Rising prices are not to be feared: on the contrary, now that the number of precious objects has increased, now that the middle classes, as Scipion de Grammont puts it, can wear 'satin and velvet', the value of things, even of the rarest things, could fall only in relation to the totality of the others; similarly, each piece of metal loses some of its value with regard to the others as the mass of coinage in circulation increases.