We thus find, in the two despatches sent to Saint-Mars on the eve of his departure for the Bastille, at that very important moment when he is about to commence his journey across France, these same characteristic words:--“Your old prisoner.” This is not all. What I have termed the perfect agreement, the exact correspondence between the prisoner who entered the Bastille, September 18, 1698, and Matthioly, is rendered more complete and more exact still by the only document concerning the Man with the Iron Mask, besides despatches, which has as yet been admitted without controversy--viz., Dujonca’s Journal. If we refer to Chapter XIII.[622] of the present work we shall perceive that he too terms the prisoner who accompanied Saint-Mars “_his old prisoner_ whom he had at Pignerol.” At the Bastille he was called merely the “prisoner from Provence,”[623] because it was in Provence that he was confided to Saint-Mars, and Dujonca is none the less exact in terming him the old prisoner from Pignerol, since Matthioly had been two years at Pignerol under the care of Saint-Mars. Of all the captives of whom Saint-Mars was the gaoler, Matthioly is thus the only one who reconciles the two apparently contradictory features of the Man with the Iron Mask, whom an undoubted tradition represents as having been brought to Saint-Mars at the Islands, and whom indisputable documents show to have also been imprisoned at Pignerol. The general error has been to represent the Iron Mask as going from Pignerol to Exiles, the name of which was never mentioned by Dujonca, and not to pay sufficient attention to this fact, viz., that tradition as well as rare contemporary documents assign only three prisons, and not four, to the mysterious captive: Pignerol, the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, and the Bastille. FOOTNOTES: [593] Unpublished despatch:--Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, section Savoy, 68. [594] Unpublished despatch from the Abbé Morel to Louis XIV.:--Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, section Mantua, 15. [595] Unpublished despatch from Louis XIV. to the Abbé Morel:--Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, section Mantua, 15. [596] Unpublished despatch from the Abbé Morel to Louis XIV.:--_Ibid._ [597] Unpublished despatch from Louvois to Villebois, March 30, 1682:--Archives of the Ministry of War. [598] _Ibid._, April 13, 1682. [599] _Ibid._, December 11, 1685. [600] Here followed “de chambre,” but these two words have been erased. [601] Unpublished despatches from Louvois to Villebois of May 1, 1684, and November 26, 1689. [602] Unpublished despatch from Barbézieux to Laprade, July 28 1692. [603] _Ibid._, December 27, 1693. [604] Letter from Tessé to Barbézieux, December 1693:--Archives of the Ministry of War, 1271. Given by M. Rousset, vol. iv. p. 531. [605] Unpublished despatches from Barbézieux to Laprade, March 20, 1694, and from Louis XIV. to the Marquis d’Herleville, March 19, 1694.