The name of the town is Pinerolo. The name of Pinerolo, though not so widely known as that of Sedan, is yet linked for ever with one of the most tragically famous of all personalities—that of the “Man in the Iron Mask,” Hercules Anthony Mattioli, as he has now at last been proved irrefutably to have been by Monsieur Funck-Brentano in that gentleman’s luminous “Legends and Archives of the Bastille,” in which at one blow the writer destroys the pretensions of the several other candidates for that mournful honour. Very few riddles, I should think, if any at all, have so constantly occupied the minds of those interested in historical curiosities during the last hundred and fifty years as has done that of the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV; rarely, if ever, has any question been so hotly disputed by one generation and another of antiquarian scholars. But perhaps the most fascinating work on the subject is an English one, that of Mr. Tighe Hopkins,[25] which I would cordially recommend to all lovers of historical writings. The whole episode of the “Man in the Iron Mask” furnishes as consummate an instance as any on record of the atrocious vengeance of one human being upon another; if ever Louis XIV was unworthy of his title of “the most Christian King” it was in his unmerciful cruelty towards the man who had inflicted upon him the most crushing diplomatic defeat of his whole reign, that same Count Mattioli. It was for making him ridiculous in the eyes of all who had any knowledge of the affair, by destroying his pet political scheme in regard to Italy, that King Louis condemned Mattioli to life-long imprisonment and to total separation from all that could make his existence endurable—the man’s religion alone excepted. So that, for twenty-four years, from May 2, 1679, to the hour of his death, which took place about ten o’clock in the night of November 19, 1703, the unhappy Italian endured the living death of a man deprived of all knowledge of those he had loved and left behind him, and who on their side had long assumed him to be dead in very fact. Neither his wife nor his father ever learned what became of Mattioli after his disappearance on that fatal 2d of May.