THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 129, 1 June 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

A MYSTERY SOLVED. (From Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, April 12th, 1901. The famous mystery of "The Man in the Iron Mask," which, by the way, was not metal but black velvet, has given way to the Rontgen rays of modern investigation. If you want to know all about it, you must get the very interesting book thus entitled, by Tighe Hopkins, who adapts from Topin, Fuuck-Brentano, and other literary detectives. It seems, according to the evidence now brought forward, that there should not of recent years have been any great doubt as to the prisoner's identity, though in Topiu's ■days, says Mr Hopkins, 52 writers, sharing among them 25 different, hypotheses, had essayed to look behind the mask, and Vicomte Maurice Bouiry extends the list to sixty, not embracing the legion of anonymous contributors to periodicals and dictionaries.

I have space only for the briefest mention of the most interesting of the many personalities identified with the Man in the Mask. There was the Due de Vermandois, the illegitimate son of Louis XIV. and La Valliere, whose brief and brilliant career terminated, to the certain knowledge of the entire French army, at Courtrai, in 1683. There was Monmc-uth, the unhappy son of Charles 11. and Lucy Walters, who paid the price of revolt against his Implacable uncle, James 11., on Tower Hill !in 1685, attended to the scaffold by a knot of priests and prelates to whom he was intimately known. There was Beaufort, the idol of the Paris markets, "le bon prince," a foul mouthed, swaggering swashbuckler, "an unfledged booby and bustard with fine legs," "the Tony Lumpkin of Versailles," as Mr Hopkins dubs him, whose one good point was the personal pluck he inherited from his grandfather, Henry IV., and who, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt* died bravely at the siege, of Candia, in IGC9—eighteen years before the Mask arrived at the Bastille. There was Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XlV.'S.ambitious and greedy Minister of Finance, whose peculations brought down on him the doom of perpetual imprisonment, at first solitary, but afterwards relieved, at his Royal Master's instructions, by the Society of his wife and children, and the frequent reception of any friends who cared to dine with him, and whose body was laid in the family vault in the Grande Rue St. Antbine, in 1681, twenty two years before the Masked Man died. Then, there was the whole mass of discordant conjectures built on the presumed unfaithfulness to her husband of Anne of Austria—a treachery of which the poor lady was certainly innocent. The mysterious prisoner was declared to be Anne's son "by some lover undiscovered," "by George Vllliers, Duke of Buckingham," who certainly made an egregious ass of himself by making undisguised love to her, and got nothing but a snubbing for his pains, and "by Cardinal Mazarin." Later on, under First Empire, Baron de Gleichen "took. up the wondrous tale." He asserted, and was at pains to prove, "that it was the true heir to the throne who was put out of sight, to the profit of a child of the Queen and the Cardinal. Having become masters of the situation on the death of the King (Louis XIII.) they substituted their son for the Dauphin, the substitution being facilitated by a strong likenes between the children." The dire consequences of this hypothesis strike the eye at once; it nullifies in the most absolute fashion the legitimacy of all the remaining Bourbons. . . After a period of repose in the shades, the ghost of the Baron de Gleichen awoke and stalked forth In to the First Empire, where all the talents were probing the dust of the Man in the Iron Mask. Here is the contribution of the Baron's ghost to the bewildering topic of debate:

—"Louis XIV. had been a mere bastard, the child of foreigners. The lawful heir had been imprisoned at the Isles of Sainte Marguerite, where he had married the daughter of one of his gaolers, Of this marriag-e a child was born, who so soon as he was weaned was despatched to Corsica, and there intrusted to a safe person, as a child comingl of "good stock"—in Italian, "Buona-parte." It is from this child that the Emperor was directly descended. The true claim of Napoleon I. to the throne of France established by the Iron Mask—How came the great Dumas to miss that great discovery?-

Dumas partially atoned for his remlssness in missing the Bonaparte -legend by adopting- the absolutely unfounded scandal first fathered by Voltaire, which he exploited in "Le Comte de Brageloime," the basis of innumerable melodramas, of which one was played at the Adelphi as lately as the year before last. Whether the absolutely limpid statements of Topin and FunckBrentano, set before English readers with unsurpassable clarity by Mr Hopkins, will banish romance from the library and the stage, remains to be seen. Picturesque legend dies hard.

I am not going to spoil an enticing true story for you, so will simply say that the real man in the mask was one Mattioli, Minister to Charles IV., Duke of Mantua, who as you will see, most basely deceived Louis VIV., and made him the laughing stock of Europe. To kidnap a brother monarch's right hand man was, even in those days, a strong measure, but Louis and his adviser, the Abbe ;di Estra&'es were furious* and never 'rested until they landed their prey. Louis merely stipulated there should be no scandal. Heavy expenditure presently depleted Mattioli's purse, and presently d'Estrades kindly undertook to raise a loan from Catinat, Commander of the French troops, which were to occupy Casale. Mattioli swallowed the bait, and on the second of May, 1679, set out in a carriage with d'Estradrs and his cousin, the Abbe de Montasquieu, for the frontier. On the morrow, Catinat was able to jnform Louvols of the complete success of the stratagem.

"I arrested Mattioli yesterday, three miles from fcere, upon the King's territories, during the interview which the Abbe d'Estrades had ingeniously contrived between him, Mattioli, and myself, to facilitate the scheme. For the arrest. I employed only Chevaliers de Saint Martin and de Vlllebois, two officers of M. de Saint Mars, and four rren of his company. It was effected With out the least violence, and no one knows the rogue's name, not even the officers Who assisted. He is In the chamber which Dubreuil oocupied.where he will be civilly treated, according to the r:q,;est of the Abbe d'Estrades, until the wishes

of the King with regard to him are known." Never was vengeance, more refined or more appallingly complete. Louis had no notion of allowing- his enforced guest to be comfortable. He sent word that Mattioli -was to have the necessaries of life merely. "The King's orders,'1 adds Mr Hopkins, "were fulfielled with a servile exactitude." For fifteen years Mattioli lay in Pignerol, for four years at the Isles of Sainte Marguerite, for five in the Bastille, and during nearly that entire space of twenty four, years his only escapes from the hideous monotony of utter solitude were the visits of his gaolers to search his apartment and occasionally his person, the readingof a few books of devotion, grudgingly doled out, and the opportunity of confessing once a year to a priest. He went mad but recovered and eventually died almost forgotten, in 1703.

The final paragraph of this enthralling volume runs thus:—"With his unfailing sense of dramatic contrast, Topin has noted that at the very hour of Mattioll's unheeded death on a pallet in the Bastile, Charles, of Mantua, arrived, on a visit to Louis XIV. Did Louis, who lavished on his guest the riches of Luxembourg, tell him the fate of his ancient favourite? It would have been heard by Charles as carelessly as Louis would, have told it. Scarce a bowshot from the palace, two turnkeys of the Bastille were trailing; Mattioli in the dusk to a grave in the churchyard of St. Paul."