time, eye-witnesses of the particulars he gives, and who may possibly have gathered some information on the subject during his two imprisonments in the Bastille, was the first to suggest a logical solution of this curious problem, by supposing the masked prisoner to have been an illegitimate son of Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII. The scandalous intimacy existing between the queen and her brother-in-law, the turbulent and unprincipled Gaston of Orleans, supplied Voltaire with a not improbable hypothesis as to the possible paternity of the captive; and, undoubtedly, this hypothesis would do much towards explaining the apparent inconsistencies of the treatment he is known to have received.
It is evident that the queen, under the supposed circumstances, would naturally cause her son to be brought up carefully, but at a distance from the Court, and in ignorance of his parentage; and equally evident that a monarch like Louis XIV., jealous above all things of his rank and prerogative, utterly selfish, and shrinking from the infliction of no amount of suffering in the care of his own interests, would, on learning that he had a brother older than himself, probably resembling him in features and person, a brother who might not only cause a terrible scandal by showing himself to the world, or even endanger his crown by asserting his own legitimacy, and claiming the rights of primogeniture, would be quite capable of causing that brother to be incarcerated for life, and of blotting out his existence from the knowledge of his contemporaries, while avoiding the actual crime of fratricide. The superstitious punctiliousness of the king with regard to everything connected with the etiquette he conceived to be due to the personal treatment of persons of royal blood, would explain the ceremonious respect and the luxurious conditions of daily life, accorded to this unfortunate victim of State policy. Testimony of no slight importance, and confirming Voltaire’s views, as set forth in the “Dictionnaire Philosophique,” is adduced by M. Beuchot in the following note, which he has appended to his edition of the works of Voltaire:
“One day, at the royal levee, a short time before his death, Louis XVIII. appeared absorbed in his own thoughts, as was often the case with him, when a conversation sprang up between the Count de Pastoret, one of the chamberlains of the king, and one of his colleagues. M. de Pastoret warmly maintained the hypothesis of Voltaire. The king, as the discussion went on, seemed to rouse himself from his stupor, but said nothing. Next morning, at the levee, a fresh discussion was entered into by the same speakers on another controverted historical question, when M. de Pastoret was interrupted by the king, who remarked to him, ‘Pastoret, you were right yesterday, but you are wrong to-day.’”
But notwithstanding the many weighty arguments that have been brought forward in favour of Voltaire’s hypothesis—based, as he declares, on secret revelations made to him by persons of the highest rank—it may fairly be doubted whether it constitutes anything more than an approximation to the truth.
M. de Laborde, whose curiosity on the subject of the masked prisoner was so little successful with his royal master, is said to have discovered, at a subsequent period, among the papers of the Marshal Duke de Richelieu, an autograph letter addressed by the Duchess of Modena, daughter of the regent, to the duke, who had formerly been included in the list of her adorers. The letter, which was in cipher, commenced thus:—“Behold, at last, this famous history. It has cost me horrible . . . . . .” Towards the end of the last century, copies of this letter were privately circulated in Paris. In it the duchess states that her father had revealed to her that “the Man in the Iron Mask” was a twin-brother of Louis XIV., born a few hours after him; that the fact of this double birth had been predicted to the king by two shepherds, who declared that civil wars would result from the rival pretensions of two dauphins to the crown of France; that the birth of the first child took place in presence of all the great officers of state whose duty it was to be present on the occasion; that the birth of the second child—“handsomer and more lively than the other”—was witnessed only by the king, the chancellor, the queen’s almoner, a Lord of the Court, from Burgundy, who had come in the suite of the person who subsequently became the young Prince’s Governor, and Madame Peronnet, midwife to the queen; that the birth of this second child—the procès verbal of which was drawn up several times by the king, and at length signed by all present—was kept strictly secret, the king compelling all who were privy to it to take an oath never to divulge the fact, which, he said, must be concealed for reasons of State; that the second infant was confided to Madame Peronnet, to be by her brought up as the child of a lady of the court—the latter, between whom and her royal nursling a strong affection always existed, remaining with him until her death; that the young Prince, when old enough to need a tutor, was entrusted to the care of the Burgundian nobleman who had witnessed his birth, and who took him to his own residence near Dijon, where he kept him in the strictest privacy, maintaining an occasional correspondence on the subject of his ward with the queen-mother, the king, and the cardinal, educating the young Prince with the utmost care, and treating him with all the respect and deference due to one who might some day be his sovereign; that these marks of deference, on the part of one whom he had hitherto supposed to be his father, led the Prince, when approaching manhood, to seek to divine the mystery of his birth; that he contrived, unknown to his governor, to gain access to certain letters which the latter had received from the Court, and, having thus possessed himself in part of the secret of his parentage, contrived to procure a likeness of the king, whose close resemblance to himself sufficed to convert his suspicions into certainty, on which the king, being informed by the governor of this discovery on the part of his brother, and fearing that the latter might attempt some assertion of his claims, ordered both governor and pupil to be at once imprisoned for life.
This explanation of the mystery of the masked captive is supported by various details given in the