sity of sending for a priest for each prisoner. To this proposal Louvois returned the following answer: "I have been made acquainted, by your letter of the 7th of this month (August 1680), with the proposal you make, to put the Sieur de Lestang with the Jacobin, in order to avoid the necessity of having two priests. The King approves of your project, and you have only to execute it when you please."+

St. Mars, in a letter of the 7th of September, 1680, thus details the results of the execution of his plan :

"Since you permitted me to put Matthioli with the Jacobin in the lower part of the tower, the aforesaid Matthioli was, for four or five days, in the belief that the Jacobin was a man that I had placed with him to watch his actions. Matthioli, who is almost as mad as the Jacobin, walked about with long strides, with his cloak over his nose, crying out that he was not a dupe, but that he knew more than he would say. The Jacobin,

* Appendix, 104.

+ Ibid.

who was always seated on his truckle bed, with his elbows resting upon his knees, looked at him gravely, without listening to him. The Signior Matthioli remained always persuaded that it was a spy that had been placed with him, till he was one day disabused, by the Jacobin's getting down from his bed, stark naked, and setting himself to preach, without rhyme or reason, till he was tired. I and my lieutenants saw all their manœuvres through a hole over the door."

It appears to have been very entertaining to St. Mars and his lieutenants, to witness the ravings of these two unhappy maniacs; and there are probably many gaolers who would experience the same feelings upon a similar occasion: what cannot, however, but strike us with horror, is the fact that there was found a minister, nay, a king, and that king one who piqued himself upon professing the Christian religion,† to sanction such a

* Appendix, 105.

If we were to judge of the Christian religion by the manner in which it was professed by Lewis the Fourteenth,

proceeding. It is indeed most painful to think, that power should have been placed in the hands of men, who could abuse it by such needless acts of cruelty.

We have no farther particulars of the state of Matthioli's mind: but, being more than half-mad at the time he was placed with the Jacobin, who was quite so, it is probable the company of the latter increased and perpetuated his phrensy. It is even not impossible that such may have been the intention of St. Mars, as, while Matthioli continued insane, it was of course more reasonable and plau

we should indeed have a most perverted idea of its precepts. It seems as if the pseudo-christianity of that monarch, only incited him to acts of narrow-minded bigotry and cruelty, allowing, at the same time, full latitude to every kind of licentious excess; while it debarred him from the exercise of humanity and toleration. A good measure of the nature and extent of his religious knowledge and feelings is acquired, by the anecdote respecting Fontpertuis and the Duke of Orleans. When the latter was going into Spain, Lewis objected to his taking the former with him, because he was a Jansenist; but withdrew the objection when assured by the duke that he was only an atheist !

sible to continue the extraordinary rigour of his confinement.

Nor were mental sufferings the only ones which the barbarity of Lewis and his minister obliged Matthioli to undergo. We have before seen, from the letters of Louvois to St. Mars, that the latter was desired generally to treat Matthioli with great severity; afterwards he writes to him upon the subject of his clothing, "You must make the clothes of such sort of people as he is last three or four years. Some idea may also be formed of the kind of furniture of his dungeon, from the circumstance, mentioned by St. Mars, that, upon the removal of his prisoner from the fort of Exiles to the Island of St. Margaret in 1687, his bed had been sold, because it was so old and broken as not to be worth the carriage; and that all his furniture and linen being added to it, the sum produced by the sale was only thirteen crowns.†

* M. Roux (Fazillac), quoting from an unpublished letter of Louvois to St. Mars, dated December 14th, 1681. + About 17. 128. Od. Appendix, No. 126.

It may be worth remarking here that the letter of Louvois, respecting Matthioli's clothes, is a sufficient answer to the absurd stories with regard to the richness of the lace, &c. worn by the Iron Mask; and the relations from St. Mars himself of his threats to his prisoner, of even corporal punishment, no less disprove the erroneous accounts of the extraordinary respect shown to him.

In the year 1681, St. Mars was offered the government of the citadel of Pignerol, which he declined accepting, for what reasons we are not told : Lewis, who was anxious to recompense his services as a gaoler of State prisoners, then gave him the government of Exiles,* a strong fortress and pass near Susa, on the frontier of Piedmont and the Briançonnois, which was vacant by the death of the Duke de Lesdiguières; at the same time augmenting the salary attached to that situation, so as to make it equal to that of the towns in Flanders.+

* Exiles was taken from the French in 1708, by the Duke of Savoy, but restored to them by the treaty of Utrecht. † Appendix, No. 111.