We now approach the question whether the prince who thus became the Iron Mask was an illegitimate brother or a twin-brother of Louis xiv.  The first was maintained by M. Quentin-Crawfurd; the second by Abbe Soulavie in his ‘Memoires du Marechal Duc de Richelieu’ (London, 1790).  In 1783 the Marquis de Luchet, in the ‘Journal des Gens du Monde’ (vol. iv.  No. 23, p. 282, et seq.), awarded to Buckingham the honour of the paternity in dispute.  In support of this, he quoted the testimony of a lady of the house of Saint-Quentin who had been a mistress of the minister Barbezieux, and who died at Chartres about the middle of the eighteenth century.  She had declared publicly that Louis xiv had consigned his elder brother to perpetual imprisonment, and that the mask was necessitated by the close resemblance of the two brothers to each other.

The Duke of Buckingham, who came to France in 1625, in order to escort Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis xiii, to England, where she was to marry the Prince of Wales, made no secret of his ardent love for the queen, and it is almost certain that she was not insensible to his passion.  An anonymous pamphlet, ‘La Conference du Cardinal Mazarin avec le Gazetier’ (Brussels, 1649), says that she was infatuated about him, and allowed him to visit her in her room.  She even permitted him to take off and keep one of her gloves, and his vanity leading him to show his spoil, the king heard of it, and was vastly offended.  An anecdote, the truth of which no one has ever denied, relates that one day Buckingham spoke to the queen with such passion in the presence of her lady-in-waiting, the Marquise de Senecey, that the latter exclaimed, “Be silent, sir, you cannot speak thus to the Queen of France!” According to this version, the Man in the Iron Mask must have been born at latest in 1637, but the mention of any such date would destroy the possibility of Buckingham’s paternity; for he was assassinated at Portsmouth on September 2nd, 1628.

After the taking of the Bastille the masked prisoner became the fashionable topic of discussion, and one heard of nothing else.  On the 13th of August 1789 it was announced in an article in a journal called ‘Loisirs d’un Patriote francais’, which was afterwards published anonymously as a pamphlet, that the publisher had seen, among other documents found in the Bastille, a card bearing the unintelligible number “64389000,” and the following note:  “Fouquet, arriving from Les Iles Sainte-Marguerite in an iron mask.”  To this there was, it was said, a double signature, viz.  “XXX,” superimposed on the name “Kersadion.”  The journalist was of opinion that Fouquet had succeeded in making his escape, but had been retaken and condemned to pass for dead, and to wear a mask henceforward, as a punishment for his attempted evasion.  This tale made some impression, for it was remembered that in the Supplement to the ‘Siecle de Louis xiv’ it was stated that Chamillart had said that “the Iron Mask was a man who knew all the secrets of M. Fouquet.”  But the existence of this card was never proved, and we cannot accept the story on the unsupported word of an anonymous writer.