[5] Especially Louis XVIII., whose language is in complete disaccord with that of Louis XV. But I shall refer to this point of debate hereafter.
[6] Voltaire, Prosper Marchand, Baron de Crunyngen, Armand de la Chapelle, Chevalier de Mouhy, Duke de Nivernais, La Beaumelle, Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Lagrange-Chancel, Fréron, Saint-Foix, Father Griffet, Hume, De Palteau, Sandraz de Courtilz, Constantin de Renneville, Baron d’Heiss, Sénac de Meilhan, De la Borde, Soulavie, Linguet, Marquis de Luchet, Anquetil, Father Papon, Malesherbes, Dulaure, Chevalier de Taulès, Chevalier de Cubières, Carra, Louis Dutens, Abbé Barthélemy, Quintin Craufurd, De Saint Mihiel, Bouche, Champfort, Millin, Spittler, Roux-Fazillac, Regnault-Warin, Weiss, Delort, George Agar Ellis, Gibbon, Auguste Billiard, Dufay, Bibliophile Jacob, Paul Lecointre, Letoumeur, Jules Loiseleur, De Bellecombe, Mérimée, Sardou; without counting the writers of general history, such as S. Sismondi, Henri Martin, Michelet, Camille Rousset, Depping, and all who have written articles on this question in cyclopædias.
[7] Histoire de France, vol. xii. p. 435.
[8] Art de Vérifier les Dates, vol. vi. p. 292.
[9] Histoire de France, vol. xiv. p. 564.
[10] Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV., p. 289.
[11] M. de Taulès, for instance, a partisan of the theory which makes Avedick, the patriarch of Constantinople, the Man with the Iron Mask, and to which I shall refer in the after-part of this book.
[12] About a year ago (Moniteur of September 30, 1868) àpropos of the fine collection of unpublished documents given to the world by M. Ravaisson, under the title of Archives de la Bastille, M. de Lescure expressed a wish to see this question definitively settled. I had been occupying myself with it for a considerable period, though not without having satisfied myself that the learned conservator of the Arsenal Archives contemplated no work on the Man with the Iron Mask, in continuation of his publication, not yet brought down to the epoch of the entry into the Bastille of this famous prisoner. Among contemporary authors, besides M. Paul Lacroix (Bibliophile Jacob), who in 1840 supported the theory that made Fouquet the celebrated prisoner, M. Jules Loiseleur, in the Revue Contemporaine of July 31, 1867, and M. de Bellecombe, in the Investigateur of May, 1868, have maintained, as the result of their labours, that the Man with the Iron Mask was an unknown and obscure spy, whose name would never be ascertained. We shall recur to the two studies of MM. Lacroix and Loiseleur, of which one is very ingenious, and the other exhibits a penetrating sagacity, while both display a varied and trustworthy erudition.
CHAPTER I.
Theory which supposes the Man with the Iron Mask to have been a Brother of Louis XIV.—Voltaire the first to support this Theory in his Siècle de Louis XIV., and in the Dictionnaire Philosophique—Certain Improbabilities in his Story—Account of the Man with the Iron Mask introduced by Soulavie into the Mémoires Apocryphes du Maréchal de Richelieu—The three different Hypotheses of the Theory which makes the Man with the Iron Mask a Brother of Louis XIV.