Louis XIV

The story goes that nine-year-old schoolboy Francis Seldon made a pun about Louis XIV’s baldness during a royal visit to a school in Clermont. Louis had the boy thrown into the Bastille, where he remained in solitary confinement for 69 years.

But the story is a lot less sensational than that.

In 1674, at the time of the king’s visit, Francis Seldon was the 16-year-old son of a rich Irish family who had sent him to France to get a first-class education. His crime was putting up a poster mocking his Jesuit teacher’s habit of holding the king above God.

For this, Seldon was imprisoned, and his parents were informed that the boy had disappeared. They died still believing this, at which point Seldon inherited the family fortune.

But Seldon wasn’t released for 31 years, and only then because a Jesuit priest petitioned on his behalf in return for 98 percent of his assets. Seldon returned to Ireland, physically broken but a wealthy man, at least until he honoured his contract with the Jesuits.

Source: Mark Blackmore, for History Extra.