The Man in the Iron Mask Page 25
Similarly, Duvivier, who believed Eustache to have been a gentleman, was concerned that someone of his rank should be reduced to working as a valet.23 He argued that Louvois’s reference to him as being “only a valet” was an act of spite typical of the minister. This insult was deepened when Eustache was sent to serve Foucquet. This, he argued, was no doubt mitigated by the fact that Foucquet had two servants, with Eustache acting as a secretary or companion, while La Rivière performed the menial tasks. Both Amberlain and Duvivier, however, ignore the strong traditions that underpinned French society at the time. As Petitfils24 argues, French society in the 17th century was organized along class lines and to put a nobleman into service would never have been tolerated, no matter what his crime might have been. Had a noble officer been forced into work below his rank, the same could easily have applied to Matthioli or Lauzun had the circumstances demanded it. This did not, and never would have, happened.
As it was, a valet might be employed in the service of a king, a prince, a member of the aristocracy or a minister, perhaps as a valet de chambre or similar position. Often, a valet would serve his master in secret and often dangerous missions, as Rousseau, Matthioli’s servant had done. Herein lies the secret of Eustache’s crime, his secret and his fate.
At the time of Eustache’s arrest, in July 1669, Louis XIV was busily making preparations for a war against the Dutch. It was a long-standing ambition, the aim of which was to acquire the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté, which would expand the borders of France and ensure the greater security of his kingdom. He had already made an attempt to gain these territories two years previously, claiming them in right of his Spanish queen, Marie-Thérèse of Austria,25 as compensation for the nonpayment of the balance of her dowry. In that campaign, which came to be known as the War of Devolution, Louis had made important gains, but he had been obliged to relinquish much of the captured territory under the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed on May 2, 1668.
Louis, however, remained determined to fulfil his original objective. He knew that his best plan was to go to war against the Dutch, whom he despised because of their republicanism, their Protestantism, and their scurrilous propaganda campaigns against him. Once he had defeated this enemy, he would be free to mount a fresh assault on the Spanish Low Countries and Franche-Comté, but in order to ensure success he needed the support of England. He was aware that Charles II had recently entered into a treaty of alliance with Holland, but Louis was confident that he could persuade his English cousin to break this treaty, transfer his allegiance to France, and support Louis in a war against his former allies.
For his part, Charles had long desired a close coalition between England and France. He saw himself and Louis as natural allies standing united against the Dutch and the Spanish. It was true that he had sided with these two powers against France in a pact known as the Triple Alliance, but he claimed to have done so in order to redress the balance of power in Europe and to curtail Louis’s worrying seizure of territories along his borders and holding them hostage while he sought favorable terms from Spain. Charles’s membership of the Triple Alliance had forced Louis to make peace with Spain.
While Charles had several reasons for wanting to ally with Louis, his primary and most secret aim was to secure Louis’s support in readiness for his proposed public announcement of his commitment to Roman Catholicism. He and his beloved sister, Henriette, who was married to Louis’s brother, the duc d’Orléans, had for some time been working toward Charles’s conversion and for a closer alliance between England and France.
January 25, 1669 (old style),26 was a significant date for Charles, for it marked the feast of the conversion of St Paul. Charles chose this day to hold a meeting at the Whitehall lodgings of his brother, the duke of York. Besides the king and his brother, three other men were present: Lord Arlington, Lord Arundell, and Sir Thomas Clifford. Charles notified them of his intention to convert to Roman Catholicism and to have the support of Louis XIV. He asked those gathered for “their advice about the ways and methods fittest to be taken for the settling of the Catholic religion in his kingdoms and to consider of the time most proper to declare himself.”27
Charles’s projected aim was that he and Louis should join forces to form an “offensive and defensive league toward one and all.”28 Louis would then provide Charles with a significant sum of money while placing troops and ships at the disposal of the English king, should they be required. In exchange for Louis’s support, Charles would lend military assistance to Louis in his forthcoming Dutch War. The negotiations, conducted under the utmost secrecy between Charles and Henriette, would ultimately lead to the Treaty of Dover.
A few days prior to his secret meeting at Whitehall, Charles decided he ought to send Henriette a cipher “by the first safe occasion, and you shall then know the way I thinke most proper to proceede in the whole matter.” He added, “I will say no more by the post upon this business, for you know tis not very sure.”29
Charles sent the cipher with a letter dated January 20, 1669 (old style): “I send you heere a cipher which is very easy and secure, the first side is in single cipher, and written within such names I could thinke of necessary to our purpose.”30
As secure as Charles considered his cipher to be, he and Henriette took still more precautions. They employed trusted servants to carry their secret correspondence, men who often remained anonymous even to the recipient. On December 27, 1668, for example, Charles sent a message to his sister “by a safe way, and you know how much secrecy is necessary for the carrying on of the business, and I assure you that nobody does nor shall know any thing of it here but my self and that one person more till it be fit to be public, which will not be until all matters are agreed on.”31
The identity of this “one person more” is not disclosed, and it is clear that not all the messengers that sailed the English Channel were known to both parties. Indeed, it was not unusual for one messenger to pass on correspondence to another, so that there was a relay of letters passing back and forth. In another letter to Henriette, Charles notes that he had received her letter by “the Italian whose name and capasity you do not know, and he delivered your letter to me in a passage where it was so darke as I do not know his face againe if I see him.”32
The negotiations between Charles and Henriette were so secret that even Ralph Montagu, the English representative in Paris, did not know that they were taking place at all.33 He was, however, aware that some sort of intrigue was going on, for he mentioned that the French court, like its English counterpart, was “full of cabals and stories.” As he wrote to Lord Arlington, “great consultations” were taking place with Louis’s minister, Colbert, the maréchal Turenne, Henriette, and Ruvigny, and that “couriers are some time dispatched into England, which perhaps you do not know, but if you would give order to the post-master at Dover, you would easily find it out.”34
In fact, the negotiations referred to by Montagu were to do with the proposed military support Charles expected from France. Colbert, for instance, would have been involved by necessity because he was the minister for the navy, while Turenne was one of France’s greatest military men.
As to Charles’s intentions to convert to Catholicism, the “great secret” was known to very few people, most of whom were in France. These were Louis XIV, Henriette, Turenne, the comte de Saint-Albans, the abbé Walter Montagu, and Lionne. Toward the middle of April 1669, two more people were admitted into the secret negotiations: Michel Le Tellier, minister of state for war, and his son, the marquis de Louvois, who worked under his father at the same ministry. Eustache could have been in the service of any one of these people, carrying the secret correspondence between his master or mistress to be passed to the recipient directly or through another courier. Had this been the case, it would go some way to explaining the angry tone to Louvois’s letter, in which Eustache is referred to as a “wretch” and “only a valet.” Had Le Tellier or Louvois felt that Eustache had somehow
betrayed them or committed some transgression while in their service, this would account for the anger and Louvois’s desire to keep Eustache under seclusion in unpleasant circumstances.
In July 1669, with the negotiation with Charles well underway, Louis suddenly and inexplicably fell out with Henriette. This was an unexpected development since the two had previously been very close, and it did not go unnoticed. On July 23, Henriette withdrew from Saint-Germain to go to Saint-Cloud to prepare for the birth of her child.35 Three days later, on July 26, Ralph Montagu wrote in her defense to Lord Arlington:
She is the most that can be beloved in this country by everybody but the King and her husband. She has too great a spirit I believe ever to complain, or to let the King her brother know of it, but I tell your Lordship of it, that you may take all the occasions wherein the King can, of putting his Majesty upon supporting her, both as his sister, and as a sister that deserves it from him by her real concern in everything that relates either to his honor or interest.36
Some weeks after this, Henriette wrote to Lord Arlington about some “suspicions” she had, which were:
founded on reasons of which I informed the King some time ago by a Page of the Backstairs to the Queen. He may have told you of them, and I gave some credence to them, because at the same time I had perceived a coldness in the feelings of the King of France for me, which made me think that, fearing that I might discover that he was not acting in good faith, he wished to remove me from the business [of the negotiations], for fear that I might warn the King my brother of it, as assuredly I should have done.37
What had caused this coldness is not known. Hartmann thought it stemmed from Louis’s belief that Henriette was favoring Charles’s interests over those of France.38
Henriette’s biographer, Jacqueline Duchêne, believed that Henriette, a former lover of Louis’s, was jealous of Madame de Montespan, who was expecting the king’s child.39 While either of these suggestions is plausible, Petitfils had suggested a third, which is that Louis’s coldness toward Henriette originated with some indiscretion on the part of one of her servants, which threatened to compromise relations between Louis and Charles.40 Had Eustache been that servant, it would explain his arrest and subsequent imprisonment without trial in July 1669. Petitfils points out that Louvois, having announced Eustache’s imminent arrival at Pignerol to Saint-Mars on July 19, waited until July 23, the date Henriette left Saint-Germain, to set a trap for Eustache with a view to having him arrested at Calais.
It was during the summer of 1669, then, under a heady atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue, as diplomats, couriers, spies, and servants crossed from France to England and back again, when Louis was soliciting Charles II’s cooperation and Charles was seeking Louis’s support, that Louis took the time to authorize the arrest and incarceration of someone who had displeased him. This was affected by means of a letter de cachet, which allowed the prisoner to be held at the king’s pleasure without having to go through the judicial process.
Eustache was taken to Pignerol, a secure prison on the very frontier of France. His identity was not hidden; instead, Eustache was subject to stringent security measures in order to ensure that he could not tell of what he knew. In time, he was allowed to serve one prisoner, Foucquet, but on no account was he allowed to have contact with another, Lauzun.
Later, he was transferred to another strong fortress, accompanied by a valet who had learned Eustache’s secret and who had failed in his duty to alert the authorities of a breach in the prison security. Now both men lost their names and were hidden away from a world that had forgotten them. In these terrible conditions, his companion died, leaving Eustache entirely alone.
A change in Eustache’s imprisonment occurred following the death of Louvois on July 16, 1691. At this point, he fell deeper into obscurity and was no longer the focus of ministerial attention. Even Louvois’s son and successor, Barbezieux, was unaware of who Eustache was or why he had been sent to prison. If the theory that Eustache was somehow connected with the negotiations that would lead to the signing of Treaty of Dover in 1670 is correct, then many of the main players were dead by the time of Louvois’s death. Henriette had died many years previously in 1670; Charles II in 1685. Charles’s successor, James II, was overthrown in 1688, and whatever hopes he might have harbored of regaining his throne were shattered at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Eustache’s secret was no longer important, and neither was he, except to Saint-Mars.
As the jailer of two of the most important men in France, Saint-Mars had found fame, glory, and wealth. Even after the death of one distinguished prisoner and the release of the second, Saint-Mars was able to continue his privileged life by allowing people to think that he still had a man of substance in his charge, and Barbezieux was in no position to contradict him. Eventually, Saint-Mars reached the high point of his career when he was offered the governorship of the Bastille. It was a fitting end to an illustrious career, and he accepted the post, taking his apparently important prisoner with him.
By this time, the prisoner had long been a man without a name, even without a face, and it was as a man of mystery that he arrived at the Bastille in 1698. Although this prison was used for aristocrats and exceptional people, Eustache was neither. He went to the Bastille by virtue of his being Saint-Mars’s prisoner. Here, he disappeared from the view of history until his death five years later, when he was buried under a false name, one that would suggest to anyone who saw the burial register that he was Matthioli. Even in his grave, Eustache still had his uses. Foucquet was known to be long dead and Lauzun still had several years to live; that left Matthioli as the only prisoner of consequence with whose name Saint-Mars was associated. As such, Eustache was buried under a name that closely resembled his, a final twist to the mystery that he had become.
Many people continue to believe that the Man in the Iron Mask must have been a famous person, perhaps even a member of the royal family. A favorite explanation is that he was a brother, even a twin, of Louis XIV, and this is the reason why his face had to be covered.
Nevertheless, while there are many aspects of the prisoner’s life that will forever remain a mystery, there are still some conclusions that can be drawn. He was not a well-known figure at court, and his disappearance was not noted nor remarked upon in contemporary letters or memoirs. Eustache was a young man, a valet who lived an anonymous existence on the edge of the court, never being part of it but perhaps serving someone who was.
Who that person might have been is open to speculation. It could have been Henriette, duchesse d’Orléans, with Eustache being involved as a messenger in the secret and sensitive negotiations that she was holding with her brother, Charles II. On the other hand, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Eustache might have served Louvois in some capacity and that he was angered when he thought his valet had somehow betrayed him. While it is true that he abused most of the prisoners he sent to Saint-Mars and subjected almost all of them to harsh prison conditions, he appears to have taken a particular interest in Eustache. For example, there is the letter in which he wanted to know how Eustache might have gotten hold of the drugs Saint-Mars had found in his possession. Elsewhere, Louvois asks Saint-Mars for a list of the prisoners under his care and what he knew of the reasons for their imprisonment. As to Eustache and his companion, they were simply to be referred to as “the two prisoners in the lower part of the tower”; Saint-Mars was told he “need only designate them by this name without adding anything else.” Prisoners could, and did, become lost in the prison system. Louvois might have forgotten the names and the crimes of those prisoners who came under his jurisdiction, but he never forgot Eustache or why he had been arrested. Upon the death of Louvois, Eustache was no longer of importance to anyone other than Saint-Mars, who used him for his own profit and to boost his own grandeur. Whatever the truth, and we may never know, Voltaire was more right than he realized when he said that, upon the arrest of Eustache, “no man of any consequence in Europe disap
peared.”
Louis XIV as a young man. The king was thirty-one years old when he ordered the arrest of his famous prisoner. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
François Michel Le Tellier, marquis de Louvois, minister for war. He oversaw every detail of the daily life of the prisoners under his jurisdiction. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars was initially the only one to have direct contact with Eustache.
Nicolas Foucquet, Saint-Mars’s first prisoner at Pignerol. Foucquet would play a major part in the story of the mysterious prisoner. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Antonin Nompar de Caumont, comte de Lauzun. It was vital that he had no contact with Eustache whatsoever, a directive that would be invalidated by Lauzun’s own activity. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Lettre de cachet sent to Captain de Vauroy. The letter gives the prisoner’s name as Eustache Dauger, but the u in Dauger could be a badly formed n. Compare this with the n in Captain two lines above and Pignerol three lines below.
The citadel of Pignerol and part of the town.
Plan of the donjon of Pignerol. Angle Tower, where Foucquet and Lauzun occupied apartments, is the D-shaped structure in the northeastern corner of the donjon. The Lower Tower, where Eustache’s cell was, is in the tower below that, in the center of the eastern curtain wall. Saint-Mars’s apartments run along the north wall, and the chapel of Saint-George is in the northwest corner.
Dramatic image of Pignerol being struck by lightning.
Letter dated July 10, 1680, showing Louvois’s handwriting at the foot. He asks Saint-Mars to “send me word how it has happened that the individual named Eustache has been able to do what you have sent me word of, and where he got the drugs necessary for the purpose, as I cannot think you would have furnished them to him.”