millennium of unlimited credit. In February, 1718, Law's Pactolus of speculation floated its first shiploads of men, money, and provisions to Louisiana. Out of them Bienville grasped the beginnings of his city. When the ships returned to France, they carried back with them the official announcement that it had been founded, and named after the Regent, Duke of Orleans.
What a picture flashes upon the eye with the name! There is absolutely no seeing of Bienville's group of palmetto-thatched huts by the yellow currents of the Mississippi. Instead, there is the brilliant epoch of the regency,—that "century in eight years," as it has been well called—that burst upon France like a pyrotechnic display, after the protracted, sombre old age of Louis XIV; when Paris, intoxicated by the rush of new life in her veins, staggered through her orgies of pleasure, arts, science, literature, finance, politics,—after her leader, her lover, the Regent Duke; her fair flower and the symbol of all that the eighteenth century contained of worst and best, the incarnation of all that is vicious, of all that is genial, debased, charming, handsome, witty, restless, tolerant, generous, sceptical, good-natured, shrewd. Kindly adjectives are so much quicker in their services to describe him than harsh ones, anecdotes and bon-mots are so ready-winged to fly to his succour against condemnation, that one feels the impotence against him that actuated his own mother to invent an apologue to explain him, an apologue, par parenthèse that might have been invented also to explain his American city. "The fairies were all invited to my bedside; and, as each one gave my son a talent, he had them all. Unhappily, one old fairy had been forgotten. Arriving after the others, she exclaimed in her pique: 'He
