If a daily mail article that says woke historian insists the man the Iron Mask was gay doesn't happen, I'll be disappointed.

September 1687, night falls over the remote stone walls of Exile Fortress, high in the alpine borderlands.

A carriage grinds to a halt. Torors flicker. Orders are whispered. A man is led inside,

masked, unnamed, and watched. The door closes behind him with a final echoing thud. From this moment on, his life will be measured in silence.

No visitors, no explanation, no mercy. Even his jailer is warned, this prisoner is unlike any other.

Outside, France is being ruled by splendour and absolute power.

Inside this cell, secrecy reigns, and questions begin to be asked.

Who exactly has just been locked away, and why must the truth never be spoken?

His face hidden, his name erased, his very existence a threat. For decades, a single prisoner

was moved in silence through France's dark fortresses, guarded at all

times and forbidden to speak. A man history would only remember as the man in the iron mask.

Join us as we plunge into one of Europe's most tantalizing mysteries. We'll hear the chilling firsthand testimony of his jailer,

trace the suffocating paranoia of life under the absolute rule of Louis XIV, and unravel

the rumours that refused to die. From a French prison cell, this is After Dark. Well, hello there. My name is Anthony.

And I'm Maddie.

And today on After Dark, we're talking about a mystery that has endured for centuries, not least because of a slightly dodgy 90s Leonardo DiCaprio film, but the

central question of who was the man in the Iron Mask? It's still actually genuinely intriguing.

So let's head back to the glitz and glamour of 17th century France, not to Versailles, but to the

dark and murky world of its prisons and to try and unmask this man. Now, in the presence of

radical honesty, I just want to let everybody know. I know that I just want to let everybody know.

I've entered the post-lunch slump. I've just had a nice lunch and sandwich, a nice soup and sandwich.

And actually, despite that lovely introduction, I'm like, Maddie, you're going to have to pull me out of the depths of this here. So, like, it just helped me with this. Unfortunately, I've also had soup for lunch and far too much bread to go with it. What kind of soup did you have? It was kind of like a panchetta tomatoy thing. Oh, she's fancy. It was kind of nice. Shane makes a very good open sandwich as well, and that's what I had. So I'm kind of full now. And I'm just a little bit like, I just want to scroll on my phone, dog videos. I just want to see dog videos. Yeah, I have honestly spent the last hour before we filmed looking at this script, of course, in preparation as a professional, but also just staring out of the window at the sky. And I'm sort of

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