[Verse 1]
Paris, seventeen-sixteen, a Scotsman makes his claim,
John Law opens the Banque Générale, paper wearing coin's own name.
Livres printed soft as linen, stitched to the crown's own debt,
Trust the note, not the metal — a wager no one's lost yet.
[Verse 2]
Seventeen-seventeen, the Compagnie d'Occident takes flight,
Chartered on Mississippi mud, a continent out of sight.
By nineteen it's the Indes, swallowing the tax farms whole,
Spices, beaver, trading rights — one company, one soul.
[Chorus]
Bank into company, company to crown,
Debt dressed up as equity, never written down.
Five hundred livres climbing to ten thousand in the sky,
Mississippi smoke — chimerical, a beautiful illusion built on lie.
Law's System: borrow, merge, and print,
Paper empire standing on a quicksand hint.
[Verse 3]
Seventeen-eighteen the bank turns royal, state-owned, no retreat,
Printing presses humming louder, hunger and credit compete.
Shares that once were five hundred climb past ten thousand strong,
By January seventeen-twenty Law conducts the treasury's song —
Controller-General of France, the foreigner in charge,
A system swollen parlous-big — precarious, perilous, too large.
[Chorus]
Bank into company, company to crown,
Debt dressed up as equity, never written down.
Five hundred livres climbing to ten thousand in the sky,
Mississippi smoke — chimerical, a beautiful illusion built on lie.
Law's System: borrow, merge, and print,
Paper empire standing on a quicksand hint.
[Verse 4]
Then autumn turns the tide, the note-holders want their gold,
Paper can't be eaten, every promise running cold.
Shares collapse like wet tissue, the Mississippi myth runs dry,
Banking's name in France stays mud for near a century's sigh.
[Verse 5]
Rue Quincampoix once roared with crowds, a hunchback rented out his back,
A makeshift desk for signing deals, no seat left in the pack.
Dukes and chambermaids alike chasing paper's golden scent,
Fortunes made before the sun, by dusk the fortune spent.
Law himself fled east in rags, the man who'd ruled the purse,
Died in Venice, gambling still — a footnote to the curse.
[Bridge]
Across the Channel, same old tune, the South Sea Company swells,
Two debt-for-equity gambles ringing simultaneous bells.
One scheme in sterling, one in livres, both built on borrowed breath,
Teaching every treasury since: shares can mask a debt to death.
[Outro]
So remember Law's three steps — bank, then company, then crown,
Debt into shares, shares into ash, the glittering empire down.
Banque to Royale, d'Occident to Indes, the pattern's clear to see —
Convert the debt, inflate the dream, then watch it cease to be.
[Final Chorus]
Bank into company, company to crown,
Debt dressed up as equity, never written down.
Five hundred livres climbing to ten thousand in the sky,
Mississippi smoke — chimerical, a beautiful illusion built on lie.
Law's System: borrow, merge, and print,
Paper empire standing on a quicksand hint.