discarded. Thus, the statement of Voltaire, and all those who have followed in his wake, about the extraordinary respect paid by the governor of the fortress, and even by the Marquis de Louvois, must be considered in the light of an unsupported, if not an invented, accessory to the romance of the incident. A manuscript journal kept by M. Dujonca, lieutenant of the Bastile, first quoted by the Père Griffet, is the only authentic document extant upon the subject of the prisoner, apart from the official correspondence to be hereafter mentioned, inasmuch as the register of the Bastile, copied in the work called La Bastile Devoilée, or "The Bastile Exposed," is judged to be merely a compilation from Dujonca's journal, so far as concerns this particular case, as all the principal records are known to have been destroyed. This journal records that, "at three o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday the 18th September 1698, Saint-Mars arrived from the Isle de Sainte-Marguerite, bringing with him, in a litter, an old prisoner, whom he had had at Pignerol, whose name was not mentioned, and who was always kept masked. This prisoner was put into the tower of La Baziniere until night, when I myself conducted him at nine in the evening to the third chamber of the tower of La Bertaudiere, which care had been taken to furnish with all things necessary. The Sieur Rosarges, who likewise came from the Isle de Sainte-Marguerite with Saint-Mars, was directed to wait upon and take care of the aforesaid prisoner, who was fed by the governor."

In the same journal, the death of the prisoner is mentioned under date of the 19th November 1703 in the following terms:

"The unknown prisoner, always masked with a black velvet mask, whom M. de Saint-Mars had brought with him, and had long kept under his charge, feeling slightly indisposed after attending mass, died to-day at ten at night, without having experienced any considerable illness: he could not have suffered less. M. Giraut, our chaplain, confessed him yesterday. Surprised by death, he was unable to receive the sacraments, and our chaplain exhorted him for a moment before he died. He was interred on Tuesday, 20th November, at four in the afternoon, in the cemetery of St Paul. His interment cost forty livres.".

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By an extract from the register of burials for the parish of St Paul, accredited by the vicar under his hand on the 9th February 1790, the exactitude of Dujonca is fully borne out. This entry is as follows:- The year 1703, on the 19th November, died at the Bastile Marchiali, aged forty-five or thereabouts; whose body was interred in the burial-ground of St Paul, his parish, on the 20th of the said month, in the presence of M. Rosarges, major of the Bastile, and of M. Reih, surgeon of the Bastile, who have affixed their signatures."

Marchiali was of course an assumed name, given to baffle inquiry, as likewise was most probably the alleged age. Voltaire relates that the prisoner was always called Marchiali at the Bas

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tile, and that he himself declared to the apothecary of the prison, a few days before his death, that he thought he was about sixty years old. After his death, the utmost care was taken to destroy every vestige of his existence: everything he had been in the habit of using, such as clothes, linen, bedding, &c. was burnt; the walls of his room were scraped and re-plastered, the panes of the windows were changed, and, according to some authorities, his body itself was consumed with quicklime.

As Saint-Mars passed with his prisoner from the Isle of SainteMarguerite, he halted at his own estate of Palteau, and an account of his visit is given by his great-nephew, M. de Palteau, as he had received it from persons resident on the property at the time. This is contained in a letter published by M. de Palteau in the Année Litteraire of 1769. He states "that the masked prisoner arrived at Palteau in a litter which preceded the one in which Saint-Mars himself travelled, under an escort of several men on horseback, and accompanied by the peasants who had gone to meet their landlord. Dinner was served in the diningroom on the ground-floor; the prisoner sat with his back to the court, and Saint-Mars opposite him, with a brace of pistols on the table. They were waited on by a single servant, who brought all the dishes from the anteroom, where they were deposited, and whenever he came in or went out, he shut the door carefully after him. The prisoner was observed to be tall in stature, and he always wore a black mask, which did not prevent his lips, teeth, and gray hair from being seen. The peasants frequently saw him cross the court with the mask over his face. Saint-Mars caused a bed for himself to be placed close to that of his prisoner, in which he slept. The remembrance of this occurrence is still fresh in the memory of many old men still living."

Such is all that is positively known of this famous captive. The question is, which of the three persons last indicated he wasArdewiks, Fouquet, or Matthioli?

The pretensions of Ardewiks are quickly disposed of. He was the Armenian patriarch at Constantinople, and had contrived to incur the deadly animosity of the Jesuits, then all-powerful in France and in other countries. They availed to procure his exile, and ultimately to have him kidnapped on board a French vessel, which conveyed him to France, where he was imprisoned in the Isle of Sainte-Marguerite, and afterwards in the Bastile, where he died. This atrocious proceeding was strenuously denied by the French government when the Ottoman court remonstrated, but is placed beyond all question by a memoir on the subject left by M. de Bonac, French ambassador at Constantinople in 1724. The Chevalier de Taules has laboured with commendable zeal to demonstrate that this abducted patriarch was the genuine Iron Mask, mainly with the view of relieving French royalty from the stigma of the suspicions which attached to it from the undis

closed mystery, and fixing it on the Jesuits. But he is met by an insuperable obstacle on the very threshold of his argument. M. de Bonac states explicitly that the patriarch was carried off during the embassy of M. Feriol at Constantinople, who only succeeded M. de Chateauneuf in 1699, and as the Iron Mask was already at the Bastile in 1698, it could not possibly have been the unfortunate patriarch of the Armenians.

The theory which would sustain Fouquet as claimant to the possession of the Iron Mask, has only very recently received a powerful stimulus from an elaborate thesis, executed by the Bibliophilist Jacob, a prominent, if not an eminent writer, under the title of Histoire de L'Homme au Masque de Fer, published at Paris in 1840. Fouquet was superintendent of finances in the early part of Louis XIV.'s reign, and won for himself a more than common share of the obloquy usually attracted by the finance minister under a despotic monarchy. He lived in a magnificence and luxury which aroused the jealousy even of the king, and he had the sad misfortune, moreover, to cross the monarch in the pursuit of certain mean schemes. Louis accounts for his animosity in the following manner:-"A view of the vast establishments this man had projected, and the insolent acquisitions he had made, could not fail to convince my mind of his unruly ambition, whilst the universal distress of my people cried aloud to me for justice against him. But what rendered him more culpable towards me was, that, far from profiting by the goodness I had manifested in retaining him in my counsels, he had derived therefrom fresh hopes of deceiving me, and instead of becoming wiser, thought only of showing himself more artful. But with all the artifices he could practise, I was not long in discovering his dishonesty, for he was unable to leave off his enormous expenditure, fortifying places and ornamenting palaces, forming cabals, and placing important charges in the hands of his friends, which he purchased for them at my expense, with the view of speedily rendering himself the supreme arbiter of the state." +

With this king to hate was to persecute. Without hesitation he caused Fouquet to be accused of malversation and treason, thrown into the Bastile in 1661, and arraigned before the Chamber of Justice, which, after a tedious process of three years, adjudged him guilty of the first crime, and sentenced him to banishment for life, with confiscation of his goods and chattels. The king was displeased that he had not been condemned to death; but judging it dangerous to allow a man acquainted with the affairs of the state to leave the kingdom, commuted the punishment to one of perpetual imprisonment.

*Two works of his are published on the subject, both posthumous, which appeared in the year 1825. Each is distinguished by a high-sounding title, having reference to the Iron Mask.

Euvres de Louis XIV., t. i., p. 101.

Three days after judgment, Fouquet was accordingly conveyed to the prison of Pignerol, on the borders of Savoy, and SaintMars appointed to guard him with the strictest vigilance.

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In 1664, therefore, Fouquet was shut up a close prisoner in the fortress of Pignerol, with M. de Saint-Mars for his jailor.-In repeated letters, which are quoted by M. Jacob, the minister Louvois urges the latter to exercise the utmost rigour towards his prisoner, in the literal fulfilment of which instructions he in fact showed himself nothing loath. After 1672, the severity of his captivity was mitigated, and he was allowed to receive a letter from his wife, and visits from the officers of the garrison. wards the close of 1679 he fell ill, and, after some time, permis sion was given that he might be taken to the baths of Bourbon ; but it was too late; he died of apoplexy at Pignerol on the 23d of March 1680. M. Jacob contends that he did not in fact die, but that the animosity of Louis being kindled afresh at the instigation of Madame de Maintenon, he resolved to wreak yet greater vengeance on the hapless superintendent. Consequently, causing his death to be announced, he had him immured in a lonely and inaccessible dungeon, and his face concealed with a mask.

But overlooking that much of this hypothesis rests on the merest and vaguest surmise, the death of Fouquet in 1680 ap pears to be as well authenticated as such an event in a state prison could be. In the first place, there is a letter from SaintMars to Louvois, dated the 23d of March 1680, intimating the occurrence; and three subsequent letters of Louvois to Saint-Mars of the 8th, 9th, and 29th of April, speak of " the late M. Fouquet." Again, Madame Fouquet was in the town of Pignerol, lodging at the house of one Sieur Fenouil, at the time of her husband's death, and arrangements had even been made for one of her daughters to occupy a room above, and communicating with the prisoner's, doubtless that she might tend her father in his sickness. It would likewise appear that his son, the Count de Vaux, must have been on the spot; for in his letter of the 8th of April, Louvois says to Saint-Mars, "You have done wrong to permit M. de Vaux to remove his father's papers and verses, and you ought to have locked them up in his apartment." His letter of the 9th of April, dated from St Germain, contains the following order:-"The king commands me to make known to you that his majesty is agreeable you should deliver to Madame Fouquet's servants the body of her late husband, to be transported whither she pleases." That Madame Fouquet, who was tenderly attached to her husband, and had, during all the years of his imprisonment, never ceased to importune the king for his release, availed herself of this permission, would seem both reasonable and natural; nor is there any reason to doubt she did so, the body of her husband being, as the burial register of the convent of the Filles de la Visitation-Sainte-Marie at Paris attests, deposited in the church of that convent, in the same vault as that of his father,

François Fouquet. But to this M. Jacob objects, first, that this interment did not take place for a whole year after the death, namely, on the 28th of March 1681; and secondly, that five months previously, a search being instituted in the church of the Visitation for the coffin of André Fremiot, erst archbishop of Bourges, to be removed to the cathedral of that city, the coffin was ultimately found in the Fouquet vault, on which occasion all the coffins in the sepulchre were examined by a municipal committee, and that professing to be of Nicholas Fouquet, the superintendent, was found empty, those of his father, wife, and sons only containing their remains. These two facts are singular, but by no means unaccountable, and are certainly wholly insufficient to invalidate the direct testimony of the death at Pignerol. But M. Jacob objects further, that Fouquet's friends were incredulous as to his demise; which can scarcely have been the case, since one of his most intimate friends, Madame de Sevigné, writes to her daughter on the 3d of April 1680 thus:" Poor M. Fouquet is dead! I am greatly affected. Mademoiselle de Scudery is much afflicted at this event." On the 5th of the same month she again writes "If I were to advise M. Fouquet's family, I would refrain from transporting his poor body, as it is said they are going to sdo I would let it be buried there, at Pignerol; for after a lapse of nineteen years, I would not have him brought out after such a fashion." The date of Madame de Sevigné's first letter is of greats consequence in this inquiry, as there is an irresistible inference to be thence deduced that she had the information of Fouquet's death direct from his widow, son, or daughter, at Pignerol, inasmuch as Saint-Mars' letter of advice to Louvois did not reach that minister until the 8th of April, as he himself complains. Now, if the members of his family, resident on the spot, were acquainted with the circumstance of his death at the instant of its occurrence, and had free access to him previously-as is incontestable, from the arrangement as to his daughter, and a notarial procuration, executed by Madame Fouquet, in the donjon of the citadel of Pignerol, on the 27th of January 1680-it is not to be doubted they had ample opportunity of satisfying them ́selves that the event was real and not fictitious.

It is true that Voltaire, in one of his works, says that it was unknown where Fouquet died; and again, in the "Age of Louis XIV." (ch. 25), has the following remarkable passage:"All historians state that Fouquet died at Pignerol in 1680; but Gourville asserts that he was liberated from prison some time before his death. The Countess de Vaux, his daughter-in-law, had already confirmed to me that fact; yet the contrary is believed in his family: thus it is that no one knows where the unfortunate man died.".

This doubt on the part of Voltaire may be explained. Gourville says in his memoirs that Fouquet, having been set/ or put at liberty (ayant été mis en liberté), wrote to him to thank him

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