[12] About a year ago (_Moniteur_ of September 30, 1868) _àpropos_ of the fine collection of unpublished documents given to the world by M. Ravaisson, under the title of _Archives de la Bastille_, M. de Lescure expressed a wish to see this question definitively settled. I had been occupying myself with it for a considerable period, though not without having satisfied myself that the learned conservator of the Arsenal Archives contemplated no work on the Man with the Iron Mask, in continuation of his publication, not yet brought down to the epoch of the entry into the Bastille of this famous prisoner. Among contemporary authors, besides M. Paul Lacroix (Bibliophile Jacob), who in 1840 supported the theory that made Fouquet the celebrated prisoner, M. Jules Loiseleur, in the _Revue Contemporaine_ of July 31, 1867, and M. de Bellecombe, in the _Investigateur_ of May, 1868, have maintained, as the result of their labours, that the Man with the Iron Mask was an unknown and obscure spy, whose name would never be ascertained. We shall recur to the two studies of MM. Lacroix and Loiseleur, of which one is very ingenious, and the other exhibits a penetrating sagacity, while both display a varied and trustworthy erudition. CHAPTER I. Theory which supposes the Man with the Iron Mask to have been a Brother of Louis XIV.--Voltaire the first to support this Theory in his _Siècle de Louis XIV._, and in the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_--Certain Improbabilities in his Story--Account of the Man with the Iron Mask introduced by Soulavie into the _Mémoires Apocryphes du Maréchal de Richelieu_--The three different Hypotheses of the Theory which makes the Man with the Iron Mask a Brother of Louis XIV.