In my Liberty Fund article on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, I made an error. Relying on what others wrote, I said:

When he [Beaumarchais] wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Louis XVI banned it for three years. The King supposedly said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first.” Eight years later, it was, and the French aristocracy came crashing down with it.

It’s a good thing I used the word “supposedly.” I suspected a problem today when I got Lever’s biography of Beaumarchais and found a different version of the remark: “This is detestable and will never be performed; the Bastille would have to be destroyed for the performance of this play not to be of dangerous inconsequence.” “Dangerous inconsequence” is a weird phrase, so I looked up the original French and found it on Wikipedia: “La représentation ne pourrait qu’être une inconséquence fâcheuse, sauf si la Bastille était détruite.”

That still looks weird to me. I took three years of French in high school long ago and I’m very rusty at the language today, but it didn’t look like a good match for either translation. So I inquired on Reddit and got some useful responses. After seeing them, I’d translate his remark idiomatically as “This play is no more than a nuisance as long as the Bastille isn’t torn down.”

That’s not nearly as exciting as the mistranslation I used. Sorry. Sometimes the truth is disappointing.