CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE

BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

IN EIGHT VOLUMES

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK [An Essay]

(This is the essay entitled The Man in the Iron Mask, not the novel
"The Man in the Iron Mask" [The Novel] Dumas #28[nmaskxxx.xxx]2759)

For nearly one hundred years this curious problem has exercised the
imagination of writers of fiction--and of drama, and the patience of
the learned in history. No subject is more obscure and elusive, and none
more attractive to the general mind. It is a legend to the meaning
of which none can find the key and yet in which everyone believes.
Involuntarily we feel pity at the thought of that long captivity
surrounded by so many extraordinary precautions, and when we dwell on
the mystery which enveloped the captive, that pity is not only deepened
but a kind of terror takes possession of us. It is very likely that if
the name of the hero of this gloomy tale had been known at the time, he
would now be forgotten. To give him a name would be to relegate him at
once to the ranks of those commonplace offenders who quickly exhaust our
interest and our tears. But this being, cut off from the world without
leaving any discoverable trace, and whose disappearance apparently
caused no void--this captive, distinguished among captives by the
unexampled nature of his punishment, a prison within a prison, as if the
walls of a mere cell were not narrow enough, has come to typify for us
the sum of all the human misery and suffering ever inflicted by unjust
tyranny.

Who was the Man in the Mask? Was he rapt away into this silent seclusion
from the luxury of a court, from the intrigues of diplomacy, from the
scaffold of a traitor, from the clash of battle? What did he leave
behind? Love, glory, or a throne? What did he regret when hope had fled?
Did he pour forth imprecations and curses on his tortures and blaspheme
against high Heaven, or did he with a sigh possess his soul in patience?

The blows of fortune are differently received according to the different
characters of those on whom they fall; and each one of us who in
imagination threads the subterranean passages leading to the cells
of Pignerol and Exilles, and incarcerates himself in the Iles
Sainte-Marguerite and in the Bastille, the successive scenes of that
long-protracted agony will give the prisoner a form shaped by his own
fancy and a grief proportioned to his own power of suffering. How we
long to pierce the