The story of Matthioly’s imprisonment derives all its interest from the supposition that he may possibly be the Man with the Iron Mask. Of the life of the captive in his prison, we have nothing or almost nothing.[527] Louis XIV. has succeeded in surrounding with uncertainty and mystery the punishment of the audacious man who had deceived him. A single attempt, if not to corrupt, at least to interest in his lot one of his gaolers, the Sieur de Blainvilliers;[528] by turns the calm of the prisoner resigned to the definitive loss of his liberty, or the momentary madness of the wretched being separated for ever from all that is dear to him; a few efforts, renewed after long intervals, to write and make known his name outside the walls within which he is confined: this is all that we know, all that we shall ever know of Matthioly’s captivity. But what prisons did he successively inhabit? Where did he drag out his existence, and, above all things, where did he terminate it? Ought we to behold in him the Man with the Iron Mask? Roux-Fazillac and Delort are generally considered as having been the first to reveal, the one in 1800, and the other in a more complete manner in 1825, the existence and abduction of Count Matthioly. This is a grave error, and we must go back long before these two writers in order to find the first traces and the first revelations of the diplomatic intrigue relative to Casale. In 1682 there appeared at Cologne a political pamphlet[529] in which the whole negotiation was disclosed, and in which the Abbé d’Estrades and Matthioly, Giuliani and Pinchesne, D’Asfeld, Catinat, and the Duke of Mantua figured. In August, 1687, a work, published at Leyden with the title of _Histoire Abrégée de l’Europe_,[530] gave, under the head of Mantua, a French translation of an Italian letter which denounced the abduction of Matthioly. In 1749 the famous Muratori related, in his _Annali d’Italia_,[531] the story of the Casale negotiation, and the abduction of the principal agent in this intrigue. In the part of the _Journal Encyclopédique_[532] for August 15, 1770, was a letter from Baron d’Heiss, ex-captain in the regiment of Alsace, in which the whole of this affair was made known; and there is a copy of this letter in the number of the _Journal de Paris_[533] for December 22, 1779. In 1786, the Italian Fantuzzi summarized in his _Notizie degli Scrittori Bolognesi_,[534] the accounts already published on this subject. A similar opinion that Matthioly was the Man with the Iron Mask, was, in 1789, supported by the Chevalier de B----, in a work with the title of _Londres, Correspondance interceptée_.[535] On November 26, 1795, M. de Chambrier, ex-Minister of Prussia to the Court of Turin, read, before the Division of Belles-Lettres of the Academy of Berlin,[536] a memoir in which “he endeavoured to establish, by tradition alone, that the Iron Mask and Ercole Matthioly were one and the same person.” Lastly,