compare himself with his brother, and see whether he resembled him. This project of his came to my knowledge, and from that moment I never left him.
“The young prince was exceedingly handsome; and having fallen in love with a young lady employed in my house, whose affections he had gained, he procured from her a portrait of his brother. Although the strictest orders had been given to all my household to give him nothing, she gave him an engraving of the king. The unfortunate Prince recognised the likeness—and well he might, for one portrait would have served for both, so like were the two brothers—and this sight threw him into such a fury, that he came to me, exclaiming:
“‘This is my brother’s portrait! This shows who I am!’
“He then showed me the letter of Cardinal Mazarin, which he had stolen from my casket, and avowed the discovery he had made. This scene took place in my house.
“The fear of seeing him escape, and make his appearance at the king’s marriage, compelled me to send a messenger to his Majesty to inform him of the opening of my casket, and my need of fresh instructions. The king sent his orders by M. le Cardinal, commanding that we should both be imprisoned until further orders; and that he should be informed that this severity was brought upon us both through his pretensions.
“I have suffered with him in our common prison until this time, when I believe that my sentence of recall from earth has been pronounced by my Judge on high; and I cannot refuse, for the tranquillity of my soul, and for that of my pupil, a sort of declaration which will enable him to deliver himself from the ignominious state in which he is, if the king should die without children. Can a compulsory oath force me to keep secret that which ought to be made known to posterity?—Saint-Mars.”
The authenticity of this document, notwithstanding the intrinsic evidence it contains of being a genuine production of the epoch whose date it bears, has been questioned on account of its signature; as the name of “Saint-Mars” has been supposed to be that of the Governor of the Bastille, in whose wardship the unfortunate prisoner is known to have passed so many years, and who, it is evident, could neither have acted as tutor to the captive, nor—as he survived his ward—have written a statement destined to throw light on the identity of the latter, after his own decease.
But the letter of the Duchess of Modena expressly states that the Burgundian nobleman who witnessed the birth of the second of the twins, and to whose care the ill-fated prince was confided during his boyhood, had come to Court in the train of the person who was afterwards his governor, that is to say, of the M. de Saint-Mars who held the posts of governor in the prisons of Pignerol, Sainte-Marguérite, and the Bastille; and the whole difficulty vanishes if we suppose this unnamed lord, brought to St. Germain by M. de Saint-Mars, and like him a native of Burgundy, to have been a relative of his patron, and to have borne the same name; a supposition which, considering the general aptitude of successful courtiers like Saint-Mars to introduce their kinsfolk into the sphere of royal favour, is certainly by no means improbable.
Assuming this supposition to be correct, and the first twenty years of the young prince’s existence to have been passed in retirement under the care of this first governor, the blank already noticed in the history of the masked prisoner previous to his incarceration at Pignerol is at once accounted for; while the choice of that fortress as the residence of the mysterious captive is satisfactorily explained by the fact that it was already under the command of an officer who was not only a devoted and unscrupulous agent of the king, but also a kinsman of the young prince’s first guardian; one who was probably initiated already into the secret of the prisoner’s birth, and who, moreover, on account of his relationship to the guardian whose remissness had incurred the royal displeasure, would be doubly vigilant in his custody of the captive thus confided to him.
The woman mentioned by the Abbé Papon, as having waited on the masked prisoner, and who was buried at night in the Island of Sainte-Marguérite, may probably have been Madame Peronnet; and as no second prisoner is mentioned by M. de Jonca as having been brought with the masked prisoner to the Bastille, it would seem that the death of the unfortunate tutor must also have preceded that event: the Sieur de Rosargues, who accompanied the masked captive to the last of his prison-dwellings, and to his grave, having probably been admitted to his service on the decease of his former guardian.
The editors of the “Memoirs of Everybody” affirmed, in 1835, that the original of this document still existed in the archives of the Minister of Foreign Affairs; and this statement has never been contradicted. It is natural that this document, supposing it to be authentic, should be in the archives of that department rather than of any other, as it would, in all probability, have been sent by the writer to some foreign place for safety, and would be brought back thence by some agent of the French government. It is true that the assertion of Louis XVIII. to M. de Pastoret would appear to invalidate the statement of Saint-Mars; but it is quite possible that he may have preferred to allow it to be thought that Louis XIV. sacrificed an illegitimate half-brother, rather than a prince of the blood royal, whose claims might be held to invalidate those of that monarch, and consequently of himself as his descendant. On the other hand, if we consider the confirmation which the letter of the Duchess of Modena—with the exception of the legendary addition of the prophecy of the two shepherds—the Memoirs of Richelieu and the declaration of Saint-Mars lend to each other, and the perfect explanation thus afforded of the various contradictory points in the history of the prisoner in question, we may fairly conclude, that we have at length arrived at the true explanation of an historical puzzle which has been sought in vain for the last hundred and fifty years.
