His wife graciously made use of her influence at court to procure a renewal of the pension of the widow Scarron, only to see her ultimately appointed guardian of the king's children and succeed her in her position, as Madame de Maintenon. "Violating all laws, civil and religious," says Duruy, "the king placed on a level with the princes of the blood the princes _legitimized_. He forced the court to respect the one as equal to the other; and the public morality received a blow from which it was very slow to recover." These lessons were not lost, and the annals of the nobility are full of scandalous examples. The ducs d'Orléans and Vendôme were addicted to infamous debauchery; the Duc d'Antin was caught, _flagrante delicto_, in theft; drunkenness and gambling were prevalent at court, the Grand Prieur de Vendôme boasted that he had not gone to bed sober one night in forty years. Pascal, discussing the privileges of the nobles and the kings, said to them boldly: "You are kings only of concupiscence." This great court, the most brilliant in Europe, "sweated hypocrisy," said Saint-Simon. It may be remarked, that, in addition to the very frequent disfigurement by small-pox, from which even the king was not entirely free, there was a remarkable prevalence of deformity among the families of the aristocracy. "There was scarcely one of which some member, male or female, had not a curved spine, a distorted limb, or other malformation; owing, most likely, to the common practice of closely swathing the limbs of infants, and of confiding young children to the charge of careless and ignorant nurses, for the first three or four years of their lives." Two of the mysteries of this reign which have long furnished themes for discussion have lately been solved by the ingenuity of modern research. The "Man in the Iron Mask," guarded in the Bastile "for forty-two years," treated with the utmost consideration and buried under a false name, it now appears was confined there only five years, from September, 1698, to his death in November, 1703, shared his cell at different periods with other prisoners, a police spy and a lackey, and was buried without any attempt at mystery! The original register of his death, reproduced before its destruction among other archives of the city of Paris in 1871, gives his name as _Marchioly_, though it had been read _Marchialy_ by all the commentators (the tail of the o being really a trifle too high for an a), and it is now considered settled that this signified Mattioli, in the uncertain orthography of the times, Count Hercule-Antoine Mattioli, secretary of the Duke of Mantua, whom Louis XIV had caused to be arrested on Italian soil, in defiance of international law, for having betrayed the secrets of the negotiations relative to the acquisition of Casal.