st in this strange case of imprisonment arises, not alone from
its completeness and duration, but also from our uncertainty as to
the motives from which it was inflicted. Where erudition alone cannot
suffice; where bookworm after bookworm, disdaining the conjectures
of his predecessors, comes forward with a new theory founded on some
forgotten document he has hunted out, only to find himself in his turn
pushed into oblivion by some follower in his track, we must turn for
guidance to some other light than that of scholarship; especially if, on
strict investigation, we find that not one learned solution rests on a
sound basis of fact.

In the question before us, which, as we said before, is a double
one, asking not only who was the Man in the Iron Mask, but why he was
relentlessly subjected to this torture till the moment of his
death, what we need in order to restrain our fancy is mathematical
demonstration, and not philosophical induction.

While I do not go so far as to assert positively that Abbe Soulavie has
once for all lifted the veil which hid the truth, I am yet persuaded
that no other system of research is superior to his, and that no other
suggested solution has so many presumptions in its favour. I have not
reached this firm conviction on account of the great and prolonged
success of our drama, but because of the ease with which all the
opinions adverse to those of the abbe may be annihilated by pitting them
one against the other.

The qualities that make for success being quite different in a novel
and in a drama, I could easily have founded a romance on the fictitious
loves of Buckingham and the queen, or on a supposed secret marriage
between her and Cardinal Mazarin, calling to my aid a work by
Saint-Mihiel which the bibliophile declares he has never read, although
it is assuredly neither rare nor difficult of access. I might also have
merely expanded my drama, restoring to the personages therein their true
names and relative positions, both of which the exigencies of the stage
had sometimes obliged me to alter, and while allowing them to fill the
same parts, making them act more in accordance with historical fact. No
fable however far-fetched, no grouping of characters however improbable,
can, however, destroy the interest which the innumerable writings about
the Iron Mask excite, although no two agree in details, and although
each author and each witness declares himself in possession of complete
knowl