Man In The Iron Mask

(this is an essay Dumas wrote on the actual "Man in the Iron Mask." The link to the book is listed under "Fiction" on the author's main page.)

For nearly one hundred years this curious problem has exercised the
imagination of writers of fiction--and of drama, and the patience of
the learned in history. No subject is more obscure and elusive, and
none more attractive to the general mind. It is a legend to the
meaning of which none can find the key and yet in which everyone
believes. Involuntarily we feel pity at the thought of that long
captivity surrounded by so many extraordinary precautions, and when
we dwell on the mystery which enveloped the captive, that pity is not
only deepened but a kind of terror takes possession of us. It is
very likely that if the name of the hero of this gloomy tale had been
known at the time, he would now be forgotten. To give him a name
would be to relegate him at once to the ranks of those commonplace
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