But in spite of these very real alleviations, it would be absurd to pretend that the prisoners were in general reconciled to their incarceration. Nothing is a consolation for the loss of liberty. How many poor wretches, in their despair, have dashed their heads against the thick walls while wife and children and concerns of the utmost gravity were summoning them from without! The Bastille was the cause of ruin to many; within its walls were shed tears which were never dried. An eighteenth-century writer thus defined the state prison: "A bastille is any house solidly built, hermetically sealed, and diligently guarded, where any person, of whatever rank, age, or sex, may enter without knowing why, remain without knowing how long, hoping to leave it, but not knowing how." These lines, written by an apologist for the old state prison, contain its condemnation, without appeal, before the modern mind. CHAPTER IV. THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. For two centuries no question has excited public opinion more than that of the Man in the Iron Mask. The books written on the subject would fill a library. People despaired of ever lifting the veil. "The story of the Iron Mask," says Michelet, "will probably remain for ever obscure," and Henri Martin adds: "History has no right to pronounce judgment on what will never leave the domain of conjecture." To-day, the doubt no longer exists. The problem is solved. Before disclosing the solution which criticism has unanimously declared correct, we propose to transcribe the scanty authentic documents that we possess on the masked man, and then to state the principal solutions which have been proposed, before arriving at the true solution. 1. THE DOCUMENTS. _The Register of the Bastille._--To begin with, let us quote the text which is the origin and foundation of all the works published on the question of the Iron Mask. [Illustration: Note in Du Junca's Journal regarding the entrance to the Bastille (September 18, 1698) of the Man in the Iron Mask.] Etienne du Junca, king's lieutenant at the Bastille, in a journal which he began to keep on October 2, 1690, when he entered upon his office--a sort of register in which he recorded day by day the details concerning the arrival of the prisoners--writes, under date September 18, 1698, these lines,[37] which the popular legend has rendered memorable:--