MANY RUMOURS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

MANY RUMOURS.

HIDDEN IDENTITY. HORRORS OF BASTILLE. INSTANT death was the penalty the mysterious prisoner must pay should he ever reveal his face—this by Royal command of Louis the Grand; he who boasted, "I am the State!" The only clue to the unfortunate's identity was this entry upon the register of the grim Bastille: "On Thursday, September 18, 1698, at 3 o'clock of the afternoon, M. de Saint-Mars, governor of the chateau of the Bastille, arrived for his first entrance into office, coming from his government of the islands of Sainte-Mafguerite, having brought with him in his litter a former prisoner of his at Pigneroi, whom he obliges to keep himself always masked, and whose name is not told." It had been 17 years since M. de Saint-Mars had left Pigneroi with his masked prisoner, who, meanwhile, had languished in the dungeons of SainteMarguerite. So when the mysterious man arrived at the Bastille he had already endured his tortures through a

period in which many a maker of history has lived a lifetime. Resembled Grand Monarch. It was rumoured that hk features had to be for ever hidden because they bore a striking resemblance that was compromising to the grand monarch. He must have been a personage of great rank. His gaolers were commanded to treat him always with that respect which was due to royalty alone. Even M. de Saint-Mars himself had to stand bareheaded when addressing his charge. The mask was of black velvet. <So another entry in the prison register stated. According to Voltaire it had steel springs at the chin piece, allowing the wearer to eat without uncovering his face; but this detail savours of Voltaire's vivid imagination. Yet its suggestion yielded up the name, "Man of the Iron Mask," by which the unfortunate 'sufferer has been known to history and fiction. Suffering Relieved by Death. He languished in the cruel Bastille for five years, two months and one day. Then his tortured soul went up to his Creator, relieved of a hell of torment known to have lasted for 22 years, and which probably had covered a longer period of agony. It left behind no clues as to his identity or his antecedents. Only M. de Saint-Mars and the grand monarch could tell, and their lips were sealed until the Black Angel delivered them out of the tortures which their conscience must have endured on this victim's account. For a dozen years after the masked prisoner had died not even M. de SaintMars' brothers in arms who had helped guard that wretched existence dared to ask themselves who their prisoner might have been. Then Louis XIV. went up for his final judgment after more than 70 years upon his throne, and men dared to gossip behind closed doors. But the first published attempt to unravel the mystery could be ventured only after that cruel monarch had been moulding in his tomb for a generation. This was in the anonymous "Memoirs" of an author supposed to have been an intriguing court belle. According to this authority, the masked man had been the Due de Vermandois, natural son of Louis XIV. by the beautiful Louise de la Valliere. During an outburst of anger he had dared strike the Dauphin, and had suffered a lifetime of torture for his attack upon the heir to the throne. Voltaire Related. Voltaire, in his "Century of Louis XIV.," later presented another key to the mystery, of which he said: "It is without example, and, what is no less strange, all historians have been ignor-

By VINCENT TOWNE. ant of it." Shortly after 1661, when Cardinal Mazarin died and Louis XIV. took the government into his own hands, "a prisoner of greater than ordinary stature, young and of most handsome and noble form, was sent under strict secrecy to the island of Sainte-Mar-guerite," Voltaire related. The King's Minister, Louvois. went to see the prisoner on the island and spoke to hiiu, standing with every sign of respect. According to this author, the prisoner was a half-brother of Louis XIV., the son of that monarch's mother, "Haughty" Anne of Austria, and Mazarin. This disclosure was shortly followed by a pamphlet emphatically stating that the natural son of Anne and Mazarin had put on the throne "by Mazarin in substitution for the real Louis XIV., for whom he had been substituted; that the personage who for morie than 70 years enjoyed all the prestige of "The Grand Monarch" was therefore a pseudo king, and that the unknown prisoner of the Bastille was the rightful ruler of France. According to a further theory that prisoner was a half-brother of Louis the Grand, but his father was the English Duke of Buckingham, rather than Cardinal Mazarin. Others have maintained that he was a twin brother of the grand monarch and had been put away to avoid complications. This was seized upon by Dumas for the plot of his novel, "The Man in the Iron Mask."

Married Gaoler's Daughter. There was once circulated an extravagant theory that this man of mystery had been the rightful Louis XIV., that he had been married upon the island of Sainte-Marguerite to his gaoler's daughter, and that there had been born to this union a son, who was smuggled over to Corsica, where his foster parents were simply told that he "came from good part," which assurance translated into French gave him the name of "Bonaparte." He was the grandfather of the great Napoleon, who thus in the third generation came forward to avenge the sins of the fathers! That the Man of the Iron Mask was a personage of less than royal blood has been persistently maintained in more recent years; but these theories do not account for the fact that he was treated with the deference due only to blood royal. Some authorities claim that he was the French officer Bulonde, who had displeased his royal master during a military siege; 'others that he was M. de Marchiel, a French soldier of fortune who led a conspiracy for the assassination of Louis XIV.; that he was Count Mattioli, the Duke of Mantau's Minister of State, who left a disappearance mystery behind him, and that he was that human enigma, James de la Cloche, son of Charles 11. of England, who dissolved into nothingness about the time that the Man of the Iron Mask appears to have been' placed in confinement at Pigneroi.

(Copyright.—All Ki-hts Reserved.) i The Princess had become unpopular . with the German people. Her eldest , child, the present ex-Kaiser, early developed a bumptiousness which alienated • him from his father, himself the most . unaffected and natural of men. Because Frederick had sought to keep his conceited son in the background until he could be cured of his vanity the latter never forgave these paternal efforts to suppress what he considered as his Godgiven cleverness and jicnius. Indeed, young William, when only the heir presumptive, accused his father of being jealous of his own extraordinary talents. Breach Widened. This breach between the Crown Prince and his son, Prince William, widened early in 1887, when it was whispered throughout Europe that the former was suffering from a case of cancer of the throat. As a matter of fact, following a severe cold, Frederick had developed in his throat a growth which was the cause of serious scientific controversy. Instead of standing by his father in this grave emergency, Prince William allowed it to but whet his insatiable ambition. He gathered about him a strong court faction, which had the audacity to propose that the afflicted Prince Frederick's claim to the crown be set aside because it would be unwholesome to the state of the empire to have upon the throne a ruler afflicted with an incurable malady. Although he realised that his father, the old Emperor William, was near unto death, Frederick is said j to have signed a formal pledge that he would abdicate in favour of his son, should it be proved that his malady was incurable. On hearing of this abdication Frederick's English wife, the Crown Princess, became highly indignant, as justly she might be. Her husband was signing away not only his but her own possible prospects of wearing a monarch's crown. Her mother, Queen Victoria, backed her up in her insistence upon her rights. So, to contra vert her son's efforts to prove that his father was dying of cancer, the Crown Princess sent to England for that country's most eminent throat specialist, Dr. Morell Mackenzie. All Europe awaited the diagnosis of this great savant. He clipped out a , portion of Prince Frederick's throat • tisue and sent it for analysis to the ] noted Professor Virchow. Virchow l announced that the tissue contained no ( indications of cancer, and this pro- , nouncement proved a great disappoint- t ment to the partisans of the young j Prince William. They immediately : accused Dr. Mackenzie of having fraudulently clipped from an unafflicted portion of the Crown Prince's throat the tissue which had been used for analysis, and Queen Victoria replied to this accusation . from her grandson's followers by immc- • diately knighting Dr. Mackenzie. \ Partisans of the Crown Princess now ; made some charges which perhaps had i no foundation more firm than the sus- < .picions that Frederick must be taken , oyt of Germany to escape the machina- , tiohs of his German physicians who had | been engaged to hasten his end. Frederick was hurried to England and i to San Reno. It was said that voung , William had become ahsolutely estranged from both his father and i mother, and rumour also had it that Dr. Mackenzie, at the request of the British royal family, was subjecting Frederick to terrible tortures that he might outlive his aged father, if only for a few days. l It was a neck-and-neck race asrainst the Grim Reaper. "Unser Fritz" won. ! On March 9, 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosze gave up the ghost, his dying son was doctored up with ! hurried to Berlin and crowned. He ", occupied the throne just 99 davs. What really happened during those dramatic months previous to his succession will never be known. i