The Man in the Iron Mask Read online

  Three years after the publication of Chevalier’s book, Jean-Pierre Papon, a librarian at the Collège de l’Oratoire at Marseille, was traveling through Provence. He was gathering stories and anecdotes about the area for a book, Voyage littéraire de Provence, which he would publish in 1780. His journey inevitably took him to the Îles de Lérins, where he researched the story of the “famous prisoner with the Iron Mask, whose name we will perhaps never know.”27 He learned that there were only a few people who had access to the prisoner, one of whom was his jailer, Saint-Mars, whose name here is incorrectly given as Saint-Marc.

  In one of the stories Papon heard, Saint-Mars was talking to the prisoner one day, standing just outside the room as he did so in order that he might see if anyone approached who should not be there. As it happened, the son of one of his friends appeared unexpectedly in the corridor, causing Saint-Mars hurriedly to close the door before the young man could see who was inside. Disconcerted, the jailer asked the youth if he had heard anything, and the boy assured him that he had not. Even so, Saint-Mars sent the boy away that same day with a letter to the father saying that the adventure had almost cost his son dearly and that he was sending the boy home for fear of anything else happening.

  Papon then heard of another alleged incident, this time involving a fisherman who had found a silver plate. He had taken it to Saint-Mars, who told him that he was fortunate that he could not read. Papon did not elaborate upon this story, but it is clear that it was inspired by the antics of the Huguenot minister, Pierre de Salves, who used to write his name on his pewter vessels and linen.28 Papon related this story on the strength of Voltaire, who, he says, had not imagined it, but he added that the oldest people at the fort assured him that they had never heard of it.

  Intrigued by these stories, Papon visited the chamber said to have been occupied by the masked prisoner. It was lit by one north-facing window, which was set into a very thick wall and closed behind three sets of iron bars, each placed at equal distance from the other. The window looked out onto the sea. He found an officer of the compagnie-franche in the citadel, a man of seventy-nine, whose father had also served in the regiment. This man recalled a story his father had told him about a barber who one day had seen something white floating in the water below the prisoner’s window. The barber had fished out the item to discover that it was a shirt of fine white linen, carelessly folded, and which was covered with writing. He took it to Saint-Mars, who, having unfolded it and read a few lines of the writing, asked the barber if he had not had the curiosity to read what was written on it. The barber protested several times that he was unable to read; however, two days later, he was found dead in his bed. This was the story the officer had heard from his father, and which was also known to the almoner who had served at the same time.

  Papon goes on to explain that at one stage a search had been made for a woman to serve the prisoner, and a lady from the village of Mougins applied, thinking that such a job would allow her to make her children’s fortune. When she was told that she would no longer be able to see her children, or even to maintain contact with anyone outside the prison, she refused to be shut in with the prisoner. Papon added that two sentinels were placed at either side of the fortress on the sea side, and that they had orders to fire on any boats that approached within a certain distance of the island.

  Papon’s account shows now classic hallmarks of the legend in the making. Historical facts, such as Saint-Mars’s assertion that he could not find valets for his prisoners because they did not wish to be imprisoned themselves, and de Salves writing on his plates and shirts and throwing them out of the window, have become associated with stories of the mysterious prisoner. That the shirts have now become fine white linen suggest the influence of Voltaire and the connection between the prisoner and the royal family.

  While the story that the Man in the Iron Mask was an older brother of Louis XIV is most associated with Voltaire, the city of Chartres was home to a different version of the legend. This time, the mysterious prisoner was said to have been the son of Anne of Austria and a lover, possibly George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. The handsome English duke had famously flirted with the queen during a visit to France in 1625.

  The story can be traced to Genevieve-Antoinette du Bois de Saint-Quentin, who was the mistress of Barbezieux, secretary of state for war. Barbezieux died in 1701, leaving his mistress with enough money to allow her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. Mademoiselle de Saint-Quentin withdrew from court and retired to Chartres, where she would remain until her death. It was here that she began to circulate the story that Anne of Austria had secretly given birth to a child by a lover, adding that she had been given this information by Barbezieux. The story persisted in Chartres, where it was heard by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, first valet de chambre to Louis XV. He later included it in his book, Histoire de l’Homme au masque de fer, tirée du Siècle de Louis XIV par Voltaire, which he published in London in 1783.

  Mlle de Saint-Quentin’s story was also known to the historian Charpentier, who wrote about the prisoner in his book, La Bastille dévoilée.29 He noted that Louis XIV and Louvois were the first trustees of the Iron Mask’s secret. Upon Louvois’s death, the secret passed to his son, Barbezieux, whose successor, Chamillart, inherited it in his turn. Chamillart, however, refused to tell his son-in-law, la Feuillade, who the mysterious man was, although he did hint at what the secret might have been about.

  According to Charpentier, the second duc d’Orléans became privy to the secret upon becoming regent, and that he may even have learned it from Louis XIV as the latter lay on his deathbed. Charpentier accepted Mlle de Saint-Quentin’s account that the prisoner was Anne of Austria’s illegitimate son by the duke of Buckingham, and that there was a “perfect resemblance” between him and his younger half-brother, Louis XIV, which is why the prisoner was put into the mask.

  Charpentier also comments on the stories of the extraordinary measures that were taken following the death of the prisoner. To the accounts of Griffet and Chevalier he adds others by Saint-Foix and Linguet, all making similar claims regarding the destruction of the chamber, linen, and other items used by the prisoner. These accounts were confirmed by M. le chevalier de Saint-Sauveur, whose father had been governor of the château de Vincennes at the same time that Saint-Mars was at the Bastille. Saint-Sauveur’s father had paid a visit to Saint-Mars and personally witnessed these precautions, which were taken to ensure that the secret of the Man in the Iron Mask was buried with him.

  Like others before him, the philologist and writer Louis Dutens was curious to find out anything he could about the Man in the Iron Mask.30 He recalled that the duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s foreign minister, had frequently heard the king say that he knew who the Iron Mask was. The duke’s interest was naturally piqued, and he would occasionally pluck up the courage to question the king directly about the man’s identity. The king, however, would never divulge any information except to say that the conjectures that had so far been made were all untrue. Undeterred, Choiseul urged the king’s mistress Madame de Pompadour to press her royal lover on the subject only for her to be told that the prisoner had been a minister of an Italian prince.

  Dutens researched the Italian prince and his ministers and discovered Matthioli, who had first been proposed as the Iron Mask in 1770. He contacted the marquis de Castellane, a former governor of the island of Sainte-Marguerite, who was also researching the story of the famous prisoner. He had come across a memoir written by one Claude Souchon.

  A man of seventy-nine years of age, Souchon was the son of Jacques Souchon, who had served as a cadet in Castellane’s compagnie-franche. Claude claimed to have been privy to Saint-Mars’s secrets and had often heard his father and the sieur Favre, Saint-Mars’s almoner, speaking about the prisoner who had been kept with such care and mystery on the island, and who was referred to as the Iron Mask. Souchon had deduced that the prisoner had been an imperial envoy of the court of Turin who had been a
bducted by the French, made to write to his secretary ordering him to send his papers to Louvois, and who had died on Sainte-Marguerite nine years after his arrest. Souchon denied many of the assertions made by Voltaire, including the story of the fisherman and the silver dish and that the Iron Mask had been taken to the Bastille by Saint-Mars. He did, however, know that the person who had served the prisoner had died on Sainte-Marguerite. This is obviously Rousseau, Matthioli’s valet, who died on the island and was buried on Saint-Honorat.

  Dutens’s account suggests that Claude Souchon was aware of several aspects of the prisoner’s story, although he did know the man’s name and he was mistaken about when Matthioli died. Matthioli was captured and imprisoned in 1679 and died in 1694, a period of fifteen years, not the nine stated by Souchon. It is probable that Matthioli’s death on Sainte-Marguerite was remembered by the officers who had staffed the prison at the time. Matthioli had been a prominent figure who had been abducted in a daring and illegal operation. After fifteen years as a prisoner, only one of which had been under the care of Saint-Mars, he had arrived on Sainte-Marguerite, only to die very shortly afterward. His story was exciting and his rank made it all the more memorable, but his imprisonment had not been a secret for very long; indeed, the only secrecy attached to his story related to the circumstances surrounding his abduction, not the fact of his captivity. That Souchon disagreed with Voltaire over the Iron Mask’s going to the Bastille is consistent with his own belief that the prisoner died on Sainte-Marguerite.

  Despite this, however, Dutens continued to believe that the Iron Mask had been Matthioli. For proof, he appealed to Du Junca’s registers, extracts of which had been published by Griffet twenty years earlier.31 Du Junca, it will be remembered, wrote that the prisoner had been buried under the name of Marchioly. This confirmed Dutens in his belief.

  Louis XV did indeed show a genuine interest in the subject of the Man in the Iron Mask. He and another of his valets de chambre, Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, would often discuss the prisoner. The king, however, would never reveal what he knew. One day, La Borde discovered a letter written by Charlotte d’Orléans to her lover, the maréchal de Richelieu. Charlotte, who was known as Mademoiselle de Valois, was the third daughter of the regent, Philippe. In his turn, Philippe was thought to have imparted the truth of the mysterious prisoner to Louis XV shortly before his death in 1723. The letter came to the attention of Friedrich Melchior, baron de Grimm, a German journalist living and working in France, and was printed in Correspondance littéraire, a collection of letters he had exchanged with Diderot, complete with anecdotes.32 According to Mademoiselle de Valois:

  While the queen, Anne of Austria, was pregnant, two shepherds arrived at the court and demanded to speak to the king. They revealed to him that they had been warned in a revelation that the queen was pregnant with two dauphins, whose birth would presage a civil war which would throw the whole kingdom into turmoil. The king immediately wrote of this to Cardinal Richelieu, his first minister, who replied that the king should not be alarmed, but to send the two shepherds to him and he would send them to the asylum of Saint-Lazare.

  In due course, the queen gave birth to a son while the king was at dinner. The birth of the boy who would grow up to be Louis XIV was witnessed by all whose presence was demanded by royal protocol. Four hours later, however, Madame Perronet, the queen’s midwife, was obliged to find the king to tell him that the queen’s labor pains had begun again. He sent someone to look for the chancellor and together they went to the queen’s bedroom in time to see her give birth to a second son, this one being more beautiful and more vigorous than the first. The birth was certified in an official record signed by the king, Mme Perronet, the doctor and a nobleman of the court, who later became the governor of the Iron Mask, and was imprisoned at the same time.

  The king drew up a formal oath to be said by all those who had witnessed the birth of the second child. They were never to reveal this important secret unless the dauphin died, and they were forbidden to speak of it even among themselves. The child was then given to Mme Perronet, who was told to say that he had been entrusted to her care by a lady of the court.

  When the child reached the age to pass into the care of men, that is, about seven years old, he was given into the care of the court nobleman who had been present at his birth. He went with his new pupil to Dijon, from where he corresponded with the queen, Cardinal Mazarin, who had taken over as first minister upon the death of Richelieu, and the king, now Louis XIV. Despite living in retreat, he remained a faithful courtier and showed the young prince all the respect due to a young man who could one day become his master. Such deference puzzled the young prince, who regarded the courtier as a father; he would question his governor about his birth and his status, but he found the nobleman’s answers unsatisfactory. One day, the prince asked his governor for a portrait of the king, only to be passed off with platitudes, a strategy used by the nobleman each time the young prince tried to discover the mystery of his origins.

  Now, the handsome young prince was no stranger to love. His first sighs were addressed to a chambermaid at the house, and he begged her to procure for him a portrait of the king. She refused at first, having been ordered, along with the other servants, not to give the prince anything unless their master was present. The prince, however, was insistent, and he eventually persuaded the chambermaid to obtain the requested portrait for him. As soon as he looked at the portrait, he was struck by his own resemblance to the king. He spoke to his governor again, asking questions about his origins in a manner more pressing and assured. He again asked to be shown a portrait of the king, but the governor tried to elude him. The prince answered: “You deceive me, here is a portrait of the king and a letter addressed to you reveals a mystery that you wanted to hide from me, in vain, for a long time. I am the king’s brother, and I want to go to court immediately to enjoy my state.” As an aside, the governor declared on his deathbed that he could never be sure how the young prince had gotten hold of the letter that he showed him; he said only that he was unaware that he had opened a casket in which he kept all the letters from the king, the queen, and Cardinal Mazarin. The governor shut away the prince and immediately sent a courier to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where the court was staying to negotiate the peace of the Pyrenees and the king’s marriage. The king sent an order to remove the prince and his governor, who were taken firstly to the Îles Sainte-Marguerite, and then to the Bastille, followed by the governor of the îles Sainte-Marguerite.

  La Borde, who for a long time had been close to Louis XV, astonished the king with his extraordinary interest in the story of the Man in the Iron Mask. The king sympathized and would always say of the prisoner: “I pity him, but his detention harmed no one but himself and it prevented great misfortune; you cannot know.” La Borde went on to tell of how Louis XV would recall that he had been very curious to know about the prisoner since he was a child, but had been told that he had to wait until he reached his majority before he could learn anything. When the fateful day finally dawned, he asked once again to be told the secret of the Man in the Iron Mask. The courtiers assembled at the door of his chamber waiting for him to emerge so they could interrogate him about what he had learned, but all he would say to them was that “You cannot know it.”

  The reign of Louis XV eventually gave way to that of his grandson, who ascended the throne as Louis XVI. Upon his succession, the new king spent time in several of the royal estates before settling at Versailles. Here, as Madame de Campan, lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, explains, Louis immersed himself in the study of his grandfather’s papers.33 He had promised the queen that he would tell her whatever he might discover about the history of the Man in the Iron Mask. This prisoner, he thought, “had become so inexhaustible a source of conjecture only in consequence of the interest which the pen of a celebrated writer had excited respecting the detention of a prisoner of State, who was merely a man of whimsical tastes and habits.”

  Having completed h
is research, the disappointed Louis informed Marie-Antoinette that he had not found anything among his predecessor’s papers to shed light on the existence of the mysterious prisoner. Undaunted, the royal couple turned to Monsieur de Maurepas, “whose age made him contemporary with the epoch during which the story must have been known to the ministers.” Maurepas, who was Louis XVI’s chief adviser, said that the prisoner was a man “of dangerous character, in consequence of his disposition for intrigue.” He went on to explain that he had been the subject of the duke of Mantua who had been enticed to the frontier where he was arrested. Held at first at Pignerol, he was moved to the Bastille when the governor of Pignerol was transferred there. “It was for fear the prisoner should profit by the experience of a new governor that he was sent with the Governor of Pignerol to the Bastille,” he explained.