ution,
should be seized, and added that it would be no harm if he was killed.
His son commissioned Grandval to murder William III.

The traitor of Casale met with a more terrible fate than a pistol shot
or the stroke of a dagger. He suddenly disappeared, and no man ever
looked upon his face again. His existence was forgotten, and when he
died, long after, nobody knew who he was. In the dismal register of
the dead who died in the Bastille he is entered under the name of
Marchiali. Fifty years later he began to fix the attention of the
world, and became a fascinating enigma. For Marchiali means Mattioli,
who was the man in the Iron Mask. That is, of course, there was no man
in the Iron Mask; the material was more merciful than that; and the
name which has become so famous is as false as the one in which the
victim of tyranny was buried.

Whilst Lewis pursued his career of annexation, the empire was disabled
by war with the Turks and by troubles in Hungary. In 1683 the grand
vizier besieged Vienna, and would have taken it but for the imperial
allies, the Elector of Saxony, the Duke of Lorraine, and the King of
Poland. After the relief of the capital they carried the war down the
Danube, and Leopold was once more the head of a powerful military
empire. It was too late to interfere with French conquests.
Luxemburg was added to the series in 1684, and an armistice of twenty
years practically, though not finally, sanctioned what had been done
since Nimeguen. When the four great fortresses had become
French--Lille, Besancon, Strasburg, and Luxemburg--and when the empire
succumbed, recognising all these acts of entirely unprovoked
aggression, Lewis attained the highest level of his reign. He owed it
to his army, but also to his diplomacy, which was pre-eminent. He
owed it, too, to the intellectual superiority of France at the time,
and to the perfection which the language reached just then. The
thinking of Europe was done for it by Frenchmen, and French
literature, penetrating and predominant everywhere, was a serious
element of influence.

In all the work of these brilliant years there was increase of power
and territorial agglomeration; there was no internal growth or
political development. The one thing wanted was that the king should
be great and the country powerful. The object of interest was the
State, not the nation, and prosperity did not keep pace with
power. The people were oppressed and impoverish