A monk has lately died, too, somewhere in a French monastery, leaving papers testifying that he was the true Iron Mask. Some say he was deranged. Perhaps so; and perhaps we would rather such might have been the case. A real bona fide, two-hundred-year-old mystery must not succumb to this practical age of would-be common sense. We could never find such another, so we must content ourselves with reviving old facts and eliciting further researches.
He who was called, under the reign of Louis XIV., The Man with the Iron Mask, was not permitted to wear so pretty a covering as that which preserved the complexion of the Empress Poppée; and the painters who have represented him with a sort of lowered visor, a rampart of iron on his face, have made a great mistake.
The unknown prisoner, to whom nobody approached, and nobody spoke, wore a mask of velvet.
The question is not decided upon what he wore on his way from the Isle Ste. Marguerite to the Bastille. Some say his chin was inclosed in a network of steel, to permit him to eat, while the upper part of his face was concealed in the mask of iron.
But this is a mystery, and his early training no less so.
He had been incarcerated a long time at Pignerol, the château of which had served for a prison of state, and since 1632 had belonged to France. The inhabitants still show a large dismantled tower that overlooks the town, and give the tradition concerning the Iron Mask and Fouquet, who were here confined.
They showed the chamber in 1818 that these poor victims inhabited.
After the taking of the Bastille, indications of the Iron Mask were sought for among the registers of this place of detention; but the largest book of records was sadly torn, and the folio numbered one hundred and twenty, coinciding with the year 1698, the epoch of the incarceration of the prisoner, had been taken away.