MASK. 



709 



hfwiiigbeenappointed governor of the Bastile, in 1698, 

 carried the prisoner with him there, but still masked. 

 An apartment had been prepared for him, more con- 

 venient, and furnished with more care than those of 

 the other unfortunate beings who inhabited this sad 

 abode. He was not permitted to cross the courts, 

 and he could not take off his mask even before his 

 physician. In other respects, the greatest attention 

 was shown him, and nothing which he requested was 

 refused him. He was fond of fine linen and lace, 

 aiul was very attentive to his whole personal appear- 

 ance. His education appeared to have been care- 

 fully attended to ; and he amused his leisure by 

 reading, and playing upon the guitar. The physi- 

 cian of the Bastile related that this unknown person 

 was admirably formed, and that he had a veiy fine 

 skin, although rather brown. He interested by the 

 mere sound of his voice, never complaining of his 

 situation, and never giving any hint of his character. 

 This unknown person died Nov. 19, 1703, at ten 

 o'clock in the evening, without having undergone 

 any severe sickness. He was buried the next day, 

 at four o'clock in the afternoon, in the cemetery of 

 the church of St Paul. He was, it is said, about 

 sixty years of age, although the record of his decease, 

 in which he is mentioned under the name of Mar- 

 thioli, makes him only about forty-five. Orders were 

 given to burn every thing which had been employed 

 in his service. The walls of the chamber which he 

 had occupied were rubbed down and white-washed. 

 The precautions were carried so far, that the tiles 

 of his room were removed, in the fear that he might 

 have displaced some of them, to conceal a letter 

 behind them. Voltaire, from whom the greater part 

 of these particulars is borrowed, remarks, that at the 

 period when the prisoner was confined, no person of 

 importance disappeared from Europe ; and yet it can- 

 not be doubted that he must have been one. The 

 marks of respect which Louvois showed him, prove 

 this sufficiently. 



Conjecture has exhausted itself to discover who 

 this mysterious personage might be. Laborde, first 

 valet de chambre of Louis XV., and who had received 

 from this prince many proofs of confidence, showed a 

 desire to discover him. The king replied, " I pity 

 him, but his detention injures only himself, and has 

 prevented great misfortunes ; you cannot know him." 

 The king himself had not learned the history of the 

 iron mask till his majority, and he never intrusted 

 it to any one. The author of Secret Memoirs, to 

 serve for the History of Persia (Pecquet), is the 

 first writer who has attempted to raise the veil which 

 covers the unknown prisoner. In this book, published 

 in 1745, he pretends that it is the count of Verman- 

 dois, who was arrested, it was said, for having given 

 a blow to the dauphin ; but it is known that the 

 count of Vermandois died in 1683, at the siege of 

 Courtrai. Lagrange Chancel, in a letter to Freron, 

 attempts to prove that the prisoner is the duke of 

 Beaufort, and that he was falsely reported to have 

 been killed at the siege of Candia. Saint Foix, in 

 1768, wished to prove, in his turn, that it was the 

 duke of Monmouth, who was said to have been be- 

 headed at London, but who had been withdrawn 

 from punishment. Le P. Griffet, who held the 

 office of confessor to the prisoners of the Bastile, 

 from December 3, 1745, to 17G4,has examined these 

 different opinions in the Treatise upon the Proofs 

 which serve to establish the Truth of History, chap. 

 xiv ; and he adds that all the probabilities are in 

 favour of the count of Vermandois. Voltaire has 

 proved (Philosoph. Diet., art. And Anecdotes) that 

 the unknown prisoner could be no one of the person- 

 ages just mentioned, but does not declare who he 

 'vas. " The writer of this article," adds he, " knows, 



perhaps, more of him than P. Grifiet, and will not 

 say more of him." Voltaire, doubtless, knew that 

 the report was spread that the prisoner was a count 

 Girolamo Magni, or Mattioli, first minister of the 

 duke of Mantua, who had been removed from Turin 

 in 1685, or rather 1679, by order of the cabinet of 

 Versailles, because it was feared that his dexterity 

 might defeat the negotiations entered into with the 

 court of Piedmont. Delort, Hist, du Masque de 

 Per, published at Paris, 1825, likewise maintains this 

 opinion. Dutens, nevertheless, reproduced it in 

 1789, in his Intercepted Correspondence, Lett. 6, 

 and again in 1806, in the Memoirs of a Traveller in 

 Repose, vol. ii. p. 204 210 ; and two other writers, 

 in 1801 and 1802, endeavoured to establish this 

 opinion, with a great array of evidence. The abbe 

 Soulavie, editor of the Memoirs of the Marshal de 

 Richelieu, inserted in them, vol. iii. p. 75, a History 

 of the Iron Mask, written by his Keeper. This ac- 

 count was said to have been given by the regent to 

 his daughter, who communicated it to the marshal. 

 According to this account, the Iron Mask was a 

 twin brother of Louis XIV. Before the birth of 

 this prince, two herdsmen announced to Louis XIII., 

 that the queen would give birth to two dauphins, who 

 would occasion a civil war, which would convulse the 

 whole kingdom ; and this prince immediately formed 

 the resolution of removing him who should be born 

 second, in order to prevent these troubles. The 

 opinion entertained by a certain party, that the un- 

 known prisoner was the offspring of a criminal inter- 

 course between the queen and the duke of Bucking- 

 ham, has been sufficiently disproved. At the time 

 of the destruction of the Bastile, in July, 1789, there 

 were not wanting curious persons, who sought, in the 

 archives of this fortress, to discover some notices 

 which might throw light upon this historical pro- 

 blem. In the last number of the journal entitled 

 Leisure Hours of a French Patriot, p. 386, dated 

 August 13, 1789, is mentioned a note written upon 

 a card, which a man, inspecting the Bastile, took up 

 at random, with several papers. The card contains 

 the number 64,389,000, an unintelligible cipher, and 

 the following note " Foucquet, arriving from the 

 isle of Marguerite, with an iron mask." Afterwards 

 X... X-.. X---, and below "Kersadwin." The 

 journalist declares that he has seen this card. The 

 romance of M. Regnault Warm, entitled the Man 

 with the Iron Mask (in 4 vols., 12mo, published in 

 1804, and the fourth edition of which appeared in 

 1816), is preceded by a dissertation of twenty-eight 

 pages, in which the author endeavours to prove that 

 this mysterious personage was the son of Bucking- 

 ham and Anne of Austria. He goes so far as to 

 give the portrait of the prisoner. The Melanges 

 d'Histoire et de Literature (Paris, 1817, 8vo) con- 

 tains a Dissertation upon the Man in the Iron Mask, 

 pp. 77 156, in which the various hypotheses are 

 judiciously discussed, even that of the chevalier de 

 Taules, French consul in Syria, in the year 1771, 

 who, in a memoir (published in Paris, 1825), seeks 

 to prove that the man in the iron mask was a 

 patriarch of the Armenians, named Awediks, remov- 

 ed from Constantinople at the instigation of the 

 Jesuits, several years after the death of cardinal 

 Mazarin. He has no difficulty in refuting this fable, 

 and finishes by saying " After an impartial investi- 

 gation, and having weighed all the circumstances, I 

 cannot doubt that he was the son of Anne of Austria, 

 but without being able to determine at what period 

 he was born." It has also been maintained that this 

 prisoner was don John of Gonzaga, natural brother 

 of Charles Ferdinand, duke of Miintua. A letter of 

 Barbesieux, of November 17, 1697, in which he says 

 to Saint Mars" without explaining yourself to any 



