Assuredly, the interest which Louis XIV. had in hiding the existence of such a prisoner as Avedick, the indispensability there was of shrouding from every eye the victim of so enormous a crime against the law of nations, the necessity, too, of removing from the ex-Patriarch every means of informing the Ottoman Porte of the country where he was detained, the clamour which his disappearance had caused throughout the entire East, the precarious situation in which the King of France then found himself, constrained as he was to treat Turkey with consideration, were all so many arguments that crowded upon the mind in favour of Taulès’ opinion. This theory presented, moreover, the advantage of explaining several circumstances, true or supposed, in the life of Saint-Mars’ mysterious prisoner. For instance, the silence almost constantly observed by him, which caused it to be continually said that he was condemned to it under pain of death, was accounted for by the Armenian Patriarch’s ignorance of our language. Again, that strange accent noticed by the surgeon Nélaton, in a visit made by him to the Bastille,[280] and which struck him in the few syllables articulated by the prisoner, finds its natural explanation in Avedick. The famous reply of Louis XV. to his valet-de-chambre, Laborde, who questioned him about the Man with the Iron Mask, “The imprisonment of this unfortunate individual has wronged nobody but himself,” applied sufficiently exactly to the Patriarch. Lastly, in default of those official despatches, which, to-day, a sovereign and indispensable proof, alone allow one to erect a theory upon a firm basis, the suggestion of Taulès united in its favour several strong presumptions, and did not at the outset meet with any fundamental objection.