literary gazette, I forget which, of his [Law] having carried off the wife of another man.”
    Their destination was Italy, the birthplace of European banking. They went first to Genoa, where, according to Gray, Law was able to find “cullies [suckers] enough to pick up a great deal of Money from,” and later to Rome, Florence, Turin, and Venice. In each city he visited he played the tables and worked at his research into finance. The great public banking institutions of Italy had been born in the Middle Ages from the need to fund crusades, commerce, and war. By the late sixteenth century Venice’s state banks—the Banco di Rialto and the Banco del Giro—operated much like the bank in Amsterdam, which had followed the Venetian lead, accepting deposits in adulterated coin and issuing notes in “bank money” with the guarantee of the state. Law also learned much about foreign-exchange dealing in Venice. According to Gray, “he constantly went to the Rialto at change-time [when the exchange was open], no merchant upon commission was punctualler, he observed the course of exchange all the world over, the manner of discounting bills at the bank, the vast usefulness of paper credit, how gladly people parted with their money for paper, and how the profits accrued to the proprietors from this paper.”
    Along with its bank, Venice had much to attract John Law and his beautiful companion. They arrived in time for the famous carnival, which began on Twelfth Night, when some thirty thousand foreigners invaded the city to enjoy a bacchanalian extravaganza of acrobatics, music, animal fights, fireworks, and dancing in the streets. According to one spectator, “Women, men and persons of all conditions disguise themselves in antique dresses, with extravagant music and a thousand gambols, traversing the streets from house