How much more would this adoration, of which Monmouth had rendered himself unworthy by his flight, have nevertheless embellished his memory, and, without absolving him, have made of him a legendary hero; how much more striking still would it have appeared, if, as Saint-Foix believed, he of whom the poets sang in their ballads, of whom the peasants talked by their firesides in the evening, and whose speedy return the people were awaiting, had been, at that very instant, confined in a prison in the remotest parts of the Alps, his face hidden from the gaze of man, unknown to all save a gaoler as rigorous as he was incorruptible? When the stage took possession of the subject of the Man with the Iron Mask, it preferred to adopt the version which makes him a brother of Louis XIV., as being the most interesting one. The supposition that Monmouth was the Man with the Iron Mask would have been much more dramatic, because, while in some points touching upon reality, it would, on the one hand, have allowed of representing a whole nation plunged in grief and filled with expectation, and on the other, the conquered of Sedgemoor following Saint-Mars from prison to prison, and after having almost attained a throne, being obscurely interred in the evening by two turnkeys of the Bastille! But however thrilling this accumulation of misfortune would have been, history cannot admit its truth. Whatever Saint-Foix may have thought--whatever the English common people may have believed--Monmouth died on the scaffold, July 15, 1685. Authentic despatches, signed by Louis XIV.’s ambassador,[169] furnish proof of it; and this monarch, far from having been an accomplice, as has been said, of an abduction of the Duke, and far from having consented to act as his keeper, received day by day exact news of the early progress of his revolt, and of his defeat, capture, and death. In these despatches, penned by an impartial and perfectly independent witness, and which appeared destined never to be divulged, there is nothing that allows us to suppose that a pardon was granted, but we find in them instead irrefragable proof of James II.’s inflexible severity. Almost to his last moment Monmouth showed himself but little worthy of the regret which he was to leave behind him. He saw his wife, but without emotion, and thought only of again beseeching his life from the Earl of Clarendon, who accompanied her. On the evening of Monday, July 14, he learned that he would be led to death the next morning. At once turning pale, he remained for a long time silent, and the first word that he could utter was a demand for a respite. He repeated this in several letters addressed to James II., as well as to the most considerable persons of the court, and desired to see the King once more, a request which was refused him.[170] When he had lost all hope he became shamefully depressed: to agitation, and to the efforts exerted up to that moment to save his life, succeeded a gloomy silence; to cowardly