e 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 thoughts and feel the heart-beats and watch the
trickling tears behind that machine-like exterior, that impassible mask!
Our imagination is powerfully excited by the dumbness of that fate borne
by one whose words never reached the outward air, whose thoughts could
never be read on the hidden features; by the isolation of forty years
secured by two-fold barriers of stone and iron, and she clothes the
object of her contemplation in majestic splendour, connects the mystery
which enveloped his existence with mighty interests, and persists in
regarding the prisoner as sacrificed for the preservation of some
dynastic secret involving the peace of the world and the stability of a
throne.

And when we calmly reflect on the whole case, do we feel that our first
impulsively adopted opinion was wrong? Do we regard our belief as a
poetical illusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, it seems to me
that our good sense approves our fancy's flight. For what can be more
natural than the conviction that the secret of the name, age, and
features of the captive, w