Mask was without doubt a brother, and an elder brother, of Louis XIV."
But the mystery has been solved. We know with certainty who the prisoner was—no one of great importance after all, but one against whom Louis XIV. entertained a bitter and implacable resentment—Ercole Antonio Mattioli.
Louis XIV. had a strong desire to obtain the Marquisate of Montferrat, with its capital Cassale; but the marquisate belonged to Charles, Duke of Mantua, a feeble, dissipated, extravagant fool. On the other hand, the Empress and the Spanish party were bitterly hostile to French schemes of aggrandisement. Mattioli acted as a paid agent of the French Government to negotiate in secrecy a sale of Cassale to Louis; and after he had received a good deal of payment for his services, betrayed the whole intrigue to the Austro-Spanish Government. Louis was furious, not only at having failed in this coup d'état but also at being so fooled. Mattioli was lured near to the frontier, and fallen on upon Piedmontese soil, carried off and thrown into the fortress of Pignerol, which was then in the hands of the French. From Pignerol he was afterwards moved to Lerins, and then finally to the Bastille, where he died. The whole story has been thoroughly thrashed out, and that the Man in the Iron Mask was Mattioli and no one else has been conclusively established.[1]
It would seem that an attempt was made to fabricate for Napoleon a descent from the Iron Mask, who was assumed to be an elder brother to Louis XIV., and by this means to establish for Napoleon a legitimate right to the throne of the Capets. But the attempt was too
- ↑ Hopkins (Tighe) The Man in the Iron Mask, Lond. 1901.
