He has communicated this impression, thus received, to other officers of the Bastille. The mysterious memory of it is at first perpetuated within the walls of this formidable fortress. It would still have been talked about during the first half of the eighteenth century, when many men of letters were imprisoned there. These last have certainly heard the tale which, after its passage from one mouth to another, still contained a little of history and already much of legend. They have preserved profoundly engraven on their minds this story, so much more striking because it was told them on the very scene of the events, and, once liberated, they have spread it abroad amongst the public, and soon throughout the whole world. Imagination, vividly excited, has had free play. Various explanations have been proposed, supported, and contested. Great writers have taken part in this controversy, and have lent it the lustre of their talents. With the view of stimulating public curiosity, people have amused themselves with adding to it much that was extraordinary and marvellous, and thus the story of the Man with the Iron Mask has by degrees left the grave domain of history to enter altogether into the seductive regions of fiction. Next, various episodes have been successively imagined and added as so many embellishments to the life of the romantic prisoner: such as--Louvois’ visit to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite; the silver dish thrown out of the window and recovered by a fisherman, luckily for himself, uneducated; and especially the transmission of the gloomy secret “from King to King, and to no other.”[634] Louvois, as we have already said,[635] never went to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, and it was a Protestant clergyman who threw out of the window a tin dish, covered with a few lines of writing. As to the transmission of the secret, which thus became, to a certain extent, an attribute of royalty, nothing proves that this ever took place when it was possible, and it is indisputable that it has not always been so. No doubt Louis XIV., on his death-bed, had a private conversation with the Duke d’Orléans.[636] That after having conversed with him concerning grave affairs of State, he should have spoken to him of the only two abductions of foreigners committed during his reign--those of Avedick and Matthioly; that at this supreme hour this King, who did not at all regret the persecutions inflicted upon his own subjects, because, even at his last moment, he was artfully made to consider them necessary for religion; that this King, I say, should have understood, at such a time, that to carry off an Armenian Patriarch, and to cause a foreign Minister to disappear, were two extreme acts, and manifest violations of international law; and that, acting under this impression, he should have recounted them to his nephew, may be admitted. Afterwards, the question of the Man with the Iron Mask having been suddenly