In the Bastille he was waited upon at the table and at his toilet by the governor, and no one else. He was allowed to go to mass, and a file of soldiers always accompanied him. Their muskets were loaded, and their matches were lighted; they were ordered to kill him instantly in case he spoke to any one, or attempted to tear off his mask. Who he was, and what he was, will probably never be known. No person of sufficient note to justify such precautions as were taken in his case was absent from the stage of history at that time. The general impression is, that he was an elder brother of Louis XIV., the fruit of an adulterous intrigue between Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham, or some other of those lovers for which Anne was famous. As he was born in wedlock, he could not have been dispossessed of his claim to the throne, if his existence had been admitted. Louis XIV. may have had some absurd prejudice against murdering his brother, though it was not the fashion of those days to be so very fastidious. A story was written by Dumas under the title of the Man in the Iron Mask, and it has been dramatized and given on the stage in Europe and America. The mystery which envelops the wearer of the mask gives an additional interest to all stories concerning him. [Sidenote: DESTRUCTION OF THE BASTILLE.] In talking about this historic individual, we have almost forgotten the Bastille. After the time of Louis XIV. the Bastille became a place of imprisonment, not alone of persons of honorable birth, but of common malefactors, and of persons of very low repute. The imprisonment of Beuzot, the king’s librarian, for obeying the king’s own directions, by the minister De Breteuil, brought to light the whole system of iniquity in which the prison was managed. On the 14th of July, 1789, the people arose in their fury, captured the Bastille, and ransacked and destroyed it. At the time of its capture only seven persons were found in its cells and dungeons, one of them having been there since his eleventh year. There was another who had been ten years in the Marguerite Islands, and thirty years in the Bastille; he appeared, on his liberation, bewildered and half idiotic, like a man waking from a sleep of forty years, and looking out upon a new world. The records of the prison reveal many cases as bad as this, and any lover of liberty, even to the smallest degree, cannot regret that the Bastille has passed away forever. [Illustration: DESTRUCTION OF THE BASTILLE, JULY 14, 1789.—ITS KEY PRESENTED BY LA FAYETTE TO GEORGE WASHINGTON, AND NOW AMONG THE RELICS AT MOUNT VERNON.] XXV. DIAMONDS AND DIAMOND MINES.