e king and the queen was arranged in consequence. But the queen
and the cardinal, equally impressed with the necessity of hiding from
Louis XIII. the iron mask's existence, will have had him brought up in
secret. This secret will have been a secret for Louis XIV. until
Cardinal Mazarin's death.

"But this monarch learning then that he had a brother, and an elder
brother whom his mother could not disacknowledge, who further bore maybe
the marked features which betrayed his origin, reflecting that this
child born during marriage could not, without great inconvenience and a
horrible scandal, be declared illegitimate after Louis XIII.'s death,
Louis XIV. will have judged that he could not use a wiser or juster
means than the one he employed in order to assure his own tranquillity
and the peace of the state; means which relieved him of committing a
cruelty which policy would have represented as necessary to a monarch
less conscientious and less magnanimous than Louis XIV.

"It seems to me, our author continues, that the more one knows of the
history of those times, the more one must be struck by these assembled
circumstances which are in favour of such a supposition."

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Voltaire.

[18] This note, given as a publisher's note in the 1771 edition, passes
among many men of letters as being by Voltaire himself. He knew of this
edition, and he never contradicted the opinion there advanced on the
subject of the man in the iron mask.

He was the first to speak of this man. He always combated all the
conjectures made about the mask: he always spoke as though better
informed than others on the subject, and as though unwilling to tell all
he knew.

There is a letter in circulation from Mlle. de Valois, written to the
Duke, afterward Marechal de Richelieu, where she boasts of having
learned from the Duc d'Orleans, her father, under strange conditions,
who the man in the iron mask was; this man, she says, was a twin brother
of Louis XIV., born a few hours after him.

Either this letter, which it was so useless, so indecent, so dangerous
to read, is a supposititious letter, or the regent, in giving his
daughter the reward she had so nobly acquired, thought to weaken the
danger there was in revealing a state secret, by altering the facts, so
as to make of this prince a younger son without right to the throne,
instead of the heir-apparent to the crown.

But Louis XIV., who had a brother; Louis XIV., whose soul w