What improbabilities, what contradictions, what errors accumulated in a few pages! This unknown, whom no one, not even his doctor, has ever seen unmasked, has his face described as “handsome and noble;” Saint-Mars, named governor of the Bastille in 1690, and traversing the whole of France in order to fetch a prisoner, for whom during eight-and-twenty years another gaoler had sufficed; this mask with steel springs covering day and night the face of the unknown without affecting his health; this resignation which prevented his complaining of his position and which did not allow him to give any one a glimmering as to who he was, and this eagerness to throw out of his window silver plates on which he had written his name; this peculiar taste for fine linen, which Anne of Austria also possessed, and which revealed his origin; this haste on her part to confess her adultery to her enemy, the Cardinal de Richelieu; the Queen of France making only the Prime Minister the confidant of her confinement; and these two events, the birth and the abduction of a royal child, so well concealed that no contemporary memoir makes mention of them: such are the reflections which immediately suggest themselves on reading this story. No less improbable, and more romantic still, is the fictitious account given by the governor himself of the Man with the Iron Mask, and which Soulavie has introduced into the apocryphal memoirs of the Marshal de Richelieu.[19] “The unfortunate prince whom I have brought up and guarded to the end of my days,” says the governor,[20] “was born 5th September, 1638, at half-past eight in the evening, while the King was at supper. His brother, now reigning (Louis XIV.), was born at twelve in the morning, during his father’s dinner. But while the birth of the King was splendid and brilliant, that of his brother was sad and carefully concealed. Louis XIII. was warned by the midwife that the Queen would have a second delivery, and this double birth had been announced to him a long time previously by two herdsmen, who asserted in Paris that if the Queen was brought to bed of two Dauphins, it would be the consummation of the State’s misfortune. The Cardinal de Richelieu, consulted by the King, replied that, if the Queen should bring twin sons into the world it would be necessary to carefully hide the second, because he might one day wish to be King. Louis XIII. was consequently patient in his uncertainty. When the pains of the second labour commenced, he was overwhelmed with emotion.” The Queen is delivered of a second child “more delicate and more handsome than the first.” The midwife is charged with him, “and the Cardinal afterwards took upon himself the education of this Prince who was destined to replace the Dauphin if the latter should die. As for the shepherds who prophesied on the subject of Anne of Austria’s confinement, the governor did not hear them spoken of any more, whence he concludes that