But the originator was not to experience for long an unmixed joy. His conviction was most firmly rooted. “Perhaps nothing,” he says, “has ever appeared to me so very plainly. _I do not more clearly feel my existence than I recognize the Patriarch in all the features of the Iron Mask._”[281] All at once, the Minister of Foreign Affairs,[282] who had ordered researches to be made among his archives, caused the Chevalier de Taulès to be informed that an important Armenian personage had really been abducted from Constantinople and taken to France, but that as indisputable despatches established the fact that he was still in Turkey during the early part of 1706, he could not be the prisoner brought by Saint-Mars from the Isles Sainte-Marguerite to the Bastille on September 18, 1698, and who died in that fortress on November 19, 1703. Taulès at first accepted with resignation this truly startling revelation. His theory was completely overthrown, his reasoning destroyed, his discovery annihilated. He acknowledged it. He regretted not having sooner recalled that maxim which he had often heard repeated by D’Alembert himself, “In this world one must neither deny nor affirm anything.” He avowed his mistake, and the man of sense gracefully repaired the very excusable error committed by the historian. But his theory had become so profoundly and tenaciously impressed upon his brain, that he could not entirely rid himself of it. A germ remained which developed by degrees, and in a fashion which of itself deserves attention, independently of the interest which is inspired by everything that relates to the Man with the Iron Mask.