distinguished him by all kinds of civilities, asked him frequently to table, and at last invited him to join a large hunting party two or three leagues outside Turin.  They set out together, but at a short distance from the city were surrounded by a dozen horsemen, who carried off the secretary, ‘disguised him, put a mask on him, and took him to Pignerol.’  He was not kept long in this fortress, as it was ’too near the Italian frontier, and although he was carefully guarded it was feared that the walls would speak’; so he was transferred to the Iles Sainte-Marguerite, where he is at present in the custody of M. de Saint-Mars.

This theory, of which much was heard later, did not at first excite much attention.  What is certain is that the Duke of Mantua’s secretary, by name Matthioli, was arrested in 1679 through the agency of Abbe d’Estrade and M. de Catinat, and taken with the utmost secrecy to Pignerol, where he was imprisoned and placed in charge of M. de Saint-Mars.  He must not, however, be confounded with the Man in the Iron Mask.

Catinat says of Matthioli in a letter to Louvois “No one knows the name of this knave.”

Louvois writes to Saint-Mars:  “I admire your patience in waiting for an order to treat such a rogue as he deserves, when he treats you with disrespect.”

Saint-Mars replies to the minister:  “I have charged Blainvilliers to show him a cudgel and tell him that with its aid we can make the froward meek.”

Again Louvois writes:  “The clothes of such people must be made to last three or four years.”

This cannot have been the nameless prisoner who was treated with such consideration, before whom Louvois stood bare-headed, who was supplied with fine linen and lace, and so on.

Altogether, we gather from the correspondence of Saint-Mars that the unhappy man alluded to above was confined along with a mad Jacobin, and at last became mad himself, and succumbed to his misery in 1686.

Voltaire, who was probably the first to supply such inexhaustible food for controversy, kept silence and took no part in the discussions.  But when all the theories had been presented to the public, he set about refuting them.  He made himself very merry, in the seventh edition of ’Questions sur l’Encyclopedie distibuees en forme de Dictionnaire (Geneva, 1791), over the complaisance attributed to Louis xiv in acting as police-sergeant and gaoler for James ii, William iii, and Anne, with all of whom he was at war.  Persisting still in taking 1661 or 1662 as the date when the incarceration of the masked prisoner began, he attacks the opinions advanced by Lagrange-Chancel and Pere Griffet, which they had drawn from the anonymous ’Memoires secrets pour servir a l’Histoire de Perse’.  “Having thus dissipated all these illusions,” he says, “let us now consider who the masked prisoner was, and how old he was when he died.  It is evident that if he was never allowed to walk in the