The Man in the Iron Mask Wasn't Wearing IRON

The Man in the Iron Mask never wore iron. And he was almost certainly not the king's secret twin.

For over thirty years, under Louis the Fourteenth, one prisoner was moved between French jails with his face always hidden. When he died in the Bastille in 1703, the guards burned everything he had touched.

Legend says the mask was solid iron, hiding the king's secret twin. That comes from novelists. The real records describe a mask of black velvet, and a prisoner guarded not for his face, but for something he knew.

So who was he? The strongest evidence points to a servant named Eustache Dauger, arrested over a secret never written down. He was no prince, just a man who learned something he was never meant to know, and paid with his whole life.

He was buried under a false name, with no portrait and no confession. The most famous prisoner in history is still, three centuries later, a man without a face.

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