-that he slept. At any rate, when he came forth, though the gaunt, haggard look was always there, his face was comparatively calm; there was not a sign of weariness in his firm, elastic gait, and he carried his gray head as erectly as if he had never known sorrow or shame. THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. HE reign of Louis XIV., upon whose un an extensive area. In the centre rose a square donjon, tall, sombre, massive, with windows closed by bars of iron, frowning gloomily over the pleasant Italian scene. Above its gates might have been written Dante's ominous inscription: He who once entered its inclosure might well abandon every hope of escape. Another favorite prison was known as the Isles of St. Marguerite. It was a rocky islet on the coast of Provence. Surrounded by the waves and guarded by incessant vigilance, the prison Tsubstantial glories French historians of the of St. Marguerite had heard the vain sighs of last age so loved to dwell, was drawing to its close. The nation had seen its intellect and its material resources sink into decay beneath the selfish despotism of its superstitious king. Yet never was Louis more eager for universal rule than in the last period of his baleful career. His wonderful mental activity was unchecked by disasters and physical decay. He built and planned palaces, gardens, water-works; he wasted vast sums in useless wars; he persecuted Huguenots; he drove the working-men from his kingdom; he watched with keen attention every discontented intellect, and filled his prisons with his personal foes. fallen courtiers and suspected nobles, of Huguenot ministers and pious reformers; while through the bars of their windows the captives might catch distant glimpses of the lovely shores of Provence, and of a happy existence in which they were never more to have a share. They pined and died amidst the fairest landscapes of France. The most famous of the state prisons was the Bastile. Few but are familiar with the massive pile of circular towers and gloomy walls that once frowned over trembling Paris; with the still and sombre precinct where lived only the jailer and his victims; with the woes, the horrors, the injustice, that made the Bastile the perpetual emblem of regal wickedness or priestly pride; with the fall of the mighty tower and the fond hope of the people of every land that with it had disappeared forever the tyranny and barbarism of the feudal rule. Of all the various characters in which the grand monarch appears before posterity, none was more admirably done than that of jailer. Not only did he fill the galleys and the common prisons with an infinite number of heretics and reformers, but he was singularly fond of shut- Over these three prisons ruled, at successive ting up for life his more important foes in some periods, the commander Sieur De Saint Mars; distant donjon or tower, and watching, from and under his care, within their solitude, lived his gay palaces and trim groves, their days ebb and died the Man of the Iron Mask. Saint slowly away in lamentation and decay. He Mars, at thirty-five, devoted himself to the prowas eager to hear from their keepers how they fession of a jailer. He attained the highest ate, slept, or looked. He must even be con- excellence in his art. His narrow and timid sulted when they were bled, or received a pre-intellect, his ceaseless vigilance, his minute scription from the physician. He was glad to know that their linen was washed in the prison, to prevent them from writing upon it in invisible ink. He read Fouquet's miserable scrawl, written with soot and water on a handkerchief; he rewarded his confessor when he consented to become a spy, and to betray him. The mag-ness. nificent Louis told gross falsehoods to the sultan, to conceal his own cruelty to the Armenian Patriarch Avedick, whom he had shut up in one of his dungeons. He seemed to linger with strange delight over the tortures of his victims. He was scarcely ever weary of repressing their efforts to escape his toils. In fact, humanity shudders at the mingled cruelty and baseness of that renowned monarch whom historians have usually called an example of courtesy and humanity. Louis possessed three towers or keeps, gloomy emblems of the Middle Ages, singularly well fitted to gratify his peculiar taste. At the entrance of the valley of Clusone, in Piedmont, stood the famous fortress of Pignerol. It had been strengthened by all the resources of ancient military art. Wide ditches separated the castle from the neighboring town. A double line of walls, defended by four massive towers, inclosed and constant care over the conduct of his captives, seem to have perfectly satisfied his exacting master; and he was slowly promoted from prison to prison, until he became, at length, the keeper of the Bastile. Nothing, indeed, could exceed Saint Mars's timid conscientiousHe was always in terror lest his prisoners might escape, and not even the wide ditches, the massive walls, or the frowning donjon of Pignerol could give him any sense of security. For sixteen years, within its guarded precinct, he watched night and day over the miserable Fouquet; he peered through the grated windows, and discovered his prisoner writing with his soot and water upon his handkerchief; he detected his sympathetic ink; he climbed every day into a tree that overlooked Lauzun's cell, and carefully noted all his motions; and he sent constant reports to the king, filled with the most trifling details. Yet the condition of the timid jailer was scarcely less unhappy than that of his captives, and he was a prisoner in his own castle. Seldom could he gain a few days of leisure to recruit his health in the sunny scenes of Italy. He grew prematurely old with mental disquietude and ceaseless toil; his powerful frame was bent and emaciated; his head was bowed down, his limbs thin and tremulous; he was the devoted victim of his unattractive profession. From Pignerol Saint Mars had been successively transferred to Exiles, to the Isles of St. Marguerite, and was finally rewarded, when he was about seventy, with the high office of keeper of the Bastile. He left St. Marguerite in the autumn of 1698 to enter upon his new charge. He traveled slowly from the south of France toward Paris, attended by a mounted guard. By his side in a litter, closely covered up, was borne a singular companion. An old man of noble appearance and graceful manners, but whose face was completely covered with a mask of black velvet, fastened by iron clasps, and who never ventured to utter a word, was seen by the curious villagers to descend from the litter, and take his place in silence at the table, when Saint Mars stopped at his estate of Palteau. At meals the captive was always placed with his back to the window; Saint Mars kept pistols near at hand to shoot him should he venture to speak. At night the jailer slept by the side of his prisoner; by day he was shut up in the litter; and during all the long journey from the Mediterranean to Paris no one caught a glimpse of the face hidden beneath the velvet mask, or heard a word of complaint, of hope, or of despair from those mysterious lips. The Man in the Mask, trained by the scrupulous hand of Saint Mars, had long learned to obey his terrible fate. The mysterious cavalcade passed slowly onward, watched apparently with eager attention by the curious villagers, among whom various traditions were long preserved of the appearance and conduct of the unhappy captive. On the 18th of September, about three o'clock, the guarded litter passed the draw-bridge of the Bastile, and the prisoner was placed in one of the rooms of the tower of La Bertaudière. Here, for five years, the Man in the Mask is lost to sight. Yet tradition has thrown a faint and doubtful light upon the singular story. It is said that the prisoner was always treated with unusual deference; that his jailer never sat down in his presence; that he was supplied with every luxury; that he was clothed in the finest linen and the costliest laces, for which he showed an extravagant fondness; that his table was abundant; that he amused his leisure by playing on the guitar. But from all intercourse with the world around him he was sternly cut off. His mask was never raised even when he took his food, and orders were given to kill him should he attempt to remove it. An aged physician of the Bastile, who had often attended him, stated that he never saw his face, although he had examined his tongue. He was finely formed, said the doctor; his complexion was dark, his voice low and soft. Yet he never complained of his condition, nor gave the least indication of who he was. A perpetual terror had probably broken down within him every thought of resistance to his royal persecutor. A doubtful story is told that at St. Marguerite the prisoner one day wrote with a knife on a silver plate which he had used at dinner, and threw it out of window toward a boat that lay on the shore near the foot of the tower. A fisherman, the owner of the boat, found the plate and brought it to the governor. He asked the fisherman, in astonishment and alarm, "Have you read what is written on this plate? Has any one seen it in your possession ?" The man replied that he could not read, and that he had shown it to no one. The governor detained him until he had made sure that he spoke the truth, and then dismissed him, saying, "It is happy for you that you can not read." Another legend relates that the prime minister of France, Louvois, visited the masked prisoner in his cell at St. Marguerite, and during the interview refused to sit down in his presence. He evidently treated the miserable captive as if he were his superior. For five years the Man of the Iron Mask survived his removal to the Bastile. Winter and summer his narrow cell in the lonely tower echoed to the note of his mournful guitar, almost the only sound that awoke its utter silence. His youth and manhood had passed away, and he had never heard the sweet voices of sympathy, of friendship, of compassion, or of love. The suspicious tones of the cautious Saint Mars, and the stealthy tread of his spies, were the only sounds with which he was familiar. Around him he might hear the murmur of busy Paris; at St. Marguerite he may have caught the roar of the tempest-tossed waves. But he must have forgotten, in his endless captivity, the cheerful sounds of his childhood, or perhaps fancied them revived in the gentle music of his guitar. His mind, no doubt, sank into imbecility in his solitary bondage. It happened to most of the captives of the magnificent Louis to fall into premature dotage, and to die surrounded by mental illusions. Nor could the Man in the Mask have escaped the common fate of Fouquet and Lauzun, of Avedick and the Huguenot ministers. Old age came upon him without reverence and without regard. No friendly eye had looked upon his veiled countenance; no children nor grandchildren cheered his weary hours as they dropped slowly away. The fatal purpose of Louis XIV. was perfectly fulfilled, and the mysterious captive was shut forever from all intercourse with his fellow-men. At last the inevitable deliverance came. In November, 1703, while the great king was wrapped in his scheme of universal rule, or reveling in his gorgeous palaces and gay parterres, the draw-bridge of the Bastile was lowered, and a scanty funeral train passed slowly out to the cemetery of the Church of St. Paul. The night was falling, the shadows of evening hid the last funeral rites of the Man of the Mask. He had been taken ill a few days before, had sunk rapidly, and died in his solitary cell. Around him were only the cold and pitiless jailers, and no kind words nor gentle faces cheered his last hours on earth. He was buried | lieu, as the son of his nurse. He was a fair with little ceremony, and no show of regret. Two of the officers of the prison alone followed to the grave him whom credible historians have thought the rightful King of France, and who is shown by all the circumstances of his imprisonment to have been at least a person of importance. No relative, no friend, was told of his fate, the king would suffer no one to know of his death. As if to blot from existence the very memory of the Man of the Mask, every trace of his residence in the Bastile was destroyed. His furniture and clothes were burned; his silver or metal plates were melted. The walls of his chamber were completely scraped and whitened, the ceiling was taken down and renewed, the floor removed and relaid, and an extraordinary care was shown to prevent any written statement of his name and his wrongs from being left in any part of the cell. On the burial register of the church he was called "Marchiali," and his age set down as only forty-five; in the records of the prison he was described as "the prisoner from Provence." Ile sank into oblivion, and Louis XIV., no doubt, believed that no one would ever pause to inquire who was that uncomplaining victim whom he had so successfully hidden from the world, and who had been buried in an obscure grave in the cemetery of St. Paul. But he was strangely mistaken. The very precautions he had taken to hide in obscurity the mysterious prisoner served only to insure him a literary immortality. The iron-clasped mask, the enforced silence, the long and secret imprisonment, the obscure burial, drew the attention of the world to the mysterious story. The peasantry of the provinces long remembered and related the passage of the closed litter through their villages, and the anxious vigilance of the Sieur Saint Mars. In the court circles it was suggested that a member of the royal family had been unjustly imprisoned by the unscrupulous king. The Man in the Iron Mask became the Junius of French history; the problem over which grave investigators and pleasant chroniclers speculated in vain. More than fifty treatises have been written on the attractive theme. The most extravagant theories have been defended with ardor; the most minute inyestigations have been pursued. Yet it is still doubtful whether the mask has ever been successfully lifted from that sad countenance, and whether the pale and uncomplaining victim has ever been clearly identified. One of the earliest suggestions to unfold the mystery was that the Man in the Mask was an elder brother of Louis XIV. This story was told by Voltaire, and found a ready belief in the last century. It has still its supporters. It was said that Anne of Austria had a son, the twin brother of Louis, whom it was necessary to conceal in order to prevent a disputed succession. The infant was taken away into Burgundy, and grew up under the care of his governor, Riche er. and graceful young man of nineteen, altogether unconscious of his royal origin, when an unhappy incident threw into his way a letter which his mother, Anne of Austria, had not prevailed upon herself to destroy. She had resolved, in case of the death of Louis, to call her first-born to the throne. The young prince, excited by his discovery, obtained the portrait of his brothHe saw at once the resemblance to himself; he rushed to his governor with the portrait and the letter, exclaiming: "This is my brother, and this tells me what I am." His conduct was reported at court, and orders were sent down to imprison the unhappy young man for life; and thus, in the romantic legend, it was his own brother against whom Louis had employed all his rare skill as a jailer—an unceasing vigilance of nearly fifty years. In support of this theory it was urged that the unknown prisoner had always received from his captors a degree of deference paid only to regal birth; that his love for laces and fine linen had been inherited from his mother, Anne of Austria; that his appearance and his manners were noble and commanding. But no eminent person had disappeared from the world about this period, and there was no one against whom it seemed probable that Louis XIV. would exercise such a severe precaution, except some rival of his power and his throne. At last a letter was produced from the Duchess of Modena, a daughter of the regent, Duke of Orleans, that professed to give a complete explanation of the story of the Man in the Iron Mask. It was found among the papers of the Marshal Richelieu. It told with minuteness the story of the birth of twins to Anne of Austria; of the prophecy of shepherds who foretold that their dissensions would bring civil war upon the kingdom; of the banishment of one of the children; his education; his noble appearance; his discovery of his royal birth; his imprisonment by a royal order in the Isles of St. Marguerite. The romantic story was at once adopted by the public as a suitable explanation of the mystery, and the Man in the Mask was universally believed to have been a discrowned and persecuted king. But skepticism soon woke again, and careful investigators refused to accept the explanation. The famous letter of the Duchess of Modena was pronounced a forgery or a fiction. The traditional details of the story were questioned. It was denied that the Man in the Mask was treated with unusual respect, or that the incidents preserved or added by Voltaire to the legend were any more trustworthy than many another embellishment of that unscrupulous historian. The mask was once more drawn over the face of Louis's victim. A throng of investigators have since labored to raise it. One of the most probable claimants to the honors of the mask was the brilliant and imperious Fouquet. As minister of finance, in the regency of Anne of Austria and the opening of the reign of Louis XIV., Fouquet had been | He had, by some mysterious crime, deserved the the wealthiest and the most powerful subject undying hatred of Louis XIV. We know that in France. He squandered with a lavish hand the resources of the nation, and grew enormously rich by the plunder of his countrymen. His landed estates surpassed those of the proudest peers. He owned Belleisle, almost a fortress; his possessions in America were almost an independent kingdom. He built at Vaux, near Fontainebleau, a magnificent château, whose gardens and groves, of more than Eastern luxury, were probably the models of those of Versailles, and whose endless galleries and stately chambers, adorned with gold, gems, and works of art, perhaps outshone any thing that Europe had witnessed since the lavish outlay of Nero or Caligula. In his palace of Vaux Fouquet gave entertainments of fabulous extravagance. All that was noble, great, or eminent in literature and art assembled in the halls of his hospitable home. His bounty, like his splendor, was more than regal. His guests were welcomed with lavish attentions. They fed on the rarest food, drank the costliest wines, were lodged in sumptuous chambers, and each in the morning found on his dressing-table a purse of gold, the parting gift of the liberal host. he was treated for sixteen years with singular His Years rolled away, and in his dreadful solitude his mind grew dim, his faculties declined, his high spirits wasted into dullness. He saw nothing but the bare walls of his cell and the Fouquet, in consequence, had troops of friends, many of whose names have shed lustre on the fêtes at Vaux. Among them were Cor-suspicious countenance of Saint Mars. All his neille and Molière, Madame De Sévigné and dim mental powers were directed to forming La Fontaine; even Louis XIV. was sometimes some connection with the world outside; to obentertained by his ambitious minister, and con- tain news of his wife, his mother, and his chilsented to borrow large sums from his seeming- dren. With wonderful ingenuity he made ink ly boundless resources. When the national from soot and a few drops of water, a pen from treasury was bankrupt, and the people clamor- the bones of a fowl, and contrived to write a ous in their want, Fouquet was always supplied letter on his handkerchief; he made a sympawith ready money; his power grew enormous, thetic ink, and wrote a few lines in a book. and dangerous to the monarchy itself; he held Saint Mars detected the ingenious treachery, in his control many of the most important cit-and sent the handkerchief, the book, and the ies of France; his adherents filled the fleet curious pen to the king. Louis returned orders and the army; his intense and restless vanity to him to endeavor to discover how Fouquet led him into a dangerous rivalry with the youth-had manufactured his sympathetic ink. The ful king, and brought him swiftly to his fall. Louis, at twenty-two, had resolved to govern alone, and Fouquet was ordered to present his accounts. He brought them in daily, but they were falsified to deceive the king, and the unscrupulous minister hoped that he might easily elude the vigilance of an inexperienced young man. But every night Louis sat down with the acute Colbert, Fouquet's chief enemy, and carefully unraveled the financial fictions. Colbert instigated and pressed on the ruin of the unfaithful minister. The king looked upon him with hatred, jealousy, and rage. A plot was formed for his destruction. With difficulty and danger the conspirators succeeded in arresting the powerful subject. He was thrown into prison, tried, condemned to banishment by the court, but by Louis to perpetual imprisonment; and he became the most important tenant of Pignerol, for sixteen years the source of endless disquietude to the conscientious Saint Mars. Many circumstances conspire to make it probable that Fouquet was the Man of the Iron Mask. prisoner next contrived to write on ribbons and a portion of his dress; he was afterward always clothed in black. When a chest of tea was sent to Fouquet his jailer was ordered to empty the tea in another receptacle, and to take away the chest with its paper lining. His linen was always thrown into a tub of water to remove any writing he might have traced upon it. Fouquet's friends made various efforts to aid him to escape, and one of his old servants suffered death for having tried to corrupt his guard. From this time he seems to have abandoned the world forever. He no longer sighed for the magnificent palace at Vaux, for the society of Corneille or La Fontaine, for the tender care of his wife and children, but gave all his thoughts to a preparation for a future life. To one person Fouquet's fall and imprisonment had given singular joy; it was his humble and pious mother. "Now, at least," she cried, "I have hopes of my son's salvation!" She rejoiced to have him snatched from grandeur and dissipation, and condemned to a silent He had been cov ered from his infancy with honors and gifts. At the age of twenty-two months he was made High Admiral of France, and the progress of his youth was marked by a constant rise in popularity and favor. His generosity was unbounded; he had inherited none of his father's despotic selfishness, but he was carried away by the passion for glory, which in that barba Beautiful in person, generous in disposition, beloved by his companions in arms, the young prince seemed destined to an illustrious career, that might bear his name down to posterity with that of Condé or Turenne. But a legend of the last century has confidently consigned meditation that might turn all his thoughts to- | a brief notice. The fair and graceful Count ward heaven. Her pious hope was gratified. de Vermandois was the son of Louis XIV. and The last years of his imprisonment were given the amiable La Vallière. to devotion. He fasted often on bread and water, and declared that nothing was of importance to him compared with the salvation of his soul. After many years of seclusion the severity of his captivity was softened; he was allowed the use of books, and was permitted to see his wife and children. About the year 1680 he disappears from sight. He either died at Pignerol or accompanied Saint Mars in his sin-rous age was chiefly displayed in offensive wars. gular journey from St. Marguerite to the Bastile, hidden by the litter and the mask. For the latter theory M. Lacroix has contended with animation and vigor. He thinks he has a conclusive argument to show that Fouquet was the Man of the Mask. That he had bitterly offended Louis is plain; M. La-him to the Bastile for life. Louis XIV., it is croix seeks for the cause of the offense in the related, had two sons, one legitimate, Louis, boundless scandals of the corrupt court. He Dauphin of France, and one, the illegitimate argues that the journey of the Man of the Mask Louis de Bourbon, Count de Vermandois. followed soon after the disappearance of Fou- Nearly of the same age, the two princes were quet; that the death of the minister is far opposite in character. The dauphin was dull, from being ascertained; that private or politic- rude, unfit to rule; the young count was enal reasons may have led the king to seclude dowed with all the graces of intellect and manhim from the world rather than to remove him ners. A rivalry grew up between the two by assassination. But what was the secret brothers, and Vermandois had been heard opensource of this later enmity? Why was it that ly lamenting that the French were one day desthe unfortunate minister was hurried away tined to obey a prince like the dauphin, unfrom Pignerol, and condemned to pass a weary worthy of a crown. His imprudent words and feeble old age in the tower of the Bastile? were reported to the king, his father; Louis, It is suggested that when Madame De Mainte- struck by their dangerous import, yet forgave non had married the king she became more than the son of La Vallière. But the feud between ever anxious to hide in perpetual obscurity her the brothers still continued, and at length the early history, which has never yet been related, count, in a sudden rage, struck the heir to the but with which Fouquet was possibly too fa- throne. It was almost an inexpiable crime. miliar. It was the enmity of an ambitious and Louis was informed of the offense. Trembling powerful woman that deepened the misery of for the culprit, he was yet forced by the united the last days of her early protector; or perhaps sentiment of his courtiers to summon his minFouquet had been implicated in the poisoning isters, and with grief and hesitation to lay bepractices of Brinvilliers and her associates, fore them the criminal conduct of his favorite among whose victims his rival Colbert had child. The laws of the state were imperative; been destined to be numbered. Yet these sug- it was decided that the young count must be gestions are scarcely founded on any historical condemned to death. The haughty father, proof, and a romantic criminality is thrown weighed down with grief, yielded to the sad. around the varied career of the great minister necessity; but happily a courtly minister sugof which there is no trace in the records of the gested a less painful punishment than immediperiod. The enmity of Louis is sufficiently ac- ate execution. He recommended that the guilty counted for in the fact that he was despotic young prince should be sent with a splendid and resolute to rule, and that the wealth and train to the army in Flanders. Here a report powerful connections of Fouquet rendered him was to be spread that he had suddenly died of a dangerous subject, and his ambition a rival plague. He was then to be made to pass for who could not safely be permitted to remain at dead; his magnificent obsequies were to be celliberty. There seems, too, scarcely a doubt ebrated in the presence of all the army; while that Fouquet died in 1684, in the care of his the unhappy count was borne away secretly at daughter, his son-in-law, and his son. He was night, and hidden for life, covered with a velburied by his family. His death was known to vet mask, in the most secluded prisons of the his contemporaries; it was the subject of a realm. touching notice from Madame De Sévigné, who had never ceased to remember him with gratitude. Two brilliant but unsatisfactory champions have next been brought forward to claim the fatal mask. Their pretensions have found vigorous defenders; they may be dismissed with Such was the legend that excited an animated debate at Paris in the last century, and which was accepted as a sufficient explanation of the historical mystery. It was shown to be altogether fabulous when it had been proved that the Count de Vermandois had died in 1683, of a violent fever, in his bed at Courtray. |