The Man In The Iron Mask

Alexandre Dumas

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1850

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Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 22 Summary

Fouquet’s carriage races to the Bastille. Along the way, Fouquet sends orders by messenger to D’Artagnan and other men he considers faithful to the true king. He sends these letters as a kind of insurance; by the time any ill might befall him at the Bastille, the men will have opened their letters and learned the truth. However, if he remains free, he will be back in time to reclaim the letters before they are opened. Fouquet arrives at the Bastille and fights a couple of guards to get inside the gate. Baisemeaux confirms that Aramis took “Marchiali” from his cell one night and then brought him back the next, but he then denies “Marchiali” was ever released. Fouquet grows tired of his games and begins to write out orders for Aramis’s and Baisemeaux’s arrests. Baisemeaux, at last, agrees to take him up to the cell. As Fouquet unlocks the doors, he hears King Louis shouting, “It was Monsieur Fouquet who brought me here!” and “Death to the traitor Fouquet!” (203).

Chapter 23 Summary

Fouquet enters the king’s cell and tells him of Aramis’s plan. King Louis does not believe there is a twin, but he eventually warms up to Fouquet, as the man is his rescuer. Fouquet begs the king to forgive Aramis and Porthos for their plot, but King Louis states his intention to never forgive them—in fact, he intends to return to Vaux with his armies and arrest or kill everyone involved in his kidnapping and imprisonment. Fouquet is forgiven, but the fact that he facilitated Aramis’s and Porthos’s escape from Vaux momentarily earns him the king’s ire again. When Fouquet reminds the king that he came to rescue him and he could just as easily leave him in his cell, King Louis forgives him again. Despite Aramis and Porthos having a four-hour head-start ahead of the king’s armies, King Louis intends to track them down to Fouquet’s property at Belle-Isle.

Chapter 24 Summary

in his notes. When he meets his mother, Philippe is at first nearly overcome with anger, but he sees in her face signs of suffering and finds pity for her in his heart. Philippe does make pointed comments to her about Madame de Chevreuse (a woman who sometimes visited the estate where he was confined as a child). He also hints at Aramis becoming prime minister, much to Queen Anne of Austria’s surprise. As the morning goes on, Philippe tests his impression of the king, and no one can tell the difference between him and his brother so far. Philippe hears someone approaching the hall via the staircase, and D’Artagnan recognizes Fouquet’s voice—but it is not Fouquet who first enters through the doors; it is King Louis. The plot now exposed, D’Artagnan arrests Philippe, and King Louis issues him an order to transport him to be imprisoned on the Iles Ste. Marguerite and forced to wear an iron mask that he cannot remove. King Louis declares that the punishment for doing so would be death.

Chapters 22-24 Analysis

The introduction of the iron mask in this section is a surprising detail considering how late it appears in the novel despite being a crucial part of the title—after all, the novel is called The Man in the Iron Mask and not King Louis XIV’s Secret Twin Brother is King for Half a Day. Fundamentally, if a character is referenced in the main title, the reader reasonably expects that character to be an important presence throughout the story. In this case, Philippe is the man in the iron mask, but he seems incidental to the story, a human tool for Aramis to achieve his own goals. That said, the inclusion of the iron mask is still significant because of its historical implications. Given that the novel falls under the genre of historical fiction, its characters are fictionalized versions of real people, including the man in the iron mask.

Historically, an actual prisoner in the Bastille remained unidentified for the entire three decades during which he was under guard. His identity remained a secret because he was forced to wear an iron mask that covered his whole face and head, and he never took it off. He was imprisoned for life, and there was no record of his crime. Many scholars of the period proposed various theories about who the man could be, and historians today still research this question. Voltaire theorized that the man in the iron mask was King Louis XIV’s older illegitimate brother, but Dumas’s depiction of the man being the king’s identical legitimate twin was his own invention. This kind of fictionalization moves the novel into a gray area between historical fiction and speculative fiction—specifically alternate history—because it engages with that “What if…?” question in a way that is integral to the plot.