HKB
happy chance skilfully induced; a chance which absolutely obliged the king to sleep in the same bed with the queen. This is how I think the thing came to pass.
"The queen may have thought that it was her fault that no heir was born to Louis XIII. The birth of the iron mask will have undeceived her. The cardinal to whom she will have confided the fact will have known, for more than one reason, how to turn the secret to account; he will have thought of making use of this event for his own benefit and for the benefit of the state. Persuaded by this example that the queen could give the king children, the plan which produced the chance of one bed for the 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.