Voltaire added a few further details which had been given him by M. de
Bernaville, the successor of M. de Saint-Mars, and by an old physician of
the Bastille who had attended the prisoner whenever his health required a
doctor, but who had never seen his face, although he had "often seen his
tongue and his body." He also asserted that M. de Chamillart was the
last minister who was in the secret, and that when his son-in-law,
Marshal de la Feuillade, besought him on his knees, de Chamillart being
on his deathbed, to tell him the name of the Man in the Iron Mask, the
minister replied that he was under a solemn oath never to reveal the
secret, it being an affair of state. To all these details, which the
marshal acknowledges to be correct, Voltaire adds a remarkable note:
"What increases our wonder is, that when the unknown captive was sent to
the Iles Sainte-Marguerite no personage of note disappeared from the
European stage."

The story of the Comte de Vermandois and the blow was treated as an
absurd and romantic invention, which does not even attempt to keep within
the bounds of the possible, by Baron C. (according to P. Marchand, Baron
Crunyngen) in a letter inserted in the 'Bibliotheque raisonnee des
Ouvrages des Savants de d'Europe', June 1745. The discussion was revived
somewhat later, however, and a few Dutch scholars were supposed to be
responsible for a new theory founded on history; the foundations proving
somewhat shaky, however,--a quality which it shares, we must say, with
all the other theories which have ever been advanced.

According to this new theory, the masked prisoner was a young foreign
nobleman, groom of the chambers to Anne of Austria, and the real father
of Louis XIV. This anecdote appears first in a duodecimo volume printed
by Pierre Marteau at Cologne in 1692, and which bears the title, 'The
Loves of Anne of Austria, Consort of Louis XIII, with M. le C. D. R., the