The Abbé was also informed by the same officer that his father had been obliged, on the death of the woman who used to wait on the prisoner, to take the corpse on his shoulders, at midnight, to the place of burial; and that he had imagined the deceased to be the prisoner himself, until he was ordered by the governor to find another woman to take her place. That he had discovered, at a neighbouring village, a woman who seemed likely to suit, and that the governor had assured her that her acceptance of the proposed situation would be the means of making the fortune of her children; but on condition that she should never see them again, never leave the service she was invited to enter, and never again hold any intercourse with the rest of the world; and that the woman refused to allow herself to be incarcerated for life upon those terms, especially as she was informed that the least indiscretion on her part would cost her dear. The same writer tells us, in his History of Provence, that, one day, when Saint-Mars was conversing with the prisoner, as he came out of the chamber (a sort of corridor or gallery whence he could see from a distance those who came thither), the son of one of his own friends arrived, and was advancing towards the place where he stood. Hearing the noise (of some one approaching), the governor hastily shut the door, and coming up to the young man, demanded of him, with a troubled countenance, “If he had seen anybody, or had heard anything he had been saying?” Being assured that he had not, he made him return home the same day, writing to his friend “how imprudently his son had acted, and how great a danger he had run.”
It has also been asserted by M. Crange Chancel that a person named Du Buisson and some other prisoners were placed in a room under that occupied by the masked captive, and conversed with him by the tunnel of the chimney; and on Du Buisson asking him to tell him his name and condition, he replied that “to do so would cost his own life, and the lives of those to whom he should reveal the secret.” This writer does not state in which of the prisons inhabited by the mysterious captive this conversation took place; but we know that it could not have been in the Bastille, as the apartment occupied by him in that fortress was found, on the destruction of the building in 1789, to be absolutely without communication with any other. The incident of the plate has been related of many other captives; and, moreover, so closely watched and guarded as were the State-prisoners of France at that period—neither pen, ink, nor knife being left in their possession—it is difficult to believe that either that, or the incident of the shirt, could really have happened.
But without attaching much importance to these stories, enough, as we have seen, is certainly known with regard to the history of the prisoner in question to justify the conclusion, that he must have been not only a person of very high rank, but also one whose existence was a source of danger to the monarch by whom he was retained so long sequestrated from all that gives value to life: and, as already remarked, a problem so eminently calculated to stimulate inquiry as the secret of an identity which could at once inspire so much uneasiness, and command so much deference, on the part of a sovereign so proud and so unscrupulous as Louis XIV., could not fail to lead to a vast amount of research, and to prompt the formation of various hypotheses explanatory of the mystery; these hypotheses being almost as numerous as the writers who support them, and, with the exception of those advanced by the two first named, agreeing only in their obvious impossibility.
Thus, some have supposed the masked prisoner to have been the Count de Vermandois (son of Louis XIV. and the Duchesse de la Vallière), punished in this manner for having struck the Dauphin; the disgraced minister Fouquet; the Duke of Monmouth; the turbulent Duke de Beaufort, commonly known as “the King of the Markets;” the schismatic Armenian Patriarch, Arwediecks, noted for his hostility to the Catholics of the East; and Count Ercolo Antonio Matthioli, Senator of Mantua and private agent of the Duke, who, after having entered into a secret treaty with Louis XIV. for the sale of the fortress of Casale—the key of Italy—thwarted and disappointed the policy of that sovereign, and incurred his vengeance by inducing his master to break off the negotiation with the French king, and to accept the higher bribe which had been subsequently offered by the emissaries of Spain and Austria.
As for the Duke of Monmouth, who was publicly beheaded on Tower Hill, on the 6th of July, 1685, and the Duke of Beaufort, who, having escaped from the prison in which he had been confined on a charge of conspiring against the life of Cardinal Mazarin, began a civil war, made his peace with the king, was created Admiral of France, defeated the Turkish fleet near Tunis in 1665, and was killed in a sally at the siege of Candia in 1669, the pretensions put forth on their behalf are clearly inadmissible; while the other hypothetical explanations of the mystery appear to have been suggested solely by certain coincidences of dates and places in the fragmentary notices that attest the various imprisonments undergone by the masked captive, and the persons whom he has been supposed to be. None of them can stand examination; a simple comparison of other ascertained dates in the history of the captive in question with those of various authenticated incidents in the lives of these other persons, sufficing to show that no one of these could have been identical with the unfortunate prisoner in question. Nor, indeed, even were not the hypotheses alluded to thus positively disproved, would it be possible, in the case of any of the persons thus brought forward, to explain the excessive precautions employed by the government with regard to the masked prisoner, both before and after his death, the secrecy so scrupulously maintained in regard to him by Louis XIV. and his successors, or the assertion of Louis XV. that the incarceration of this captive had “saved France from great calamities.”
Voltaire, who was the first to call attention to this subject, and who declares that he gained his information from parties still living in his