the 9 Pluviose, Year xi.,[537] the citizen Reth, the commissioner charged with organizing the national lottery in the twenty-seventh military division, addressed a long communication to the _Journal de Paris_[538] tending towards the same conclusion.[539] Thus we see that neither Roux-Fazillac, nor Delort, nor still less any writer of our own days, can claim to be first to have put forward the theory that Matthioly was the Man with the Iron Mask. However, Delort had the incontestable advantage over his numerous predecessors of furnishing a portion[540] of the official despatches relating to the negotiation, and also of those which were exchanged between Saint-Mars and the various Ministers after Matthioly’s incarceration. Since then, and in our own days, M. Camille Rousset, in his _Histoire de Louvois_, has in his turn disclosed the intrigue concocted by D’Estrades, the Duke of Mantua, and Matthioly; and contenting himself with merely giving his opinion on the Iron Mask, in a short note,[541] has declared that he sees in him the faithless Minister who betrayed Louis XIV. Depping, in his _Correspondance Administrative sous Louis XIV._, also adopts this view. But they have neither of them endeavoured--nor, indeed, did it belong to their subject--to establish what I shall term the perfect agreement and exact correspondence between the individual carried off from near Pignerol, May 2, 1679, and the prisoner who was interred in the Church of Saint Paul, November 20, 1703. Here is the knot of the question. We have just seen, and this, moreover, has been known since a long time, that Matthioly was carried off in 1679 by a French ambassador and taken violently to Pignerol. But it is no longer a question merely of this intrigue, which is simply a preliminary portion of the problem with which we are occupied. It is necessary to follow the Duke of Mantua’s Minister from prison to prison, and to ascertain, not only if he may not have been, but also if he could have been, any other than the mysterious prisoner conducted in 1698 by Saint-Mars from the Isles Sainte-Marguerite to the Bastille, where he died in 1703. Delort believed he had proved it. His conviction was profound, and to many persons his demonstration seemed irrefutable. On what grounds, then, did it rest, and how has a judicious writer of our own days entirely overthrown it?