Of the principal personages in whom people have seen the Man with the Iron Mask, we have first got rid of those imaginary beings, those pretended brothers of Louis XIV., whom it was necessary to banish to the domain of fiction. Afterwards entering into that of reality, we have studied the lives of several princes whom people have also covered with the mysterious mask,[336] but whom we have shown as dying elsewhere than at the Bastille; as Vermandois before Courtray, Monmouth on the scaffold, and Beaufort at the siege of Candia. These accounts have been followed by the story of a great State prisoner under Louis XIV., in whose favour very strong presumptions have been advanced, but who was incarcerated neither at Pignerol nor at the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, and who ended his days in liberty. Let us now penetrate with Saint-Mars into Pignerol, and among the individuals confided to his care, let us seek which of them, confined for a long time in this fortress, next at the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, and lastly conducted to the Bastille, where he died on November 19, 1703, is really the Man with the Iron Mask. At the entrance to the valleys of the Chisone and the Lemina, on the slope of one of those hills in which by insensible gradations the great chain of the Alps terminates on the side of Piedmont, there arose in the form of an amphitheatre a little town which, from the twelfth century, the Princes of Savoy had caused to be fortified for the safety of their States, the approach to which it defended. At the summit of the hill, formerly covered with a forest of pines, whence the town received its name, a citadel, surrounded by fortifications, had been constructed, which was commanded on the north alone by the mountain of Sainte-Brigitte, soon to be itself covered with redoubts and entrenchments. Having thus become a military position of the greatest importance, and, as the key of Italy, able in turns to check or favour foreign invasions, the position of Pignerol, coveted by the Kings of France, and so precious to the Dukes of Piedmont, was long disputed by arms, or claimed by diplomacy. Captured in 1532 by Francis I. from the too feeble Duke Charles III., restored by Henry III. in 1574 to Philibert-Emmanuel,[337] attacked unsuccessfully in 1595 by the Duke de Lesdiguières, it ended in 1630 by falling into the power of Cardinal de Richelieu, who took possession of it at the head of 40,000 men, and placed it under the rule of the King of France, to whom it was destined to belong until the disasters of the latter years of Louis XIV. Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louvois contributed to render its fortifications formidable. To-day there remain only a few ruins of them, near to the cathedral of Saint-Maurice, whence there is a charming view.[338] Very different, however, was the appearance of Pignerol in 1664, the period at which Saint-Mars proceeded thither to take possession of the donjon of the citadel, converted into a State