It appears to have been very entertaining to St. Mars and his lieutenants, to witness the ravings of these two unhappy maniacs; and there are probably many gaolers who would experience the same feelings upon a similar occasion: what cannot, however, but strike us with horror, is the fact that there was found a minister, nay, a king, and that king one who piqued himself upon professing the Christian religion,[102] to sanction such a proceeding. It is indeed most painful to think, that power should have been placed in the hands of men, who could abuse it by such needless acts of cruelty. We have no farther particulars of the state of Matthioli’s mind: but, being more than half-mad at the time he was placed with the Jacobin, who was quite so, it is probable the company of the latter increased and perpetuated his phrensy. It is even not impossible that such may have been the intention of St. Mars, as, while Matthioli continued insane, it was of course more reasonable and plausible to continue the extraordinary rigour of his confinement. Nor were mental sufferings the only ones which the barbarity of Lewis and his minister obliged Matthioli to undergo. We have before seen, from the letters of Louvois to St. Mars, that the latter was desired generally to treat Matthioli with great severity; afterwards he writes to him upon the subject of his clothing, “You must make the clothes of such sort of people as he is last three or four years.”[103] Some idea may also be formed of the kind of furniture of his dungeon, from the circumstance, mentioned by St. Mars, that, upon the removal of his prisoner from the fort of Exiles to the Island of St. Margaret in 1687, his bed had been sold, because it was so old and broken as not to be worth the carriage; and that all his furniture and linen being added to it, the sum produced by the sale was only thirteen crowns.[104] It may be worth remarking here that the letter of Louvois, respecting Matthioli’s clothes, is a sufficient answer to the absurd stories with regard to the richness of the lace, &c. worn by the Iron Mask; and the relations from St. Mars himself of his threats to his prisoner, of even corporal punishment, no less disprove the erroneous accounts of the extraordinary respect shown to him.