a was carried off, masked, and
imprisoned, by order of Louis XIV in 1679, but it did not succeed in
establishing as an undoubted fact that the secretary and the Man in the
Iron Mask were one and the same person.

It may be remembered that M. Crawfurd writing in 1798 had said in his
'Histoire de la Bastille' (8vo, 474 pages), "I cannot doubt that the Man
in the Iron Mask was the son of Anne of Austria, but am unable to decide
whether he was a twin-brother of Louis XIV or was born while the king
and queen lived apart, or during her widowhood." M. Crawfurd, in his
'Melanges d'Histoire et de Litterature tires dun Portefeuille' (quarto
1809, octavo 1817), demolished the theory advanced by Roux-Fazillac.

In 1825, M. Delort discovered in the archives several letters relating
to Matthioli, and published his Histoire de l'Homme au Masque de Fer
(8vo). This work was translated into English by George Agar-Ellis, and
retranslated into French in 1830, under the title 'Histoire authentique
du Prisonnier d'Etat, connu sons le Nom de Masque de Fer'. It is in this
work that the suggestion is made that the captive was the second son of
Oliver Cromwell.

In 1826, M. de Taules wrote that, in his opinion, the masked prisoner
was none other than the Armenian Patriarch. But six years later the
great success of my drama at the Odeon converted nearly everyone to the
version of which Soulavie was the chief exponent. The bibliophile Jacob
is mistaken in asserting that I followed a tradition preserved in the
family of the Duc de Choiseul; M. le Duc de Bassano sent me a copy made
under his personal supervision of a document drawn up for Napoleon,
containing the results of some researches made by his orders on the
subject of the Man in the Iron Mask. The original MS., as well as that
of the Memoires du Duc de Richelieu, were, the duke told me, kept at the
Foreign Office. In 1834 the journal of the Institut historique published
a letter from M. Auguste Billiard, who stated that he had also made a
copy of this document for the late Comte de Montalivet, Home Secretary
under the Empire.

M. Dufey (de l'Yonne) gave his 'Histoire de la Bastille' to the world in
the same year, and was inclined to believe that the prisoner was a son
of Buckingham.

Besides the many important personages on whom the famous mask had been
placed, there was one whom everyone had forgotten, although his name
had been put forward by the minister Chamillart: this was the cele