The government wished to close his
mouth by giving him a lucrative post under the same profitable system.
This our author indignantly refused; and that method of enforcing silence
having failed, another more forcible one was immediately adopted.
Darigrand was sent to the Bastille in January 1763. His book is a most
forcible and complete exposure of that horrible system of extortion,
torture, and ruination which made a reformation or a revolution
inevitable.
Authors have often been compelled to eat their words, but the operation
has seldom been performed literally. In the seventeenth century, owing to
the disastrous part which Christian IV. of Denmark took in the Thirty
Years' War, his kingdom was shorn of its ancient power and was
overshadowed by the might of Sweden. One Theodore Reinking, lamenting the
diminished glory of his race, wrote a book entitled _Dania ad exteros de
perfidia Suecorum_ (1644). It was not a very excellent work, neither was
its author a learned or accurate historian, but it aroused the anger of
the Swedes, who cast Reinking into prison. There he remained many years,
when at length he was offered his freedom on the condition that he should
either lose his head or eat his book. Our author preferred the latter
alternative, and with admirable cleverness devoured his book when he had
converted it into a sauce. For his own sake we trust his work was not a
ponderous or bulky volume.
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