everything given to him that he wanted. He took the Communion
masked; was very devout, and read perpetually.'

On October 22, 1711, the Princess writes that the Mask was an
English nobleman, mixed up in the plot of the Duke of Berwick
against William III.--Fenwick's affair is meant. He was imprisoned
and masked that the Dutch usurper might never know what had become
of him.*

* Op. cit. 98, note 1.

The legend was now afloat in society. The sub-commandant of the
Bastille from 1749 to 1787, Chevalier, declared, obviously on the
evidence of tradition, that all the Mask's furniture and clothes
were destroyed at his death, lest they might yield a clue to his
identity. Louis XV. is said to have told Madame de Pompadour that
the Mask was 'the minister of an Italian prince.' Louis XVI. told
Marie Antoinette (according to Madame de Campan) that the Mask was a
Mantuan intriguer, the same person as Louis XV. indicated. Perhaps
he was, it is one of two possible alternatives. Voltaire, in the
first edition of his 'Siecle de Louis XIV.,' merely spoke of a
young, handsome, masked prisoner, treated with the highest respect
by Louvois, the Minister of Louis XIV. At last, in 'Questions sur
l'Encyclopedie' (second edition), Voltaire averred that the Mask was
the son of Anne of Austria and Mazarin, an elder brother of Louis
XIV. Changes were rung on this note: the Mask was the actual King,
Louis XIV. was a bastard. Others held that he was James, Duke of
Monmouth--or Moliere! In 1770 Heiss identified him with Mattioli,
the Mantuan intriguer, and especially after the appearance of the
book by Roux Fazaillac, in 1801, that was the generally accepted