We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Richelieu, compiled by his secretary the Abbé Soulavie, that Mdlle. de Valois, the Regent's daughter and at this date the mistress of Richelieu, consented, at the instigation of the latter, to prostitute herself to her father--tradition has it that the Regent was enamoured of his daughter--in order to get sight of an account of the Iron Mask drawn up by Saint-Mars. According to this story, which the author of the _Memoirs_ prints in its entirety, Louis XIV. was born at noon, and at half-past eight in the evening, while the king was at supper, the queen was brought to bed of a second son, who was put out of sight so as to avoid subsequent dissensions in the state. The Baron de Gleichen goes still farther. He is at the pains to prove that it was the true heir to the throne who was put out of sight, to the profit of a child of the queen and the cardinal. Having became masters of the situation at the death of the king, they substituted their son for the Dauphin, the substitution being facilitated by a strong likeness between the children. One sees at a glance the consequences of this theory, which nullifies the legitimacy of the last Bourbons. But the career of imagination was not yet to be checked. The legend came into full bloom under the first empire. Pamphlets then appeared in which the version of Baron de Gleichen was revived. Louis XIV. had been only a bastard, the son of foreigners; the lawful heir had been imprisoned at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, where he had married the daughter of one of his keepers. Of this marriage was born a child who, as soon as he was weaned, was sent to Corsica, and entrusted to a reliable person, as a child coming of "good stock," in Italian, _Buona-parte_. Of that child the Emperor was the direct descendant. The right of Napoleon I. to the throne of France established by the Iron Mask!--there is a discovery which the great Dumas missed. But, incredible as it seems, there were men who actually took these fables seriously. In a Vendéan manifesto circulated among the Chouans,[39] in Nivose of the year IX,[40] we read: "It is not wise for the Royalist party to rely on the assurances given by some emissaries of Napoleon, that he seized the throne only to restore the Bourbons; everything proves that he only awaits the general pacification to declare himself, and that he means to base his right on the birth of the children of the Iron Mask!" We shall not stay to refute the hypothesis which makes the Iron Mask a brother of Louis XIV. Marius Topin has already done so in the clearest possible manner. The notion, moreover, has long been abandoned. The last writers who adhered to it date from the revolutionary period.