the mystery. He begged in vain. Chamillard answered
that it was a secret of state, which he had sworn never to reveal, and
he died with it untold.

Voltaire, in his "Age of Louis XIV.," was the first to call special
attention to this mystery, and since then numerous conjectures have been
made as to who the Iron Mask really was. One writer has suggested that
he was an illegitimate son of Anne of Austria, the queen-mother. Another
identifies him with a supposed twin brother of Louis XIV., whose birth
Richelieu had concealed. Others make him the Count of Vermandois, an
illegitimate son of Louis XIV.; the Duke of Beaufort, a hero of the
Fronde; the Duke of Monmouth, the English pretender of 1685; Fouquet,
Louis's disgraced minister of finance; a son of Cromwell, the English
protector; and various other wild and unfounded guesses. After all has
been said, the identity of the prisoner remains unknown. Mattioli, a
diplomatic agent of the Duke of Mantua, who was long imprisoned at
Pignerol and at Sainte Marguerite, was for a long time generally thought
to be the Iron Mask, but there is good reason to believe that he died in
1694.

Conjecture has exhausted itself, and yet the identity of this strange
captive remains a mystery, and is likely always to continue so. The
fact that all the exalted personages of the day can be traced renders it
probable that the veiled prisoner was really an obscure individual, whom
the caprice of Louis XIV. surrounded with conditions intended to excite
the curiosity of the public. There are on record other instances of
imprisonment under similar conditions of inviolate secrecy, and it is
not impossible that the king may have endeavored, for no purpose higher
than whim, to surround the story of this one with unbroken mystery. If
such were his purpose it has succeeded, for there is no more mysterious
person in history than the Man with the Iron Mask.

_VOLTAIRE'S LAST VISIT TO PARIS._

Never had excitable Paris been more excited. Only one man was talked of,
only one subject thought of; there was no longer interest in rumors of
war, in political quarrels, in the doings at the king's court; all
admiration and all sympathy were turned towards one feeble old man, who
had returned to Paris to die. For twenty-seven years he had been absent,
that brilliant writer and unsurpassed genius, the versatile Voltaire.
His facile pen had given its greatest glory to the reign of Louis XV.,
yet for more tha