The Man in the Iron Mask Read online

  Despite Louvois’s assertion that Cardel could not be treated badly enough, Louis appears to have relented. As he considered the faith of these ministers, he decided that they were wrongheaded rather than wicked, and he felt that they might be persuaded to abjure what he considered to be their heresy. On his orders, Louvois wrote to Saint-Mars to tell him that, should any of the ministers become ill, he was to find an honorable priest to attend them in order that they might be converted before they died.27

  It was shortly after the arrival of the first Huguenot ministers that two events occurred that would have a profound effect on Saint-Mars’s life. One was the death of Mme de Saint-Mars in 1691. She was buried at the monastery on neighboring Saint-Honorat.

  The death of his wife was, however, a personal tragedy for Saint-Mars, but the other event would also have an impact on Eustache. This was the death, on July 16, 1691, of the marquis de Louvois, the man with whom Saint-Mars had exchanged letters for some twenty-six years, and who had exercised a great deal of influence over the conditions of Eustache’s imprisonment.

  The story of Louvois’s death, as told by the marquis de Sourches,28 has it that the minister was working with Louis in his cabinet at Versailles when the king remarked a change in his expression. Louis asked if he was well, upon which Louvois said that he felt ill and asked if, since he had no pressing business, the king would permit him to go home and resume his work the following day. Louis graciously agreed. As Louvois was gathering up his papers, Louis watched him closely and asked if he still felt unwell, to which Louvois replied that he did.

  Louvois left the king’s cabinet and made his way through the royal apartments and on into the Galerie des glaces supported by one of his gentlemen, Chavigny. As he went, he exchanged a few words with various people and even arranged an interview with a cavalry captain for the next day.

  Once inside his own room, he sent for Dionis, the premier surgeon to the dauphin, to bleed him. Louvois declared that he felt a little better, but a moment later, he felt a pain in his left side and asked to be bled on that side. Dionis, who was still bandaging Louvois’s right arm, did not have time to fulfil this request, for Louvois just had time to complain of feeling weak before he died.

  Several concerned courtiers rushed into Louvois’s apartment. It was noticed that the dead minister, who was laid out on his bed, appeared to have a small patch of violet on his cheek. Louis, when given the news of Louvois’s death, was visibly touched at the loss. He had worked with Louvois for many years, and now he had lost his trusted minister just as French fortunes at war were not going well.29

  Louvois was succeeded by his son, Louis Le Tellier, marquis de Barbezieux. Aged twenty-three, Barbezieux was Louvois’s third son and the third Le Tellier to inherit the post. His grandfather, Michel Le Tellier, had been something of a bureaucrat, preferring to perform his duties from behind his desk in the comfort of his office. Louvois had taken the opposite approach and often traveled to the front or visited strongholds across the kingdom, often to the annoyance of the generals and intendents who felt he was getting in their way. Just as Louvois had learned his job at his father’s side, so had Barbezieux learned from Louvois, and he had been training for the post for the past four years. It would soon become obvious, however, that, while he may have paid attention to those valuable lessons, he was less inclined to apply himself to the task, much to the dismay of the king. Within months of the young man’s taking office, Louis began to feel the need to direct the affairs of the ministry for war himself.

  That gradual change, however, was yet to come. For now, Saint-Mars awaited a response to a letter he had sent toward the end of July, in which he acknowledged the new minister, pledged his allegiance, and requested instructions on how to proceed. Barbezieux’s reply, when it came, was succinct: whenever Saint-Mars had anything to say about the prisoner he had been guarding for twenty years, he should apply the same precautions he had used when writing to the late M. de Louvois.30

  Here, Barbezieux refers to “the prisoner,” whom he does not name. He does note that this prisoner had been in Saint-Mars’s custody for twenty years, implying that he was someone who had become a prisoner in 1671. The only one to have entered Pignerol that year was Lauzun, and he had been freed in 1681. It is possible that Barbezieux was merely rounding up his numbers;31 if so, his letter still allows us to identify which prisoner he meant by a process of elimination.

  Of the prisoners Saint-Mars had left behind at Pignerol upon his transfer to Exilles, three remained: Matthioli, imprisoned in 1679; Rousseau, Matthioli’s valet who was captured shortly after his master; and Lapierre, the Jacobin, who had been a prisoner since 1674. Dubreuil, imprisoned in 1676, had been released in 1684. Matthioli, Rousseau, and Lapierre had obviously left Saint-Mars’s custody and had spent the previous ten years being guarded by Villebois and his successor, La Prade.32

  Upon his move to Exilles, Saint-Mars had taken two prisoners with him, those he referred to as his two merles or the “gentlemen of the Lower Tower.” The first was Eustache, described as a valet, who had entered Pignerol in 1669 and had later been allowed to serve Foucquet. The second was La Rivière, who had been hired as a valet to serve Foucquet, who had failed to report a breach of security and was believed to have learned Eustache’s secret. For these two offenses, the authorities felt it appropriate to imprison him. A state prisoner, without having been tried and without even a lettre de cachet to authorize his captivity, he had died at Exilles in 1687.

  The prisoner referred to by Barbezieux could only have been Eustache, who had been in Saint-Mars’s continuous custody since 1669—that is, for twenty-two years. It is a close approximation made by the new young minister who had not been fully briefed about the prisoners in his charge. Barbezieux may not have known who Eustache was or anything about his case.

  The Huguenot ministers made Saint-Mars’s life, and no doubt that of Eustache, a misery by their constant singing and chanting. “The first of these ministers, who have been sent here, sings psalms all day and night with a loud voice, expressly to make it known who he is,” complained the jailer when he wrote to Barbezieux on June 4, 1692. He pointed out that he had ordered Cardel several times to desist on pain of severe punishment, which, he said, he had been forced to administer. He had also been obliged to discipline Salves, who “writes on his pewter vessels and on his linen… to make it known that he is detained unjustly for the purity of his faith.”33

  As to Eustache, he continued his lonely existence, staring out of his windows across the blue Mediterranean toward Cannes and the French countryside beyond it. Did he recall the days before his imprisonment? We can only speculate what went through his mind as he looked back over the years, with the stark contrast between freedom and captivity, his reminiscences interrupted by the chanting that drifted into his chamber from his saintly neighbors. What he may not have known was that he was no longer part of the world he had left behind, forgotten by those who directed whatever future he might have. Only Saint-Mars, who looked after his daily needs, seemed now to give any thought to the man who was so quiet and accepting of his fate that his jailer was hard-pressed to find any news about him to report.

  In the insulated world in which the prisoners of Pignerol lived, it must have been hard for them to imagine that life continued beyond the thick walls of their prison chambers. Now events were about to break into their solitary existence in the most violent way.

  For some time, Victor Amadeus II, duc de Savoie, had looked with envy upon the little town of Pignerol, with its excellent strategic position and impenetrable stronghold. He desired to restore the town and its citadel, lost decades earlier, to his duchy. It was for this reason, with thoughts of regaining this jewel of the Alps as his reward, that he joined the enemies of France in a conflict that would become known to history as the Nine Years’ War or, as it is sometimes called, the War of the League of Augsburg.34 In 1692, Savoie invaded the Dauphine, but his greatest triumph was yet to come.

&
nbsp; As dawn broke on the morning of July 29, 1693, the duke’s forces marched on Sainte-Brigitte, only a kilometer away from Pignerol. The fortress fell into their hands after a siege lasting four weeks, but the town and the citadel of Pignerol itself held firm as everything from bombs to corpses were sent crashing through its defenses. The corpses were a particularly nasty weapon. Combined with the stifling heat of the Alpine summer, they constituted a primitive but effective form of biological warfare. Inevitably, disease spread among the town’s populace and, equally inevitably, the prisoners inside the donjon succumbed to the fevers that raged.

  La Prade feared for the safety of his prisoners under his care, whose numbers had increased since Saint-Mars’s departure.35 In November 1682, Jean Breton, or Le Breton, had been arrested on the orders of Louvois on suspicion of spying. Held at first in a civil jail, Le Breton had been transferred to the donjon a month later, with only bread and water for sustenance. Here he would remain until the following April, when Louis issued an order to the marquis d’Herleville to release him. For reasons unknown, this order was never carried out, and so Le Breton remained at Pignerol, another lost prisoner.

  Five years later, in August 1687, one Jean Herse was sent to Pignerol under Louvois’s orders. Herse was fifteen years old, an apprentice tailor who had been overheard to say that he would kill the king for payment. For this act of treason, he was imprisoned in the Bastille under a lettre de cachet before being transferred to Pignerol, escorted by the sieur La Coste, an officer of the court police. The young man was violent and difficult to manage; unable to bear his captivity, he attempted suicide in January 1689 and made an unsuccessful escape attempt in May 1692.

  Now, in early October 1693, the lives of both Le Breton and Herse, together with their companions in captivity, were threatened by the duc de Savoie’s forces, who bombarded Pignerol mercilessly for several days. La Prade, now greatly concerned for the safety of his prisoners, wrote to Barbezieux to ask what options were available to him. The young secretary’s reply was not encouraging. If any of them were to die, he told La Prade, they should be buried like the soldiers were. He hastened to add, however, that he did not believe that this would be necessary, as he was persuaded that none of them would die. As it was, both Matthioli and his valet, Rousseau, were ill in bed with fever. La Prade told Barbezieux that he had discovered that the two men had been writing messages inside the linings of their jackets. Barbezieux remained unconcerned. He told La Prade that he should simply burn the messages.36

  The secretary’s belief that the prisoners would not be in any danger naturally proved to have been misplaced. A little more than a fortnight after the latest exchange, he received news that a prisoner had died. Referring to him in his letter as le plus ancien, it was clear that Barbezieux did not know the man’s name; he wrote to La Prade: “As I do not doubt that you would remember it, I pray you tell me it in cipher.”37 The prisoner described as le plus ancien could only have been Lapierre, the Jacobin who had gone insane as a result of the conditions in which he had been kept. The torment of this unfortunate man would come to an end only in death, in December 1693.

  As the war progressed, Catinat took the fight to the duc de Savoie and crushed his army outside La Marsaille, or Marsaglia, near Pignerol on October 4, 1693.38 The siege was lifted, but the threat of hostilities remained ever present. It was clear that some solution had to be found regarding the prisoners. The comte de Tessé, maréchal de France, came up with the ideal solution. This was to evacuate the prisoners from Pignerol and lodge them either at Exilles or on the island of Sainte-Marguerite. With Exilles having been abandoned to the elements, and with newly built, state-of-the-art facilities having been established on Sainte-Marguerite under the capable command of Saint-Mars, the choice was obvious.

  The plan was sent to Barbezieux, who passed it on to the king, who approved it. Saint-Mars was duly apprised of the situation; warned that some prisoners were being brought to the island, he was ordered to arrange suitable accommodation for them. There was one problem, however: Barbezieux had no idea how many prisoners were being transferred, but he was sure Saint-Mars would know.39

  The official correspondence mentions only three prisoners: Matthioli, Le Breton, and Herse. Lapierre, the Jacobin, as has been seen, had died. A fourth man, Rousseau, who was Matthioli’s valet, would be transferred alongside his master. As always, the new inmates were to be kept in separate cells and Saint-Mars was to ensure that they could not communicate with anyone, either by word of mouth or in writing.

  Despite the danger posed by the presence of foreign troops hiding out along the route between Pignerol and Sainte-Marguerite, Louis and Barbezieux gave orders that the prisoners should make the journey one at a time. The cost of this undertaking, the time it would take, not to mention the risks involved, made this a wholly impractical course of action. The plan was revised and, a few weeks later, on April 7, 1694, the small party of three prisoners and one unfortunate valet set out from Pignerol under the care of M. de Maisonel, captain of the dragoons.

  At Briançon, they were handed over to La Prade, who took them the rest of the way. La Prade and his officers were, in turn, escorted by twenty mounted sergeants provided by the comte de Tessé.40 He had received his orders two weeks earlier, together with instructions on how he was expected to conduct himself on the journey. He assured Barbezieux that he would conduct himself according to his “orders and instructions with the greatest secrecy, entire circumspection, and every possible measure for the security of these prisoners, without having the slightest temptation to the least petty curiosity.”41

  The operation to transfer the four men to their island prison appears to have gone off without a hitch, but it could not have been an easy journey for them. There was the constant fear of attack by the duc de Savoie’s troops, and the stress of a long and arduous journey, and at least one of them was still unwell. He arrived on the island in such a weakened state that he died shortly afterward. Saint-Mars informed Barbezieux in a now lost letter of April 29. The secretary’s reply was dated two weeks later. In it, he acknowledged the news of the prisoner’s death and agreed with Saint-Mars’s proposal that the dead man’s servant should be put into the vaulted prison, with the usual precaution that the man could not communicate in any way with the outside world.42 The prisoner who died almost immediately upon his arrival on the island of Sainte-Marguerite could only have been Matthioli because he was the only one of the three prisoners from Pignerol to have had a valet.

  In December 1695, Saint-Mars was approaching seventy years of age. Although the climate on Sainte-Marguerite was agreeable, certainly much better than it had been in any of the Alpine fortresses in which he had served for the past thirty years, there were times when ill health prevented his performing his duties as he would have wished. Louis, through Barbezieux, wanted to know what arrangements the jailer had made should he ever be absent from the island or too ill to care for his prisoners. Saint-Mars’s reply, dated January 6, 1696, provides some intriguing insights into prison life on Sainte-Marguerite and the routine that had been established there.43

  Saint-Mars explained that two lieutenants had been assigned to serve the prisoners their meals using the procedure he himself had devised and which they have seen him use many times. The senior of these lieutenants takes the keys of the ancien prisonnier, with whom they begin their rounds,44 opens the three doors that seal the chamber and enters. The prisoner politely hands the lieutenant his dishes and plates, which he has placed neatly one on top of the other. These are then carried through two of the doors and given to one of the sergeants, who takes them to a table two paces off. Here, the second lieutenant examines them carefully, as he does anything that goes in or comes out of the prisoner’s chamber. This is to ensure that the prisoner has not written anything on his plates. After everything necessary has been given to the prisoner, the lieutenant searches the chamber, taking particular care to check under the bed and the window bars, and often the prisoner him
self. The lieutenant then asks in a very civil manner if the prisoner needs anything. He then shuts the doors and goes away to perform the same procedure with the other prisoners.

  The table linen, shirts, and any other linen used by the prisoners is changed twice a week, with every item counted in and out and thoroughly searched. “One can be very much cheated about the linen when it leaves and enters the service of prisoners who are people of consideration,” he goes on to explain, “as I have had some who have wished to bribe the laundresses, who have acknowledged to me… what had been said to them.” In order to get around this problem, Saint-Mars ordered all the linen to be “steeped in water on leaving [the prisoner’s] chambers, and when it was clean and half dry, the laundresses came to iron and smooth it in my apartments in the presence of one of my lieutenants.” The lieutenant would then lock up the baskets of freshly laundered linen in a chest until they were handed over to the prisoners’ servants.

  “There is much to be distrusted in candles,” Saint-Mars continues. “I have found some that upon being broken or used contained paper instead of wicks. It is also very dangerous for ribbon to leave a prisoner’s apartments, as he writes on it as linen without any one being aware of it.” Here Saint-Mars is reminiscing of the good old days when he guarded Foucquet and Lauzun, two illustrious prisoners, whose status enhanced his own by association. These men wore handsome suits with laced shirts, which were decorated and tied with silken ribbons. He went on to explain how the late Monsieur Foucquet “made fine and good paper on which I allowed him to write, and afterward I went and took it from a little pocket he had made in the seat of his breeches, which I sent to your late father.”