ecome a mother began to
spread over the kingdom. In this manner was born Louis XIV, the
putative son of Louis XIII. If this instalment of the tale be favourably
received, says the pamphleteer, the sequel will soon follow, in which
the sad fate of C. D. R. will be related, who was made to pay dearly for
his short-lived pleasure."

Although the first part was a great success, the promised sequel
never appeared. It must be admitted that such a story, though it never
convinced a single person of the illegitimacy of Louis XIV, was an
excellent prologue to the tale of the unfortunate lot of the Man in
the Iron Mask, and increased the interest and curiosity with which that
singular historical mystery was regarded. But the views of the Dutch
scholars thus set forth met with little credence, and were soon
forgotten in a new solution.

The third historian to write about the prisoner of the Iles
Sainte-Marguerite was Lagrange-Chancel. He was just twenty-nine years of
age when, excited by Freron's hatred of Voltaire, he addressed a letter
from his country place, Antoniat, in Perigord, to the 'Annee Litteraire'
(vol. iii. p. 188), demolishing the theory advanced in the 'Siecle
de Louis XIV', and giving facts which he had collected whilst himself
imprisoned in the same place as the unknown prisoner twenty years later.

"My detention in the Iles-Saint-Marguerite," says Lagrange-Chancel,
"brought many things to my knowledge which a more painstaking historian
than M. de Voltaire would have taken the trouble to find out; for at the
time when I was taken to the islands the imprisonment of the Man in the
Iron Mask was no longer regarded as a state secret. This extraordinary
event, which M. de Voltaire places in 1662, a few months after the death
of Cardinal Mazarin, did not take place till 1669, eight years after the
death of His Eminence. M. de La Motte-Guerin, commandant of the islands
in my time, assured me that the prisoner was the Duc de Beaufort, who
was reported killed at the siege of Candia, but whose body had never
been recovered, as all the narratives of that event agree in stating. He
also told me that M. de Saint-Mars, who succeeded Pignerol as governor
of the islands, showed great consideration for the prisoner, that he
waited on him at table, that the service was of silver, and that the
clothes supplied to the prisoner were as costly as he desired; that when
he was ill and in need of a physician or surgeon, he was obliged u