The Man in the Iron Mask (Hardcover)

'They never existed and were simply bastards of my imagination,' said Alexandre Dumas, of his famous Three Musketeers, but this is untrue. Athos, Aramis and Porthos were flesh and blood. Their supposedly fictional duel with Cardinal Richelieu's guards actually took place in 1640 and Charles d'Artagnan, a teenager on his first day in Paris, fought alongside the Musketeers. Many other elements of the tale are also true - the Cardinal's agent, Milady de Winter, really was an English aristocrat, and against all odds, d'Artagnan did succeed in becoming Captain of the King's Musketeers, the only person whom Louis XIV could trust to arrest his over-mighty minister, Fouquet. It was d'Artagnan who escorted Fouquet to the feared Alpine fortress of Pignerol, wherein lived the most mysterious of all prisoners, the Man in the Iron Mask. Oxford historian Roger Macdonald has spent five years unravelling fact from fiction to uncover the true story of the Musketeers and their connection with the Man in the Iron Mask. It is a reality more extraordinary than any tale Dumas could devise.; Honour and heroism, betrayal and intrigue, are set amidst the lust, jealousy and deadly poisons that made the Sun K