covered over with oilcloth seems best. A litter might break down,
litters often did, and some one might then see the passenger.

Now M. Funck-Brentano says, to minimize the importance of Dauger,
"he was shut up like so much luggage in a chair hermetically closed
with oilcloth, carried by eight Piedmontese relays of four."

Luggage is not usually carried in hermetically sealed sedan chairs,
but Saint-Mars has explained why, by surplus of precaution, he did
not use a litter. The litter might break down and Dauger might be
seen. A new prison was built specially, at the cost of 5,000
lires, for Dauger at Sainte-Marguerite, with large sunny rooms. On
May 3, 1687, Saint-Mars had entered on his island realm, Dauger
being nearly killed by twelve days' journey in a closed chair. He
again excited the utmost curiosity. On January 8, 1688, Saint-Mars
writes that his prisoner is believed by the world to be either a
son of Oliver Cromwell, or the Duc de Beaufort,[1] who was never
seen again, dead or alive, after a night battle in Crete, on June
25, 1669, just before Dauger was arrested. Saint-Mars sent in a
note of the TOTAL of Dauger's expenses for the year 1687. He
actually did not dare to send the ITEMS, he says, lest they, if the
bill fell into the wrong hands, might reveal too much.


[1] Duc de Beaufort whom Athos releases from prison in Dumas's
Vingt Ans Apres.


Meanwhile, an Italian news-letter, copied into a Leyden paper, of
August 1687, declared that Mattioli had just been brought from