"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.
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