The Man in the Iron Mask Read online

  Mme de Campan further elaborated on “the man on whom people have been pleased to fix an iron mask.” She appealed to the authority of a certain unnamed author, who had scoured the archives of the foreign office and laid the true story before the public, but the people “would not acknowledge the authenticity of his account.” Instead, they relied upon the authority of Voltaire, and now the general belief was that the masked prisoner had been a natural or a twin brother of Louis XIV.

  “The story of this mask,” speculated Mme de Campan, “perhaps had its origin in the old custom, among both men and women in Italy, of wearing a velvet mask when they exposed themselves to the sun.” As such, it was possible “that the Italian captive may have sometimes shown himself upon the terrace of his prison with his face thus covered.” Campan then turned her attention to the silver plate that the prisoner was said to have thrown from his window: “It is known that such a circumstance did happen,” she affirmed, “but it happened at Valzin, in the time of Cardinal Richelieu.” As a result, the anecdote “has been mixed up with the inventions respecting the Piedmontese prisoner.”

  By the time Mme de Campan’s memoir was published, the Revolution had taken place and her mistress, Marie-Antoinette, was dead. The events that had rocked France and swept away the ancien régime nevertheless led to a happy outcome for historians and researchers: the state papers and archives, which had long been the jealously guarded property of officialdom, were made available for the first time.

  Eager scholars flocked to see what might be revealed about the mysterious prisoner who had lived and died within an iron mask. A special commission was established with Charpentier as its chairman, whose task was to sift through the dusty and yellowing records and note those that contained any information about the prisoner. As it turned out, nothing new was found. The Bastille’s archives could add nothing more to what was already known, much of which had already been published several years earlier by Griffet.

  Disappointed researchers turned their attention to the ministry for war to see what secrets its archives might reveal. These were meticulously researched and classified by Bishop Jean-Baptiste Massieu, who, between 1797 and 1815, worked his way through some eight hundred volumes of documents. Among these precious papers they found the correspondence that was exchanged between the ministry for war and Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars.

  Under Louis XIV, official correspondence was handled according to a carefully set out procedure.34 When a minister wanted to send a letter, he would write down what he had to say in a Minute. A clerk would use this to produce the letter, which was then sent to the intended recipient. The Minute was kept in the files of the ministry, which eventually formed an archive of correspondence for that ministry. This seemingly straightforward procedure did not mean, however, that the documents were kept in any kind of order. The clerks were kept busy and had little time to organize these papers into a classified collection.

  The documents relating to the prisoners of Pignerol, Exilles, and the Île Sainte-Marguerite began in 1664 with Saint-Mars’s appointment as jailer to Nicholas Foucquet at Pignerol. They came to an end in 1698 upon his transfer to the Bastille. Some of these documents were printed by Pierre Roux-Fazillac, whose Recherches historiques et critiques sur l’homme au masque de fer was published in 1800. Joseph Delort published a selection of letters in 1825 in Histoire de l’homme au masque de fer; four years later, he published the correspondence in its entirety in the first volume of Histoire de la Détention des Philosophes et des Gens de Lettres à la Bastille et à Vincennes, précédée de celle de Foucquet, de Pellisson et de Lauzun, avec tous les documents authentiques et inédits. Marius Topin printed a selection of letters, including some new discoveries, in L’Homme au masque de fer in 1869 as did Théodore Iung in his 1872 work, La Verite sur le Masque de Fer (Les Empoisonneurs), d’après des documents inedits. Iung’s beautiful book also contains floor plans of the various prisons in which the Man in the Iron Mask was held. Finally, the Archives de la Bastille was published in sixteen volumes between 1866 and 1884. The first three volumes, edited by François Ravaisson, contain the relevant documents under the heading “Fouquet.” A. S. Barnes published a collection of original documents in his The Man of the Mask in 1912.

  The content of some of this correspondence was taken from surviving letters, but in other cases the editors had to rely on the Minutes because letters would often be destroyed, end up in private collections, or simply go astray. Sometimes, the content of missing letters can successfully be reconstructed from matters addressed in the replies.

  As extensive as this material was, however, scholars quickly encountered a major impediment: Eustache’s name had been omitted from the Minute from which the order for his arrest had been taken, although it had been written into the letter sent to Saint-Mars in July 1669 and the lettre de cachet that was sent to Vauroy several days later. This omission would have an impact on researchers because it cast doubt upon the name that appeared in the letters, and it came to be accepted that the name written on the letter sent to Saint-Mars, Eustache Dauger, must have been false. The sole purpose of this, it came to be believed, was to disguise the prisoner’s true identity.

  As a result, historians continued to look for anyone whose story they thought best fit the circumstances of the mysterious prisoner.35 He had to be an important person, imprisoned under conditions of unprecedented secrecy as an annoyance to the king or a threat to France. A prince of the royal house was favored by some; others went further, suggesting that he must have been a brother of Louis XIV or even his twin, a suggestion that captured the imagination of writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Louis XIV himself was proposed as a candidate by baron de Gleichen, with the king imprisoned and masked by his elder brother, who took his throne and his name. Matthioli, who had betrayed Louis XIV, was for many the true face behind the iron mask, while Nicolas Foucquet’s name was put forward at the time of the Revolution, the ultimate victim of royal tyranny.36 On one occasion the Jacobin monk was proposed, as was the playwright and actor Molière.37 In 1899, historian Maurice Boutry38 explored various possibilities: a son of Christina of Sweden and her lover Monaldeschi; a son of Louis XIV and Henriette d’Angleterre; a son of Henriette d’Angleterre and the comte de Guiche; a child born to Marie-Louise d’Orléans, the result of an adulterous affair; a natural child of Marie-Anne de Neubourg, second wife of Charles II of Spain; or even a son born to Marie-Thérèse of Austria and her black page. Boutry eventually settled on Matthioli. A valet known as Martin was proposed by Andrew Lang. James Stuart de la Cloche, an illegitimate son of Charles II of England, was put forward by Edith F. Carey. Monsignor A. S. Barnes proposed the abbé Giuseppe Prignani, who had swindled the English royal court out of a lot of money; Dr. Franz Scheichl’s choice was Jacques Bretel de Grémonville, a Maltese diplomat. More tragically, Frantz Funck-Brentano suggested that the prisoner wore the mask not out of cruelty or punishment, but to hide the disfiguring effects of a cancroid on his face.39 In time, more faces would be found behind the mask, including Claude Imbert, who had served Mazarin as a valet-cum-secretary and whose candidacy was explored by Sonnino, and d’Artagnan, the famous musketeer, who was proposed by Macdonald.

  By this time, however, the iron mask had already been lifted and the true face of the man within had been revealed. In 1890, the lawyer and historian Jules Lair published a two-volume biography of Nicolas Foucquet. Out of necessity, he wrote about Foucquet’s life as a prisoner at Pignerol and the people he encountered there. One of these was a man who had been imprisoned under conditions of great secrecy and held in dreadful surroundings before being allowed to serve Foucquet as his valet. Lair identified the prisoner as Eustache Dauger, but the mystery did not stop there.

  THIRTEEN The Man in the Iron Mask

  Who was this person and why had he been arrested? He was French, Catholic, a valet by profession. Everything leads us to believe that he was really called Eustache Dauger. He had been employed for a cer
tain task, which has never been specified. Presumably, he was one of those men who were charged with shady missions, carrying off money or people, perhaps even worse, and whose silence, once the deed is accomplished, is ensured by death or imprisonment.1

  Jules Lair revealed the mysterious prisoner to be a valet called Eustache Dauger in his two-volume biography of Nicolas Foucquet, which was published in 1890. Although he provided an overview of scholarly speculation about the various proposed identities of the Man in the Iron Mask in an appendix to the second volume, Lair did not investigate the mystery any further: his book was about Foucquet, not the masked prisoner, and he had already shown this person to have been the man sent to join Foucquet as a prisoner at Pignerol and, later, to serve him as a valet.

  While, as we have seen, even after Lair’s revelation some historians continued to search for men who may have been the Iron Mask, others accepted Lair’s conclusions or subsequently came to agree with him as a result of their own research. For them, the search shifted from looking for a suitable candidate to trying to find a man who fit a particular set of criteria. Eustache had to be French and a Catholic; he had to have been arrested at Calais and to have disappeared in July 1669.

  One historian, Maurice Duvivier, set about the task of tracking down Eustache and discovered him to have been a man named Eustache Dauger de Cavoye. His book, Le Masque de fer, was published in 1932.

  The family d’Oger or Dauger originated in Picardie. François Dauger de Cavoye was captain of Cardinal Richelieu’s musketeers, a regiment every bit as proud as the king’s musketeers with whom they would compete for military glory. In an interesting coincidence, François’s father had acquired the epithet of Bras-de-fer, or Iron Arm.2 On September 16, 1625, François married Marie de Lort de Sérignan, a woman famous for her beauty, who served as lady of honor to Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV.

  Unusually, the Cavoye marriage was a love match, and, in a period with a high child-mortality rate, the couple were blessed with eleven surviving children: Henriette, Pierre, Constance, Marie, Charles, Eustache, Armand, Louis, Anne, and two other children whose place in the order of birth is not known, Jacques and Charlotte. Three of their sons sometimes went by other names: Pierre was also known as Gaspard, Charles was Hector, and Eustache was called Jacques, despite having a brother with that name. By all accounts, the Cavoyes were a model family, but there was one black sheep: Eustache.

  Eustache Dauger de Cavoye was born on August 30, 1637, in Paris and was baptized at the church of Saint-Eustache on February 18 the following year.3 Like his brothers, he followed his father into a military career and joined the French Guards, but he soon drifted into a life of depravity that brought shame on his family.

  At Easter 1659, Eustache and his field commander, the comte de Guiche, were invited to a party at the château de Roissy.4 The guests were all in their early twenties except for one, Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, who was twice their age. All, however, were out for a good time. The party began on Good Friday, a day of strict religious observance, fasting, abstinence, and the contemplation of Christ’s Passion. The group, however, interpreted these obligations in their own way. While they observed the fast, they made up for the deprivation by drinking throughout the day. When it came to their evening meal, they accepted that they were required to eat fish and not meat, so they took a piglet to the chapel and baptized it “carp” before slaughtering and eating it. They indulged in fun and games, drinking and homosexual sex, which continued until Easter Sunday, when the party broke up and the revelers went their separate ways.

  News of the party quickly spread, and all who heard about it were scandalized. The king ordered an inquiry, and those who had taken part were sent from court. Eustache’s punishment is not known, but his outraged family was not forced to share it. Mazarin assured Madame de Cavoye that her reputation would remain untarnished, and Anne of Austria invited her to Louis’s wedding the following year.

  Eustache, despite being labeled “Cavoye de Roissy” as a result of the scandal, managed to put any shame he felt behind him and became a lieutenant in 1662. Three years later, however, he became involved in another scandal when, stationed at Saint-Germain, he got into an argument with a drunken page and ran the boy through with his sword. Louis was furious that such a thing could occur in a place sanctified by his presence and refused to allow Eustache to appear before him.

  It was at about this time that Madame de Cavoye died suddenly. She had, however, already endured enough of her son’s antics and had made arrangements for her disappointment with him to be felt in a way that would injure him the most. Her eldest sons having died in battle, she had drawn up her will on May 6, 1664, and, making use of a clause in her marriage contract that allowed her, under the custom of Picardie, she disinherited both Eustache and Armand in favor of their younger brother, Louis. Eustache would receive 1,000 livres a year, while Armand would have 2,000. Armand meant to contest this, but he was killed in 1667 before he could do so. As for Eustache, he came to an arrangement with Louis, in which he received an extra 1,000 livres a year in exchange for some small properties he had inherited several years earlier when he became titular head of the family.

  At this point Duvivier loses sight of Eustache Dauger de Cavoye. Indeed, Eustache disappears entirely from the historical record in May 1668. As Duvivier scoured the archives in an attempt to pick up his trail, he discovered a man named Auger, a surgeon operating in the Parisian underworld. Auger was involved in the infamous Affair of the Poisons, working alongside the abbé Guibourg. Duvivier saw that, on one occasion, Auger and the abbé were said to have participated in a black mass held at the Palais-Royal.

  According to one of their accomplices, Lesage, the black mass had been said for Henriette, duchesse d’Orléans, and its purpose had been to bring about the death of her husband, Philippe.5 It was said that Henriette hated Philippe because he preferred his male favorites over her, particularly the chevalier de Lorraine, who ruled Philippe’s house. The mass itself, therefore, had to have taken place prior to March 1668, which was when Lesage was imprisoned in the Bastille and two months before Eustache disappeared from history. Duvivier quickly realized that Auger and Eustache Dauger had to be one and the same man. Now here he was working satanic rituals for the highest in the land.

  Duvivier claims that Louvois arranged for Eustache de Cavoye, aka Auger, to be arrested in July 1669 and sent off to Pignerol, far away from the court. However, even in this grim fortress, Eustache failed to learn from his harsh imprisonment. Rather than mend his ways, he brought down an even worse fate upon himself by poisoning Nicolas Foucquet. This provided the solution to Louvois’s enigmatic reference to “drugs” in his letter to Saint-Mars of July 10, 1680. Further, Duvivier speculates that Eustache had probably killed Foucquet on behalf of Colbert, but instead of being released as his reward, he was shut away for the rest of his life.

  Duvivier provides a fascinating theory as he seeks to identify who Eustache really was and to explain the truth behind his story. He has found a man with a very similar name. In that period, there were almost always several variant spellings of most names, so this accounted for the inconsistencies in the spelling of Eustache’s name: Dauger, d’Auger, Auger. Duvivier also provides a motive for Eustache’s extended imprisonment: that he murdered Foucquet, and even the timing is accurate. There is one vital element that Duvivier’s theory fails to address, however, which is the need to hide Eustache’s face within an iron mask.

  This point is answered by Rupert Furneaux in his book The Man behind the Mask: The Real Story of the “Ancient Prisoner,” which was published in 1954. Furneaux discovered a striking resemblance between Eustache’s younger brother, Louis, and Louis XIV. There was only one explanation for this: Marie de Sérignan, the mother of Eustache and Louis de Cavoye, had been the mistress of Louis XIII, and he had been the father of these two boys.

  Furneaux’s theory is interesting, but it does not take into account how Louis XIII, a sullen man
with a deep distrust of women in general, could have been inclined to father two sons out of wedlock. The two relationships he did have with women other than his queen had been close but were entirely platonic.

  It would take a further twenty years before another historian approached the subject of Eustache de Cavoye. In 1974, Marie-Madeleine Mast published Le Masque de fer: Une solution révolutionnaire. She agreed with Furneaux that Louis de Cavoye and Louis XIV looked very much alike, but she rejected his conclusion. Her revolutionary solution was that the two men did not share the same father, but the same mother. Mast argues that Cardinal Richelieu was concerned about Louis XIII’s infertility and the dire consequences for France if he did not produce an heir to the throne. Richelieu ordered the captain of his musketeers, François de Cavoye, to do something about it.

  François de Cavoye was a handsome, virile man who had fathered eleven children, including six strapping sons. It was he, according to Mast, who fathered the child born to Anne of Austria on September 5, 1638, not Louis XIII. This explained the resemblance between Louis de Cavoye and Louis XIV, but it also explained why Eustache was arrested. Having become head of the family upon the deaths of his elder brothers, he had become privy to the family papers and discovered the secret of his royal origins. He then began to talk about what he had discovered and had to be silenced, his features forever hidden behind a mask of iron.

  Each of these theories, fascinating and convincing though they might be, have serious flaws. Emile Laloy6 correctly asserts that no gentleman, no matter how low he might have fallen, would have stooped to making a living as a surgeon. In 17th-century France, a surgeon performed several tasks: among others, as a barber, a peddler in folk remedies, and an apothecary. There is a discrepancy of time, too: the surgeon, Auger, was still at large in 1676, seven years after Duvivier supposed him to have entered Pignerol. As to the resemblance between Louis de Cavoye and Louis XIV, even if it were true, there is nothing to say that it would have been shared by Eustache de Cavoye. Moreover, as Noone points out,7 Louis XIV’s courtiers made it their business to try to look like the king, copying his clothes and even trying to match their wigs to his.