The Man in the Iron Mask

Aramis, once a musketeer and now a bishop with secret power, discovers a young prisoner, hidden away since birth and now held in the Bastille: Philippe, the identical twin brother of King Louis XIV. With the help of the loyal, unsuspecting Porthos, he plans to put Philippe on the throne in the king's place one night during the celebrations at the château of Vaux. When the plot fails, the friends of a lifetime find themselves on opposite sides, and the story moves to its end: the death of Raoul, son of Athos, in the French expedition to Djidjelli, today's Jijel on the Algerian coast, the last stand of Porthos in a cave on Belle-Île, and the fate of d'Artagnan.

This is the final part of Alexandre Dumas's long novel The Vicomte de Bragelonne, written between 1847 and 1850, which ends the story begun in The Three Musketeers. It was inspired by a real masked prisoner who died in the Bastille in 1703 and whose identity is still unknown. The earlier parts are in The Vicomte de Bragelonne.

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was the grandson of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman of African descent in Saint-Domingue; his father became a general of the Revolution. Arriving in Paris as a clerk with little education, Dumas made his name in the theatre and then, with the collaborator Auguste Maquet, turned history into the most popular adventure novels of the century.

The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo were followed by dozens more, earning fortunes that Dumas spent as fast as they came, on travel, newspapers and a fantastic château. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris among the great figures of France.