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 courtyard of the Bastille or to see a physician without his mask, it must have been lest his too striking resemblance to someone should be remarked; he could show his tongue but not his face.  As regards his age, he himself told the apothecary at the Bastille, a few days before his death, that he thought he was about sixty; this I have often heard from a son-in-law to this apothecary, M. Marsoban, surgeon to Marshal Richelieu, and afterwards to the regent, the Duc d’Orleans.  The writer of this article knows perhaps more on this subject than Pere Griffet.  But he has said his say.”

This article in the ‘Questions on the Encyclopaedia’ was followed by some remarks from the pen of the publisher, which are also, however, attributed by the publishers of Kelh to Voltaire himself.  The publisher, who sometimes calls himself the author, puts aside without refutation all the theories advanced, including that of Baron Heiss, and says he has come to the conclusion that the Iron Mask was, without doubt, a brother and an elder brother of Louis XIV, by a lover of the queen.