Needs must when the devil drives, and, the pinch of poverty sharpening his wits, he now turned his attention to the black-mailing business, in the pursuit of which he was soon to evince a quite uncommon aptitude and adroitness. His talents in this direction were ably seconded by a facile pen and a command of vituperative language and personal abuse which the author of the Letters of Junius could scarcely have outdone. His first effort of importance in this direction was _Le Gazetier Cuirassé, ou Anecdotes Scandaleuses sur la Cour de France_. Those who would not purchase immunity by a lump sum down had their characters and private lives mercilessly torn to pieces in its pages. The book is said to have brought him £1000. An attempt to blackmail Voltaire was less successful. The veteran _philosophe_ published the blackmailer’s letter with comments by his own satiric pen. The blackmailer’s path has indeed its ups and downs, and once he was fain to accept a horsewhipping and publish an abject apology, the price extorted by an offended French nobleman. Madame du Barry, however, Louis XV.’s notorious favourite, was made of other stuff, and in consequence the _Memoires d’une Femme Publique_, compared with which _Le Gazetier Cuirassé_ was said to have been “rosewater,” were never published. Morande accepted the sum of 32,000 livres in solatium for his wounded literary _amour propre_. Before, however, paying him his price the French Government had attempted to kidnap the audacious libeller. This was the ancient substitute for the more prosaic extradition methods of modern times. The plot, however, failed. With a dexterity worthy of a better cause, Morande, warned in time, was able to pose in the English press as a political exile and avenger of public morality. The sympathy of the susceptible public responded warmly to the unscrupulous appeal, and the representatives of French authority escaped with difficulty from the clutches of an infuriated London mob.