it will be necessary to take up my residence in this place in order to pass the winter there with the whole of my family and the bears, it will take time for me to accommodate myself as well as possible. What consoles me is that I shall have the honour of being near to the States of their Royal Highnesses, to whom I am as much a debtor as a very respectful and humble servant.” Consequently, Matthioly was not the prisoner who died at Exiles, the commencement of January, 1687.[575] He was therefore left at Pignerol, where we shall soon meet with him again in charge of the Sieur de Villebois. Louis XIV. at first had the idea of having him removed to Exiles, as is proved by Louvois’ despatch of June 9, 1681, the last sentence of which we have quoted. But it is none the less certain that this first design was abandoned, and that Matthioly was left at Pignerol. There is also another remarkable expression in Saint-Mars’ letter. He writes, “I shall also have in custody two crows” (_merles_). Now even in our own time the word “crow” (_merle_) is applied only to common and insignificant persons, of as little notoriety as importance. Up to the present, however, it is in one of these two “crows” that people have seen the Man with the Iron Mask. Is it objected that one proof alone is not sufficient to establish the entire obscurity of these two prisoners of Saint Mars? But this is confirmed also by all we have said concerning the treatment of which Saint-Mars’ prisoners at Pignerol were the objects, with the exception of Fouquet, Lauzun, and Matthioly.[576] Is additional testimony required? “You can have clothes made for your prisoners,” writes Louvois to Saint-Mars at Exiles, December 14, 1681; “_but it is necessary that the clothes of people like these should last three or four years_.”[577] As usual, the Minister’s orders were punctually executed by his representative, and when Saint-Mars left Exiles to proceed to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, he wrote to Versailles “that the prisoner’s bed was so old and worn out” (we have previously seen that one of the prisoners was still alive in 1687, the other having died in the early part of January of the same year), “as well as everything he made use of, both table-linen and furniture, that it was not worth while to bring them here; they only sold for thirteen crowns.”[578] Assuredly if this is the Man with the Iron Mask, and if he had that delicate taste for fine linen, of which so much has been said, he must have found considerable difficulty in gratifying it.