Our story takes place in The tower of London where a man in an iron mask was held to live out his days. He slepted in the mask, ate in it, and if he was ever to try to take it off, the musketeers garding his cell would kill him. Why go to all that troubble to punish a man like that? What did he look like? Where did he come from? What secret was he keeping, or the king keeping for that matter...........
One of the most puzzling mysteries of the world , who is the Man in the Iron Mask?



http://www.royalty.nu/legends/IronMask.html <----- take a look here!


Ok, so to get this forum started! I personaly think it was the kings twin brother being held in the mask. Most of the stories point to a fact that he was treated with respect, kings twin or not he had to have some backround of importance to be treated nicely.

You know...historically, the mask was actually made of velvet, and he didn't live in a cell...he lived like royalty. He just wasn't allowed to speak, or take of his mask in public.

never heard of it but it is quite interesting to read bout....

Perhaps I am confussing two differnet stories but wasn't the man a French king?

The story I read as a younger girl was one of a French king, Luis, who had a twin brother, Phillipe.

I thought it was Leonardo DiCaprio...I could be wrong though...

Good point!....

i was waiting for someone to say leo!

its intresting (napolien?) french leader said his father was the father of the man in the mask and that would make them half brothers.

Interesting topic you brought up because I was just at the Fortean Times home page and came across this article posted about "What Happened on This Day Nov. 19"



Maybe this answers some questions....

You're thinking of Alexandar Dumas' version of the story which took certain liberties (granted they were also generally accepted at the time due to a newspaper article). It's part of the Three Muskeeters series of books.

Also he was held in the Bastille, not the Tower of London which is in a different country.

Generally, it's accepted that he was (as stated above,) a Baron who displeased the King.

The link posted above is really quite complete.

Wicked Good! i was reading this post the other day and i was reading my unexplained mystery book today and came across a whole article on this guy. This is really freakin long but here it is.

In July 1669, agents of King Louis XIV of France captured a man near the port of Dunkirk and sent him secretly to prison with stern instructions to the warden:

It is of the first importance that he is not allowed to tell what he knows to any living person... You must yourself take to him, once a day, the day's necessities and you must never listen, under any pretext whatever, to what he may want to reveal to you. You must threaten him with death if he ever opens his mouth to you on any subject but his day-to-day needs.

For 34 years the prisoner was transferred from one comfortable prison suite to another until he died in the Bastille at Paris in 1703. He always wore a black velvet mask. Once, it is said, he scratched a message on a silver plate and threw it from his window. The fisherman who found it and brought it to the gate was allowed to live only because he couldn't read!

All that is really known of the prisoner is contained in these facts: that is face was dangerously recognizable, that he was too valuable to dispose of but to threatening to set free, and that what he knew was so explosive that even a simple fisherman could have shaken France with the infomation. The best-known face in France, of course, was that of the king himself.

The Great writer and philosopher Voltaire had been imprisoned in the Bastille in 1717 when he was a young man. There he had a chance to talk with jailers who had known the masked man and all the gossip about him, but not his identity. Interested in discrediting the monarchy, Voltaire later concocted the theory that the masked man was Louis XIV's elder brother, imprisoned by the king to prevent disturbances over potential rival claimants to the throne.

In 1801, after the French Revolution, it was rumored that the prisoner was Louis XIV himself, displaced on the throne by his illegitimate half-brother. In prison he married (not uncommon ni those days), the story went on, and the fathered a son who was taken to Corsica, where he grew up and became the grandfather of Napoleon Bonaparte. This version, which served to link France's revolutionary decatur to the old regime, has never been taken seriously by scholars.
The most famous treatment of the story was that of Alexander Dumas pere, who altered Voltaire's version, making the prisoner the king's twin brother, and also changed the material of the mask. His romance, entitled "The Man in the Iron Mask", was published in 1848. Folklore and movies have propagated this story, although it has been totally dismissed by historians.

Another version is that the prisoner was the true father of Louis XIV. The birth of Louis XIV in 1638 was thought at the time to be something of a miracle. His mother, Anne of Austria, and his presumed father, Louis XIII, had been estranged for many years and had no children. Since the royal couple was faced with the need to produce an heir to the throne, and Louis XIII was ailing and quite likely impotent, it is possible that the surrogate father was arranged. This interpretation would explain why Louis XIV kept the mystery man a prisoner rather then having him killed, a deed which would have fixed on Louis the sin of patricide.

So many scholars and mystery lovers in the last 300 years have attempted to unravel the mystery that any conclusive evidence would surely have surfaced by now. None has. Thus it seems likely that people will continue to spin theories around the masked prisoner, who dropped out of history and into a legend in 1669.

OoOoO HAND CRAMP!!!
See it does pay to read. I hope i cleared some stuff up for you guys.

dude-that was sweet kratos, i had read a few stories about this but never one that i thought to be so true. also if king louis xiii had arranged for a "surrogate" father wouldnt that make king loius xiv not really the king? i live in a country where we have no king, but a lot of bush so maybe i dont quite understand but i thought that in a patriarchy such as france that they king had to father a son, otherwise the reign of his family would end. maybe thats why they locked the guy up, they didnt want anyone to know that louis xiv wasnt a real king. booya.