Voltaire added a few further details which had been given him by M. de Bernaville, the successor of M. de Saint-Mars, and by an old physician of the Bastille who had attended the prisoner whenever his health required a doctor, but who had never seen his face, although he had “often seen his tongue and his body.”  He also asserted that M. de Chamillart was the last minister who was in the secret, and that when his son-in-law, Marshal de la Feuillade, besought him on his knees, de Chamillart being on his deathbed, to tell him the name of the Man in the Iron Mask, the minister replied that he was under a solemn oath never to reveal the secret, it being an affair of state.  To all these details, which the marshal acknowledges to be correct, Voltaire adds a remarkable note:  “What increases our wonder is, that when the unknown captive was sent to the Iles Sainte-Marguerite no personage of note disappeared from the European stage.”

The story of the Comte de Vermandois and the blow was treated as an absurd and romantic invention, which does not even attempt to keep within the bounds of the possible, by Baron C. (according to P. Marchand, Baron Crunyngen) in a letter inserted in the ’Bibliotheque raisonnee des Ouvrages des Savants de d’Europe’, June 1745.  The discussion was revived somewhat later, however, and a few Dutch scholars were supposed to be responsible for a new theory founded on history; the foundations proving somewhat shaky, however,—­a quality which it shares, we must say, with all the other theories which have ever been advanced.

According to this new theory, the masked prisoner was a young foreign nobleman, groom of the chambers to Anne of Austria, and the real father of Louis xiv.  This anecdote appears first in a duodecimo volume printed by Pierre Marteau at Cologne in 1692, and which bears the title, ’The Loves of Anne of Austria, Consort of Louis xiii, with M. le C. D. R., the Real Father of Louis xiv, King of France; being a Minute Account of the Measures taken to give an Heir to the Throne of France, the Influences at Work to bring this to pass, and the Denoument of the Comedy’.

This libel ran through five editions, bearing date successively, 1692, 1693, 1696, 1722, and 1738.  In the title of the edition of 1696 the words “Cardinal de Richelieu” are inserted in place of the initials “C.  D. R.,” but that this is only a printer’s error everyone who reads the work will perceive.  Some have thought the three letters stood for Comte de Riviere, others for Comte de Rochefort, whose ‘Memoires’ compiled by Sandras de Courtilz supply these initials.  The author of the book was an Orange writer in the pay of William iii, and its object was, he says, “to unveil the great mystery of iniquity which hid the true origin of Louis xiv.”  He goes on to remark that “the knowledge of this fraud, although comparatively rare outside France, was widely spread within her borders.  The well-known coldness of