From the time that restrictions on the press were removed, hardly a day passed without the appearance of some new pamphlet on the Iron Mask.  Louis Dutens, in ‘Correspondence interceptee’ (12mo, 1789), revived the theory of Baron Heiss, supporting it by new and curious facts.  He proved that Louis xiv had really ordered one of the Duke of Mantua’s ministers to be carried off and imprisoned in Pignerol.  Dutens gave the name of the victim as Girolamo Magni.  He also quoted from a memorandum which by the wish of the Marquis de Castellane was drawn up by a certain Souchon, probably the man whom Papon questioned in 1778.  This Souchon was the son of a man who had belonged to the Free Company maintained in the islands in the time of Saint-Mars, and was seventy-nine years old.  This memorandum gives a detailed account of the abduction of a minister in 1679, who is styled a “minister of the Empire,” and his arrival as a masked prisoner at the islands, and states that he died there in captivity nine years after he was carried off.

Dutens thus divests the episode of the element of the marvellous with which Voltaire had surrounded it.  He called to his aid the testimony of the Duc de Choiseul, who, having in vain attempted to worm the secret of the Iron Mask out of Louis XV, begged Madame de Pompadour to try her hand, and was told by her that the prisoner was the minister of an Italian prince.  At the same time that Dutens wrote, “There is no fact in history better established than the fact that the Man in the Iron Mask was a minister of the Duke of Mantua who was carried off from Turin,” M. Quentin-Crawfurd was maintaining that the prisoner was a son of Anne of Austria; while a few years earlier Bouche, a lawyer, in his ’Essai sur l’Histoire de Provence’ (2 vols. 4to, 1785), had regarded this story as a fable invented by Voltaire, and had convinced himself that the prisoner was a woman.  As we see, discussion threw no light on the subject, and instead of being dissipated, the confusion became ever “worse confounded.”

In 1790 the ‘Memoires du Marechal de Richelieu’ appeared.  He had left his note-books, his library, and his correspondence to Soulavie.  The ‘Memoires’ are undoubtedly authentic, and have, if not certainty, at least a strong moral presumption in their favour, and gained the belief of men holding diverse opinions.  But before placing under the eyes of our readers extracts from them relating to the Iron Mask, let us refresh our memory by recalling two theories which had not stood the test of thorough investigation.

According to some Ms. notes left by M. de Bonac, French ambassador at Constantinople in 1724, the Armenian Patriarch Arwedicks, a mortal enemy of our Church and the instigator of the terrible persecutions to which the Roman Catholics were subjected, was carried off into exile at the request of the Jesuits by a French vessel, and confined in a prison whence there was no escape.  This prison was the fortress of Sainte-Marguerite, and from there he was taken to the Bastille, where he died.  The Turkish Government continually clamoured for his release till 1723, but the French Government persistently denied having taken any part in the abduction.