How Bad Economic Memories are Made: John Law’s System in Les lettres persanes, Manon Lescaut, and “The Great Mirror of Folly”

French literature has received a lot of attention lately from an unexpected public: economists. Whereas Piketty et al. study nineteenth-century novels to identify the wealth people needed to appear distinguished in the 1820s, and note the fears of bankruptcy felt by the have-nots, I argue that such issues need to be contextualized in a broader history of emotion. This chapter focuses on John Law’s ill-fated “System” and shows how it launched a series of opportunities for parodying economists and soothsayers of their ilk. Writers and artists used fiction and caricature to temper the French confidence about money, banks, and credit.