The Man in the Iron Mask Page 21
Interest in the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask continued to spread far and wide, and among those who took it upon themselves to investigate the story was Germain-François Poullain de Saint-Foix, a man of letters.16 The first theory to come under his scrutiny was that which was set out in the L’Histoire de Perse, which identified the face behind the iron mask as that of the comte de Vermandois. This was instantly dismissed by Saint-Foix because, as he pointed out, none of the contemporary memoirs had recorded such a story about the young comte as it had been set out in that anonymous work. Moreover, the comte had been only sixteen years old at the time the incident was supposed to have occurred, while the dauphin was twenty-two, married, and with a son, the duc de Bourgogne. Saint-Foix found it inconceivable that Louis XIV would treat a beloved son, even a natural one, with such severity, and even if the king had felt obliged to demand satisfaction on behalf of the dauphin, he would not have punished the boy in secret for so public a crime, but would instead have sought a more visible form of reparation.
Saint-Foix next turned his attention to the theory that the Man in the Iron Mask was the duc de Beaufort, a theory noted by Saint-Mars and supported by La Grange-Chancel. Once again, the theory was refuted because Louis XIV, “adored by his subjects, respected by his neighbors, enjoying a glorious peace after conquests,” would not have had anything to fear from the duc de Beaufort. There was nothing to justify his sending the duke to prison and hiding his whereabouts. Moreover, all those who had spoken of the prisoner agreed that he was young and of a noble bearing, characteristics that, according to Saint-Foix, could not be applied to Beaufort. As though this were not proof enough, Saint-Foix offers anecdotal evidence from the marquis de Saint André Montbrun, who had been a commander on Candia at the time of the siege. Montbrun stated that Beaufort had been killed at the siege, after which his head was removed and carried through the streets of Constantinople on a pike on the orders of the grand vizier.
At the time Saint-Foix’s work was published, the official records had not yet been made public but were still stored in the archives belonging to the appropriate ministries. The precise date of the Man in the Iron Mask’s imprisonment was not available to researchers. Nevertheless, Voltaire thought that the prisoner had been put away in 1661, while La Grange-Chancel gave 1669. The Histoire de Perse, on the other hand, set the date at 1683. None of these dates were correct according to Saint-Foix, who concluded that the Man in the Iron Mask had been imprisoned in 1685 and that he was James, duke of Monmouth, the son of Charles II of England and his mistress Lucy Walter.
Saint-Foix justified his theory by explaining that, following the death of his father and the subsequent accession of James II, the young duke had led an unsuccessful rebellion against his uncle and was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was condemned to be beheaded on July 15, 1685, but his place was taken by an officer who resembled him and who had also been condemned to death. The officer stepped onto the scaffold in order that the prince might escape.
Saint-Foix appeals to several pieces of evidence to support his theory. In one, a lady who had known the prince persuaded those who were watching over the coffin to open it. Upon seeing the corpse’s right arm, she cried, “Ah, it is not him!” Another piece of evidence came in the form of a book, Amours de Charles II & de Jacques II Rois d’Angleterre, in which it is stated that on the night following Monmouth’s supposed execution, King James accompanied by three men removed the duke from the Tower and covered his face with a hood before the king and the duke drove off in a carriage, with the three men following on behind. This anecdote reminded Saint-Foix of a story told to him by a certain abbé Tournemine that stated that the king’s confessor, Father Sanders, had assured the duchess of Portsmouth that Monmouth had not been executed.
Saint-Foix was convinced that Monmouth had been spirited away to France in order to distance him from those who continued to nurture hopes that he would one day return as a messianic figure and save his supporters. The duke ended up in the Bastille, where he came to the attention of one Nelaton, an English surgeon, who recalled an incident that occurred when he was serving as chief assistant to the surgeon at the Porte Saint-Antoine. Upon being summoned to the Bastille to bleed a sick prisoner, the governor took him into one of the chambers, where “he had a man who complained of a lot of headaches.” This man’s face was covered with a towel, which was knotted at the neck. Nelaton was unable to see the patient’s face, but he could tell “by his accent that this man was English.”
Saint-Foix’s theory caught the attention of Guillaume-Louis Formanoir de Palteau. The son of Guillaume Formanoir de Corbest, Palteau was the great nephew of Saint-Mars, and he had been interested in the mysterious prisoner for some time. He shared what he knew of him in a letter to Elie Fréron, editor of L’Année litteraire.17 He noted that the prisoner was known only as La Tour during the time he had been held on Sainte-Marguerite and at the Bastille. Palteau said that the governor and the officers had great regard for this man, to whom they gave everything that could be given to a prisoner. La Tour was allowed to walk outside as long as he wore his mask, but, wrote Palteau, it had not been until the publication of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV that he heard it said that the mask was made of iron and was fitted with springs. He added that the prisoner was required to wear the mask only when he went out to take the air or when he was obliged to appear before some stranger. This contradicts the information unearthed by the duchesse d’Orléans, who thought that the prisoner was obliged to wear the mask at all times.
Palteau spoke of the sieur de Blainvilliers, Saint-Mars’s cousin and an officer in the compagnie-franche, who had often told Palteau of his curiosity to know more about La Tour. Blainvilliers had tried to satisfy this curiosity by dressing in the uniform and carrying the arms of a sentinel stationed in the gallery beneath the windows of the prisoner’s chamber on Sainte-Marguerite. The officer watched him throughout the night and managed to get a good look at him. He noted that the prisoner was not wearing his mask, his face was white, he was tall and well made, his lower leg was a little swollen, and his hair was white, even though he was still in his prime. The prisoner had spent the entire night pacing in his chamber. Blainvilliers added that the prisoner was always dressed in brown, that he was given fine linen and books, and that Saint-Mars and his officers would remain standing before him uncovered until he told them to put their hats on and sit down. They would often keep him company and eat with him. Palteau continued:
In 1698, M. de Saint-Mars passed from the governorship of the isles of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille. On his way to take up his post, he stayed with his prisoner on his estate at Palteau. The masked man arrived in a litter which preceded that of M. de Saint-Mars; they were accompanied by several men on horseback. The peasants went to meet their lord.
M. de Saint-Mars ate with his prisoner, who had his back to the windows of the dining-room, which looked out onto the courtyard. The peasants whom I have questioned could not see whether he ate with his mask on, but they observed very well that M. de Saint-Mars, who sat at the table opposite him, had two pistols at the side of his plate. They were served by only one valet de chambre, who carried the plates from an ante-room, carefully closing the dining-room door behind him.
When the prisoner crossed the courtyard he always had his black mask over his face. The peasants remarked that they could see his teeth and lips, that he was tall and had white hair. M. de Saint-Mars slept on a bed that had been put up for him next to that of the masked man.
That Saint-Mars was said to have had two pistols at either side of his plate in readiness to shoot the prisoner is reminiscent of the duchesse d’Orléans’s account, in which two musketeers were on hand to fire on his if he tried to remove his mask.
Blainvilliers also told Palteau that when the prisoner died, the year of which Palteau gave as 1704, he was secretly buried in the cemetery at Saint-Paul and that they placed chemicals in the coffin to consume the corpse. Pa
lteau had not heard that the prisoner spoke with a foreign accent, thereby refuting Saint-Foix’s assertion that he might have been the English duke of Monmouth.
In 1769, an important development was made in the study of the Man in the Iron Mask when Père Henri Griffet published some extracts from Etienne Du Junca’s registers.18 A respected historian and scholar, Griffet taught at the Jesuit school Louis-le-Grand in Paris, preached at court, and had served as a chaplain at the Bastille between 1745 and 1764. The extracts, which included the entry in which the death and burial of the mysterious prisoner was announced, were printed in the book Traité des différentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité de l’Histoire and annotated by Griffet:
The memory of the masked prisoner was still preserved among the officers, soldiers, and servants of the Bastille, when M. de Launay, who has long been the governor, came to occupy a place on the staff of the garrison.19 Those who had seen him with his mask, when he crossed the courtyards on his way to mass, said that after his death the order was given to burn everything he had used, such as linen, clothes, cushions, counterpanes, &c.: and that the very walls of the room he had occupied had to be scraped and whitewashed again, and that all the tiles of the flooring were taken up and replaced by others, because they were so afraid that he had found the means to conceal some notes or some mark, the discovery of which would have revealed his name.
Père Griffet speculates that these measures had to be related in some way to the incident of the plate on which the prisoner had engraved his name and which had been found by a fisherman and carried to Saint-Mars. The pewter vessels upon which Pierre de Salves scratched had become a part of the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask, with the engraving now being attributed to the mysterious prisoner.
Griffet speculated that the destruction of the items used by the prisoner, as well as all traces of his existence, were designed to preserve the secret of his identity, a conclusion that contrasts with Louvois’s requirement that the secret of how the prisoner was previously employed must be guarded.20 He also reported a story, which he attributed to Launay, that concerned Monsieur d’Argenson, lieutenant of the police, who had the task of periodically inspecting the Bastille. He was aware that there was still talk among the staff of the mysterious prisoner, and one day he asked the officers what was being said. They told him the various conjectures, to which he replied that “we will never know that.”
The year following the first edition of Père Griffet’s book saw the publication of a letter written to the editors of the Journal encyclopédique by Baron de Heiss, a former captain of the Alsace regiment. He explained that, since the publication of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, his curiosity about the Man in the Iron Mask had been piqued, and he had taken it upon himself to try to discover who the prisoner might have been.21 He admitted that his research had so far been unsuccessful, but, by a happy accident, he had come across a section of an article titled “Mantoue” in a book, Histoire abrégé de l’Europe pour le mois d’Août 1689.
From what he read, Heiss deduced that the secretary of the duke of Mantua could have been the Man in the Iron Mask, who had been transferred from Pignerol to Sainte-Marguerite and from there to the Bastille in 1690 [sic], when Saint-Mars took over as governor. He noted that he found this hypothesis all the more believable because, as Voltaire had said, no prince or any person of note in Europe had disappeared.
The secretary Heiss spoke of was, of course, Matthioli. Although a nobleman, Matthioli was largely unknown beyond the borders of his own country, and to those who arrested him, interrogated him, and held him at Pignerol, he was merely another prisoner to be guarded. He, therefore, could be seen to fit the criterion of being a person of no note. Heiss’s hypothesis resonated with many researchers at the time, and Matthioli would be accepted as the Man in the Iron Mask for many years to come.
In 1770, Voltaire returned to the subject of the Man in the Iron Mask in Questions sur l’encyclopédie, a work that contained articles on a variety of subjects. Some of these had been reedited and modified from a previous work, the Dictionnaire philosophique, which had been published six years earlier. The new work followed the same format as the earlier one and included an article titled “Anecdote on the Man in the Iron Mask.”22 In it, the theories that the unknown prisoner might have been Beaufort, Vermandois, or Monmouth were dismissed. While Voltaire did not name his favored candidate, he did offer some details that complemented his earlier research and dropped hints that might lead a perceptive reader to a certain conclusion. Specifically, he noted that if the prisoner had not been allowed to cross the court of the Bastille or to see his physician unless he was wearing his mask, it must have been out of fear that someone would have “recognized in his face some too striking resemblance.” There was really only one person in France at the time whose face would be instantly recognizable, and that was the king’s. As to the prisoner’s age, a few days before he died he had said to the apothecary at the Bastille that he thought he was about sixty years old. Voltaire’s source was Jean Marsolan, who had also assisted him when he was researching the Siècle de Louis XIV. Since the prisoner died in 1703, he would have been born in or close to 1643.
The following year, 1771, Voltaire republished Questions sur l’encyclopédie and whatever doubt there might have been regarding the true identity of the Man in the Iron Mask was removed. The revised edition contained a note purportedly written by the publisher but which some think may have been written by Voltaire himself.23 It stated that the “Iron Mask was without doubt a brother, and an older brother, of Louis XIV.” This assertion challenges the claim in the first edition, which states that the prisoner thought he was about sixty at the time of his death; for to be older than Louis XIV, he would of necessity have been born prior to 1638. Nevertheless, the editor’s note appealed to Anne of Austria’s “taste for fine linen with which M. de Voltaire has supported his case.” It goes on to say that it was “in reading the memoirs of the times, which reported that anecdote on the subject of the queen, which recalled the same taste of the Iron Mask, I no longer doubted that he was her son; which all other circumstances had already persuaded me.” The anecdote in question refers to the legendary origins of Louis XIV:
It is known that Louis XIII had long ceased to live with the queen, that the birth of Louis XIV was due only to a happy accident; an accident which obliged the king to sleep in the same bed with the queen. Here is, then, what I believe happened. The queen had come to imagine that it was her fault that no heir had been born to Louis XIII. The birth of the Mask undeceived her. The cardinal [Richelieu], whom she had taken into her confidence, knew how to take advantage of this secret; he believed he could turn this event to his own profit and that of the state. Persuaded by this example that the queen could give the king children, he arranged it so that the king and the queen would be obliged to share a bed. But the queen and the cardinal, both aware of the need to hide the existence of the Iron Mask from Louis XIII, had the child brought up in secret. This secret was kept from Louis XIV until after the death of Cardinal Mazarin. But this monarch, learning that he had a brother and an older brother whom his mother could not disown, who, moreover, perhaps bore marked features which announced his origin; reflecting that this child born in wedlock could not, without great disadvantage and a terrible scandal, be declared illegitimate after the death of Louis XIII, Louis XIV could not have used a more wise and more just means than that which he employed to assure his own peace and the calm of his state, a means which spared him from committing a cruel act which politics would have held as necessary to a monarch less conscientious and less magnanimous than Louis XIV.
This, then, was the opinion attributed to Voltaire in the introduction of Questions sur l’encyclopédie: gone was the ambiguity that had been present in the first edition; now it was affirmed that the mysterious prisoner had been Louis XIV’s elder brother.
The implications of this were that Louis had not been the rightful king because
his older brother was still living. He had, nevertheless, been unaware of the existence of this brother until after the death of his first minister, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. The king, who was twenty-two years old at the time, could not deny his older brother, nor could he declare him illegitimate because the resulting scandal would have caused great harm to the monarchy. Moreover, the possibility that the brother bore a strong resemblance to the king meant that he could not simply be put away; there had to be some other means of keeping his identity a secret. As such, Louis devised the strategy of imprisoning his brother and making him wear a mask of iron so that his face would always be concealed.
In suggesting that the Man in the Iron Mask was an older brother of Louis XIV, Voltaire appears to have been influenced by Père Griffet, who wrote a legendary account of Louis XIV’s conception based on earlier accounts by the marquis de Montglat, an officer in the army of Navarre and grand master of the king’s guard, and Mme de Motteville, lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Austria.24 However, Voltaire fails to explain why the elder brother should have been a problem. He would simply have become king upon the death of his father, while the younger son, Louis, would have assumed the role played by his own younger brother, Philippe duc d’Orléans.
While Voltaire had been a prisoner at the Bastille, he naturally had had no access to the records that were stored there; instead, he had to rely on the reminiscences of those who had encountered the prisoner. This was not the case with Henri Godillon-Chevalier, who served as major of the Bastille from 1749 until his death on February 21, 1787. Third in command after the governor and the king’s lieutenant, Chevalier managed the internal administration of the Bastille and was charged by M. de Malesherbes25 to make a study of its archives. Like Père Griffet before him, Chevalier came across Du Junca’s registers, including the entries concerning the death and burial of the mysterious prisoner. He summarized these and added his own observations:26 “This is the famous masked man whom no one has ever known,” he wrote. “He was treated with great distinction by the governor, and was seen only by M. de Rosarges, major of the said château, who had sole charge of him; he was not ill except for a few hours, and died rather suddenly: interred at St Paul’s on Tuesday November 20, 1703, at four o’clock, under the name of Marchiergues [sic].” He went on to add that the prisoner “was buried in a new sheet and generally everything that was found in his room was burnt, such as his bed, including the mattress, tables, chairs, and other items, [which were] reduced to dust and ashes and thrown into the privies.” Other items used by the prisoner were similarly destroyed. “This prisoner was lodged in the third chamber of the Bertaudière Tower, which chamber was scraped back to the stone and whitewashed. The doors and windows were burned with the rest.”