journal, calls him 'Mr. de Marchiel.' Now, Saint-Mars often spells
Mattioli, 'Marthioly.'

This is the one strength of the argument for Mattioli's claims to
the Mask. M. Lair replies, 'Saint-Mars had a mania for burying
prisoners under fancy names,' and gives examples. One is only a
gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly
said that, as he is a State prisoner, his real name is not to be
given, so he is registered as Pierre Maret (others read Navet,
'Peter Turnip'). If Saint-Mars, looking about for a false name for
Dauger's burial register, hit on Marsilly (the name of Dauger's old
master), that MIGHT be miswritten Marchialy. However it be, the age
of the Mask is certainly falsified; the register gives 'about forty-
five years old.' Mattioli would have been sixty-three; Dauger
cannot have been under fifty-three.

There the case stands. If Mattioli died in April 1694, he cannot be
the Man in the Iron Mask. Of Dauger's death we find no record,
unless he was the Man in the Iron Mask, and died, in 1703, in the
Bastille. He was certainly, in 1669 and 1688, at Pignerol and at
Sainte-Marguerite, the centre of the mystery about some great
prisoner, a Marshal of France, the Duc de Beaufort, or a son of
Oliver Cromwell. Mattioli was no mystery, no secret. Dauger is so
mysterious that probably the secret of his mystery was unknown to
himself. By 1701, when obscure wretches were shut up with the Mask,
the secret, whatever its nature, had ceased to be of moment. The
captive was now the mere victim of cruel routine. But twenty years
earlier, Saint-Mars had said that Dauger 'takes things easily,
resigned to the will of God and the King.'