This version of the story, which is the original source of all the controversy on the subject, was at first generally received as true.  On a critical examination it fitted in very well with certain events which took place in the reign of Louis XIV.

The Comte de Vermandois had in fact left the court for the camp very soon after his reappearance there, for he had been banished by the king from his presence some time before for having, in company with several young nobles, indulged in the most reprehensible excesses.

“The king,” says Mademoiselle de Montpensier (’Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier’, vol. xliii. p. 474., of ’Memoires Relatifs d’Histoire de France’, Second Series, published by Petitot), “had not been satisfied with his conduct and refused to see him.  The young prince had caused his mother much sorrow, but had been so well lectured that it was believed that he had at last turned over a new leaf.”  He only remained four days at court, reached the camp before Courtrai early in November 1683, was taken ill on the evening of the 12th, and died on the 19th of the same month of a malignant fever.  Mademoiselle de Montpensier says that the Comte de Vermandois “fell ill from drink.”

There are, of course, objections of all kinds to this theory.

For if, during the four days the comte was at court, he had struck the dauphin, everyone would have heard of the monstrous crime, and yet it is nowhere spoken of, except in the ‘Memoires de Perse’.  What renders the story of the blow still more improbable is the difference in age between the two princes.  The dauphin, who already had a son, the Duc de Bourgogne, more than a year old, was born the 1st November 1661, and was therefore six years older than the Comte de Vermandois.  But the most complete answer to the tale is to be found in a letter written by Barbezieux to Saint-Mars, dated the 13th August 1691:—­

“When you have any information to send me relative to the prisoner who has been in your charge for twenty years, I most earnestly enjoin on you to take the same precautions as when you write to M. de Louvois.”

The Comte de Vermandois, the official registration of whose death bears the date 1685, cannot have been twenty years a prisoner in 1691.

Six years after the Man in the Mask had been thus delivered over to the curiosity of the public, the ‘Siecle de Louis XIV’ (2 vols. octavo, Berlin, 1751) was published by Voltaire under the pseudonym of M. de Francheville.  Everyone turned to this work, which had been long expected, for details relating to the mysterious prisoner about whom everyone was talking.