SWICS rlc 1117'111'U:4 qili Serif at 11 Oa blir la •elit(• dims l'hist,dre 1769), lie quoted from the manuscript journal of the royal lientelmnt of the Bastille, to which Saint the Governor of the island of Sainte :\larguerite. in September. 169.4, brought with him to the Bastille a prisoner whom he had already had in eustody at I'ignerol. The pris oner's face was always kept eon9ealed by a mask of black velvet. 'the journal also mentions his death on November 19, 1703, and that he was buried in the cemetery of Saint Paul. This I., confirmed by the register of burials for the parish of Saint Paul, where the prisoner is mentioned under the name of .11areltiel, ehiali, or Alarellioli. These two entries are the bare facts of the case, and upon them have been cre•tt•il Ilmories and hypotheses without number, Besid•s the earliest story already mentioned, there have been at least four other explanations as to the identity of the prisoner. Among the minor conjecturt.s are those which eolineet hiM With Fomplet. the financial minister of Louis XIV.. and with the Duke of :Aloninouth, the illegitimate son of Charles 11. of England. to mention only a few of many. An addition to the artiele on the subject in the Dietionnaire phi losaphique freely states the opinion that the prisoner was all elder brother of Louis XIV. The 3.,riter, who was probably the editor of the work, makes the prisoner an illegitimate son of Anne of Austria. Louis XIV. first learned the exist ence of his nruther when he came of age, and put him in confinement to guard against any possible unpleasant consequences. Lingua, in the Bas tille devoih'e, ascribes his paternity to the Duke of Buckingham. Saint-Michel, in 1790, to connect the prisoner with a supposedly secret marriage between Queen Anne and Cardinal Nazarin. What is remarkable is that the Court continued to manifest an interest in the matter, and took every means to keep the identity of the prisoner in the dark. When the Bastille fell, the prisoner's room was eagerly searched and also the prison register; but all inquiry was vain. The Abbe' Soulave, who published Mt: moires rill man'ehal Richelieu ( London mid Paris, 1790), tried to establish from a document alleged to have been written by the tutor of that un fortunate prince that the Man in the Iron Mask was a twin brother of Louis XIV., and that, to avoid the calamities of a disputed succession to the throne, Louis XIII. had caused the later born of the twins to he brought up in secret. Louis XIV. learned of his brother's existence only after the death of Mazarin, and the twin brother, hav ing discovered his relation to the King by means of a portrait, was subjected to perpetual im prisonment. This view of the matter was at one time almost universally prevalent. The first conjecture of what is still held by many to be the truth is contained in a letter dated 1770, written by a Baron d'Ileiss to the Journal Encyclopcdique. The same is repeated by Louis Dutens, who declares in his Intercepted Cor respondence (1789) that there is no point of history better established than the fact that the prisoner in the iron mask was a minister of the Duke of Mantua. This minister, Count Mat thioli, had pledged himself to Louis XIV. to urge his roaster, the Duke. to deliver up to the French the fortress of Casale, which gave access to the whole of Lombardy. Though largely bribed to maintain the French interests, he began to betray them; and Louis XIV., having obtained conclusive proofs of his treachery, contrived to have Matthioli lured to the French frontier, where he was secretly arrested April 23, 1679, and conveyed to the fortress of Pignerol, which was his first prison. The conclusions of dllciss
and Dutens were followed up by Roux-Fazillac, who published a small work on the subject in IF.01. This attempt to show that. Matthioli was the Man in the Iron Mask, though eleven was not altogether successful; but the documents later discovered and published by N. Delort and M. Marius Topin seemed to leave little doubt on the subject, and the public had apparently made up its mind that the secret was at last discov• erect, until a still more recent work by a French officer, M. Jung, seemed to show conclusively that Matthioli could not have been the mys terious prisoner, and endeavored to prove that the Man in the Iron Mask was a soldier of fortune of Lorraine, Marechiel by name, who was the head of a widespread and formidable con spiracy, working in secret for the assassination of Louis X1V, and some of his ablest ministers. In the course of his researches, N. Jung ex amined some seventeen hundred volumes of dis patches and reports in the bureau of the Min istry of War. According to his story, Mareehiel was arrested by order of Louvois in 1673, and after being brought to Paris was sent to Pignerol to be under the care of Saint Mars. who took lion with him to Exilles (1689), Saint Mar guerite, and finally to the Bastille (1695) , where the prisoner died in 1703. The so-called iron mask, really a velvet one was burned with his clothes and effects. Up to 1891 dung's theory us as considered satisfactory, but in that year Captain Bazieres, of the garrison at Nantes, pub lished a translation of some of Louis X1V.'s cipher dispatches to Luuvois and the Minister's replies. From these it appeared that the mys terious prisoner was Ceneral de Bulonde, who was punished for his mistake or cowardice in raising the siege of Cuneo, by lifelong imprison ment at Pignerol, and later in the Bastille. Dur ing the last decade, however, there has been it reaction in favor of the Matthioli theory, due chiefly to the efforts of M. Mock-Brentano. Opinions still differ, and there is a tendency in many quarters toward regarding the Nan in the Iron Mask as some obscure plotter, probably a. valet possessed of a great secret, and therefore held in the strictest confinement. The whole question, however, is one of those mysteries of history that will probably never be satisfactorily solved, though it may he that the secret archives of the Vatican could throw light on the subject. The literature concerning the Man in the Iron Mask is very large. Up to 1870 fifty-two works had been written tq elucidate the mystery, and since then over twenty more have appeared. The following list, therefore, is merely a selection of the best and most noteworthy contributions to the subject: Ilonx-Fazillae, Recherches historiques slur l'homme au masque de fer (Park, 1801) ; Delort, Histoire du masque de fer ( ib., 1825 ) ; Topin, L'hononle au masque de ler (ib., 1570) ; .Tung, La. N'rit(' Sur le masque (lc [Cl-, 1664-1 iO3 (ib., 1873) : Loiseleu•. Trots ('nigmes historiques decant la critique nuederne (ib., 1882) : Burgand and Bazii_%res. Le masque de fer (ib., Funck-Brentano. "L'homine au masque de vel011r9 110ir (lit le masque de fer," in Revue Historique,, vol. i, i. (ib., P894). The best work to consult in English is Hopkins, The Man in the Iron Mask (London, 1901).