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THE PRINCE IN THE IRON MASK

Lost in subterranean darkness, in cavernous galleries and labyrinthine passageways, a door of massive wood, reinforced with iron, scrapes open on rusted hinges and reveals a vaulted dungeon, dank and bare, where sits the skeleton of a prisoner hung with chains, the bones strung together by rags of clothing, the skull enclosed in an iron mask. Imprisoned in the time of Louis XIV¹, an iron helmet locked onto his head to hide his face, discovered in the time of Louis XVI,² and the melancholy features behind the anonymity of the mask reduced to the anonymity behind the face - to the grimacing bare bone skull.

The scenario is pure fantasy, but in the summer of 1789 when the Paris mob swarmed into the Bastille,³ slaughtered the guards and liberated the prisoners, there were people ready to believe it. In the popular imagination, the Bastille was the symbol of tyranny and since the mob had met with little resistance from the guards and had found only seven prisoners to release, some sensational invention was needed to satisfy public expectation. The mouldering bones bore witness to the monstrous inhumanity of the despotic rulers of France, of a king’s crime against his brother, a queen’s crime against her son. What did it matter to the ardent revolutionary that a skeleton in an iron mask had not really been found at all? The Man in the Iron Mask was real enough, his existence had been proved and his identity established long before. For a hundred years he had been the skeleton in the cupboard of the French Royal House and, with the overthrow of their tyranny, the truth could finally be told.

It was Voltaire,⁴ scourge of despotism, champion of the underdog, forebear of revolution, who had uncovered the infamy. His bones, refused honourable burial at the time of his death eleven years before, were also found by propagandists of the Revolution, in fact and not in the Bastille, and were transferred in glory to a hero’s monument in the Pantheon.⁵ His courage in print had been so great that to escape secret agents and hired thugs he had been obliged to live most of his life as a refugee outside of France; yet he, even he, had not dared to publish the entire truth. The account he had given had been spread over various books and the underlying secret revealed only by innuendo. As early as 1738 he had written to his friend the Abbé Dubos, permanent secretary of the French Academy: ‘I am well enough informed about the affair of the Man in the Iron Mask who died in the Bastille. I have spoken to people who served him.’ From May 1717 until April 1718 he had himself been a prisoner in the Bastille and presumably had persuaded members of the prison staff to talk, but he had spoken also to people in government, to relatives, friends and associates of ministers and officials who had been directly involved with the prisoner.

His first remarks appeared in his Si cle de Louis XIV published in Berlin in 1751. After a reference to the death of Cardinal Mazarin,⁶ which took place in March 1661, he continued:

Some months after the death of that minister, an event without parallel occurred, and what is no less strange is that all historians are unaware of it. An unknown prisoner, of height above the ordinary, young and of an extremely handsome and noble appearance, was conveyed with the utmost secrecy to the castle on the island of Sainte-Marguerite⁷ in the sea off Provence. On the way there this prisoner wore a mask, the chin-piece of which had steel springs to allow him to eat with it on, and the order was to kill him if he took it off. He stayed on the island until 1690 when a trusted officer named Saint-Mars, ⁸ the governor of Pignerol,⁹ was made governor of the Bastille and went to Sainte-Marguerite to get him and conduct him to the Bastille, still wearing the mask … This unknown man died in 1703 and was buried at night in the parish church of Saint-Paul. What is doubly astonishing is that when he was conveyed to Sainte-Marguerite, no man of consequence in Europe disappeared.

A second enlarged edition of the Si cle de Louis XIV was published the following year and a supplement added the year after that. In the 1752 edition, Voltaire provided more information: ‘M. de Chamillart¹⁰ was the last government minister to possess this strange secret. His son-in-law, the second Maréchal de La Feuillade, told me that when his father-in-law lay dying, he begged him on his knees to tell him who this man was, who was only ever known under the name of the Man in the Iron Mask. Chamillart replied that it was a state secret and that he had taken an oath never to reveal it.’ In the 1753 supplement, Voltaire followed this up with a simple deduction designed to prod his reader towards his own solution of the mystery: ‘One has only to ponder the fact that no man of any consequence disappeared at the time, and it is clear that it was a prisoner of the greatest importance whose destiny had always been a secret.’

Finally, in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie published in 1770, Voltaire went as far as he dared, leading his readers on with yet another carefully directed deduction and a further piece of pointed evidence: ‘It is clear that if he was not allowed to walk in the courtyard of the Bastille or talk to his physician except in a mask, it was for fear that some too striking resemblance would be recognized in his features … As for his age, he himself told the apothecary of the Bastille a few days before his death that he thought he was about sixty years old.’ All the information necessary to solve the puzzle was there. The Iron Mask was someone of the highest importance, whose very existence had always been a secret, whose face bore a close resemblance to a well-known person and whose age in 1703 was about sixty years old. In the light of this evidence, a closer consideration of the second factor - the reason for the mask – was enough to bring the reader to the truth which Voltaire had been afraid to publish.

The masked prisoner had been made noticeable by the very means used to render him anonymous. The authorities who forced him to wear the mask must have been aware of this. Clearly, in their estimation he nevertheless attracted less attention with the mask on his face than he would have done without it. The face of the Iron Mask is thus revealed precisely because such pains were taken to hide it. The only face universally recognizable in France at that time was the face of the King, known not only to the many who had actually seen him, whether at court, in procession or on campaign, but to anyone anywhere in the country. No other face, no matter how famous the name of its owner - were he a prince of the blood or a field-marshal, a provincial governor or a president of the Parlement - was known beyond the narrow circle of his own immediate influence. But the profile of the King, engraved as it was on the coins of the realm, was stamped indelibly upon the consciousness of the people.¹¹ Since the King’s face was the only one that was universally known, the only reasonable explanation for covering the prisoner’s face from everyone was that he bore such a close resemblance to the King that anyone seeing him would have recognized the likeness and would have supposed that the prisoner was the King; or would have realized the very secret the King wished to hide: that the prisoner was his own flesh and blood, his living image - his identical twin-brother.

The nightmare world of the doomed prince is easy to imagine. His mask was made of riveted iron, padded inside with silk and, being designed especially for him, was a perfect fit. It covered his head like a helmet and locked around his neck. The key was kept by the prison governor and he alone was authorized to use it. To unlock the mask without the key was impossible, and any attempt to wrench or break it off ran the risk of dislocating the wearer’s neck or fracturing his skull. It was heavy to wear but not otherwise uncomfortable, and could if necessary be left on the prisoner’s head for months at a time. Steel hinges on a spring in the jaw allowed enough movement of the chin-piece for him to eat with it on and, when he lay flat on his bed, the weight was supported well enough to enable him to sleep. The only practical reason for removing the mask at all was to allow his beard and hair to be cut. The prison governor did this personally every month or so, and in between times allowed him the use of a pair of highly polished tweezers with which he could pluck out the odd hairs that discomforted him. No one but the governor ever saw him without the mask. He wore it continuously for more than forty years, wore it even when he was sick and needed to be attended by a physician, was wearing it when he died, and was still wearing it a century later when the face he shared in twinship with Louis XIV had become the face they shared in common with all mankind.

In August 1789, one month after the fall of the Bastille, the identity of the Iron Mask, as insinuated by Voltaire, was finally divulged by Frédéric-Melchior Grimm, a German expatriate journalist living in Paris, who wrote commentaries upon the French intellectual scene for foreign patrons. The secret, he gave his readers to believe, had been closely guarded within the French royal family since the time of Louis XIV, confided as an obligation in conscience with the power of the crown to successive rulers of France. His informant was Jean de La Borde, one-time chief valet of Louis XV.¹² La Borde often questioned his master on the secret of the Iron Mask and Louis XV had told him that he himself had been made to wait until the day he reached his majority before being allowed into the secret, recalling that on that day his friends had pressed around him begging to be told, and that he had replied: ‘You cannot know it.’ To La Borde he had said the same thing, adding: ‘I feel sorry for the man, but his detention did wrong to no one except him and averted great misfortune.’

Apparently Louis XV had been informed by his predecessor in power, the Duc d’Orléans,¹³ who had been Regent from the death of Louis XIV in 1715 until his own death in 1723. Unknown to Louis XV, however, the Regent had already betrayed the secret. His daughter, Charlotte de Valois, had persuaded him to disclose it to her. She had passed it on in a letter to her lover, Maréchal de Richelieu,¹⁴ and he had left the letter among his private papers where it had been found by La Borde. The letter, as quoted by Grimm, began with a short message originally in code: ‘Here then is the famous story. I dragged the secret out. I had to pay a horrible price …’ For Grimm’s readers the price the young lady had to pay remained obscure, but the mystery of the Iron Mask was finally elucidated. The Regent had allowed his daughter to read a secret document, the contents of which she reproduced in her letter. This document was a death-bed confession made by an unnamed nobleman, who declared that he had witnessed the birth of the man who later became the Iron Mask, had been his tutor and had shared imprisonment with him until his death.

According to this nobleman’s account – as retold by Charlotte de Valois, as reported by La Borde, as revealed by Grimm – the story began in 1638 when Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis XIII,¹⁵ was pregnant. Two shepherds arrived in Paris, demanded an audience with the King, and warned him that his wife would give birth to twin boys, who would destroy the kingdom in their conflict over the throne. The King turned for advice to his Prime-Minister, Cardinal de Richelieu,¹⁶ the great-uncle of Maréchal de Richelieu, who solved the immediate problem by having the two shepherds locked up in the asylum of Saint-Lazare. At midday on 9 September, the Queen gave birth to a son, Louis XIV, in the presence of all the witnesses normally demanded by law and protocol. But four hours later, while the King was taking his afternoon collation, the midwife, Dame Perronet, came to inform him that the Queen’s labour pains had recommenced. The King hurried to her bedside, accompanied by the Chancellor, and, with no one else present except the midwife, the doctor and the nobleman responsible for the secret declaration, saw his wife give birth to a second son ‘more handsome and vigorous than the first’. The King had everyone present sign a formal record of what had taken place and swear a solemn oath never to speak of it to anyone, not even to each other, and to reveal it only if the first-born twin should happen to die. The baby was then entrusted to Dame Perronet, who was ordered to pretend that it was the child of some lady at court.

When the child reached boyhood, responsibility for his upbringing was transferred to the nobleman, who took him to live in Dijon. The nobleman might have passed for the boy’s father, but the extraordinary deference he always showed caused the young prince to ask questions, which were never answered satisfactorily. As the boy grew older, his curiosity increased, and by the time he was twenty-one his suspicions centred upon the fact that under no circumstances was he ever allowed to see a portrait of the King. Through all this time the nobleman had been in secret correspondence with the King, first with Louis XIII, who died when the boy was five, later with Louis XIV, who was crowned when the boy was sixteen, and also with the Queen, Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Mazarin, who was the successor of Cardinal de Richelieu. Somehow the young man contrived to find or intercept one of these letters and at the same time to persuade a chambermaid, who had become his sweetheart, to procure for him a portrait of Louis XIV. Armed thus with proof that he was the identical twin-brother of the King, he confronted his tutor and informed him that he was leaving at once for Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the South of France, where the court had gathered for the marriage of Louis XIV with Maria-Teresa of Spain. The nobleman had the young prince confined to the house while he informed the King of what had happened. As soon as Louis XIV got the news, he gave orders to have both the prince and the nobleman packed off to prison, first to the island of Sainte-Marguerite in the Bay of Cannes, and later to the Bastille.

Maréchal de Richelieu, among whose papers this supposed letter was found, died at the age of ninety-two, just one year before Grimm’s remarkable disclosure was made. Aged nineteen at the time of Louis XIV’s death, he had lived through the Regency, the reign of Louis XV and the first fourteen years of the reign of Louis XVI. Born to fortune and to favour, a soldier, diplomat and courtier of the highest rank, illiterate, arrogant, shallow, unscrupulous, dissolute and corrupt, he had made no discernable contribution to government, thought or art in all his long life of influence and power, but coddled by fortune he had outlived the witnesses of his mediocrity and become free in old age to feed his vanity with sensational accounts of his one time political acumen and mettlesome spirit, his military glamour and sexual prowess. The private papers he left behind were important not so much for any particular text they might have provided as for the pretext their mere existence offered. With Richelieu dead and revolution in the air, they could be used as the pretended source of endless bits of gossip or invention about the secrets and scandals of the old regime. The old man’s image lent credibility to the pretence, and people believed it simply because they wanted to believe. When the first volumes of his pretended Mémoires appeared in 1790, they sold like hot cakes.

The man responsible for this publication was a defrocked priest by the name of Jean-Louis Soulavie, who claimed that Richelieu in the last years of his life had given him access to all his papers, along with the help of the private secretary whose job it had been for twenty-five years to classify them. In fact Soulavie felt as little concern for French history as he did for the Roman Church. The public was eager for sensational disclosures on the crimes and corruptions of the past, and in the pillage of the Revolution there was no shortage of material to satisfy them. Libraries and archives, looted from great houses, could be had by the cartload for next to nothing. Soulavie ran a writing factory where plundered material was sifted through by a team of scribes and hacks, copied, adapted, elaborated, transformed and finally compiled, under his direction, into something that would sell.

After Grimm’s disclosure of the letter from the Regent’s daughter found in Richelieu’s papers, the readers of the Mémoires would expect to be treated to a section on the Iron Mask and they could not be disappointed. Grimm moreover had implied that the price paid by the lady to her father for the secret had been in some way shocking. Soulavie could not pass up such an opportunity, and had his Richelieu divulge all: ‘At that time it was generally believed that the Regent knew the name of the Mask, the story of his life and the reason for his imprisonment, and so being more curious and daring than anybody else, I attempted, by means of my charming princess who curiosity was also aroused, to wrest the great secret from him. She always used to repulse the advances of the Duc d’Orleans and show a great aversion to him, but since he was nevertheless passionately in love with her and at the slightest hope of favour would grant her whatever she asked, I persuaded her to let him understand that he would be happy and satisfied if he allowed her to read the Memoires of the Iron Mask which were in his possession.’

The plan worked: in return for making him ‘happy and satisfied’, the Regent gave his daughter the manuscript she wanted and the next day she sent it to Richelieu with a short message in code. To tease and tantalize his readers, Soulavie reproduced the note without deciphering it, and then seventy pages further on reproduced another note from the same lady in the same code, this time deciphered. Thus he allowed the reader the special thrill of turning back through the book and deciphering the first note for himself. In later editions, even this seventy-page gap was dispensed with so that the titillation could become immediate. With a little adaption to enable the system to work in translation, the note he printed read as follows:

The document referring to the Iron Mask, which was found among Richelieu’s papers and published by Grimm, was a letter written by the Regent’s daughter reporting information culled from a secret declaration. In Soulvaie’s book the situation had improved with marvellous illogicality and devastating implausibility: the document, sent to Richelieu by the lady in question and found among his papers, was the secret declaration itself. It bore the following title: Description of the birth and education of the unfortunate prince sequestrated by the Cardinals de Richelieu and Mazarin and confined by order of Louis XIV. (Written by the tutor of that prince on his death-bed.) Soulavie reproduced it in its entirety, the same basic story as offered by Grimm, odd details omitted, changed or added, and all padded out to close on two thousand words.

Soulavie’s version of the declaration differed from Grimm’s only in the following particulars: a) the two shepherds were locked up by the Archbishop of Paris; b) ‘the unfortunate prince’ was born at half past eight in the evening while the King was at supper. The first chaplain and the Queen’s confessor were also present; c) ‘the unfortunate prince’ cried at birth as if he knew even then the suffering he was to endure. He had birthmarks on his right thigh, his left elbow and the right hand side of his neck; d) it was the Cardinal de Richelieu who advised keeping the second twin out of the way but in reserve, though the Queen thought the danger of civil war greatly increased by the medical opinion that the last born of twins was the first conceived. The midwife was threatened with death if she ever betrayed the secret; e) the nobleman’s house was in Burgundy, but not actually in Dijon; f) the letter stolen by ‘the unfortunate prince’ was one from Cardinal Mazarin, and it was a young governess of the house who gave ‘the unfortunate prince’ a portrait of the King; she did it because he was such an accomplished lover; g) the prisons in which ‘the unfortunate prince’ and the nobleman were confined were not named; h) the nobleman made his death-bed declaration to pacify his soul and to draw attention to the plight of ‘the unfortunate prince’, who at that time was still alive in prison.

As Soulavie himself remarked in a laboured display of objectivity, there was nothing in the declaration to prove that ‘the unfortunate prince’ was the Iron Mask, but since the stories of both, fragmentary and bewildering as they were when taken separately, appeared to complete and explain each other when put together, it was reasonable to suppose that they were one and the same. No one eager to accept the Mémoires as genuine was likely to refuse such a cautious supposition, and the myth of the Twin in the Iron Mask took its place in popular history, to be developed by romantic souls and exploited by political spirits in the century which followed.

In 1823, Emmanuel de Las Cases, who had been secretary to Napoleon during his exile on Saint Helena, published a journal of conversations with his master, in which for Friday 12 July 1816 he recorded a conversation on the subject of the Iron Mask. Much had been made of the idea, however fanciful, that the last-born of twins is the first conceived, and that therefore the Iron Mask, though younger than Louis XIV, was the rightful heir to the throne. Louis XIV was a usurper, and the legitimate possession of the crown had devolved upon his progeny only because the Iron Mask had died without children. In the popular myth developed around Napoleon was one ingenious fable which made him the descendant of the Iron Mask. According to this, the governor of the prison of Sainte-Marguerite allowed his daughter to visit the Iron Mask. The young couple fell in love and with the court’s permission were married. Since the Iron Mask had no known name, the children of this union were given the name of their mother. That name wasde Bonpart. The children were secretly moved to Corsica to be raised, and there the difference of language transformed their name from Bonpart to Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte was of this family directly descended from the Iron Mask in an unbroken line of eldest sons, and that being so he was the legitimate heir to the French throne. In Napoleon’s view the naivity and credulity of the general public was such that to establish such a story and find unscrupulous people in government to sanction it would not have been difficult. Someone else who took part in the conversation remarked that a genealogist had once seriously set about proving it to him, claiming that the record of a marriage between Mlle de Bonpart and the Iron Mask could be seen in the register of some parish church in Marseilles.

Meanwhile the Prince in the Iron Mask had inspired a pantomime, a tragedy, a four-volume novel and, in 1821, a dramatic narrative by Alfred de Vigny entitled La Prison. None of this work is remembered today except perhaps de Vigny’s poem, three hundred lines of heavily sentimental excitement in verse-couplets, which tells the following story: An old priest clutching the viaticum is led, blindfolded and stumbling, through vast echoing galleries and narrow twisting passageways, to a dungeon dimly lit by torchlight where a mysterious prisoner lies dying. Soldiers remove the blindfold, and addressing the dying man as ‘prince’, inform him that the priest has arrived. The reaction of the dying man is one of indifference at first, but the priest calls him ‘son’ and at that he responds with bitterness. The priest exhorts him to confess his sins, sermonizing on penance and the sufferings of Christ, leans forward to peer into the shadows which hide the dying man’s face, and is horrified at what he sees:

A mask without features, a phantasm’s head,

In the torchlight a face made of iron glowed red.

Many years before, the old priest had heard rumours of such a prisoner: a beautiful, noble, sweet-voiced man, royally born and guilty of no crime, condemned from youth to spend his life in prison with his face concealed in a mask. Once one of his fellow monks had found a golden goblet at the foot of the prison tower and had taken it to the prison commander. There had been a message from the masked prisoner scratched into the gold and, because the monk had read it and learned some perilous secret, he had never been seen again. Remembering this, this old priest falls silent. The prisoner speaks: after a life of such unmitigated and unmerited suffering, how can he believe in a just and merciful God:

I have fed on despair, and my tears wept in vain

Have rusted the cheeks of the mask of my pain.

The old priest has nothing to say, and the prisoner babbles on in a delirium telling of the girl he never knew and all the longings of his lost life: the sun on his face, the wind in his hair, dreams of mountains and the sea, of rivers and trees and simple love. In a final moment of clarity before he dies, he rejects the viaticum and, with a last despairing gesture, breaks his arm against the prison-wall. The priest stays to pray beside his body throughout the night and in the morning sees it wrapped in its winding-sheet, the face still covered in its iron mask.

It was in 1850 that the story of the Twin in the Iron Mask reached final form and lasting celebrity in another work of fiction, the best-selling novel of Alexandre Dumas, The Viscount of Bragelonne. This was the third and last volume of the adventures of his famous Musketeers, d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis. The first two volumes, The Three Musketeers in 1844 and Twenty Years After in 1845, had been an immense success, and the third book was written for the same readers, reaching the death of d’Artagnan in the last paragraph. The sufferings of the Iron Mask were subsidiary to the deeds and deaths of the Musketeers, just part of the melodrama of French history in which they played key rôles, but it nonetheless was, and still is, the most vivid and elaborate version of the Iron Mask story. This, reduced to eleven short scenes, is how Dumas told it:

Scene One: The bedroom of the Queen Mother in the Royal Palace. Late morning. Anne of Austria, stricken by some secret grief, is talking sadly with her ladies of honour. Enter a mysterious woman in a loo-mask, come to cure her strange complaint. The ladies of honour withdraw and the mysterious woman talks of a terrible secret kept by the Queen Mother since the day her son, the King, was born, twenty-three years ago. On that fateful day she gave birth not just to one son but to two, and in spite of the floods of bitter tears she shed that second child, for reasons of State, for the peace and safety of the realm, was taken from her and hidden away. Shocked at the stranger’s knowledge of the secret, the Queen Mother turns pale as death and feels beneath her icy hand the beads of perspiration on her brow. The mysterious woman then removes her mask: it is the Duchesse de Chevreuse, the once bewitchingly beautiful favourite of the Queen Mother, now hideously old and witchlike. After years of banishment she has returned to beg the protection of her one-time friend and mistress. The Queen Mother takes her into her arms and apparently into her confidence; the ill-fated boy, she tells her, died of consumption while still a child.

Scene Two: A prison room on the third floor of the Bertaudière Tower in the Bastille. A starry night sky beyond the bars of the window. Clothes discarded on a leather armchair; supper-dishes untouched on a small table; a young man sprawled disconsolately under the half-drawn curtains of a bed. A man dressed in grey has just entered with a lantern, a distinguished-looking man in late middle age, calm and confident, cold and calculating. It is Aramis, the one-time musketeer, and he has just used the secret powers of the Jesuit Society, of which he is the Father-General, to gain entrance to this room. No one has ever been allowed to see this prisoner. Few people even know that he exists.

Before he was a prisoner here, the young man lived with a nurse and tutor in the confines of a large house and walled garden lost in the country. A house without mirrors, without books of history or literature, without a portrait of the King. In the time he was there a lady of majestic bearing came to see him every month, sometimes accompanied by another lady, once by Aramis, and once by another gentleman. Apart from his former nurse and tutor, his present turnkey and prison governor, these people are the only ones he has ever spoken to in his life. The efforts made to seclude him from the world, the care taken to educate him for that same world, and the respect shown him within the little world in which he lived, made him wonder sometimes about his origin and identity. But he was always told that he was an orphan and that no one had any interest in him.

The incident that transformed his life had occurred eight years previously, soon after his fifteenth birthday. He was sleeping in the hall one day, exhausted after a long lesson of fencing, when he heard his tutor call out in consternation to his nurse. A letter had blown out of a window and fallen down the well. In their agitation the old couple did not realize that he could hear them, and he understood from what they said that they had to retrieve the letter because it was from the Queen. She would want it back to burn, as she did with all the letters they received from her, and they would be in peril of their lives from Mazarin if they could not produce it when next she came. To find someone to help them, someone who would be able to recover the letter without being able to read it, they hurried off to the village, leaving the young man alone in the house.

Urged on then by that impulse whch drives a man to his own destruction, he lowered the cord from the windlass and slid down it into the darkness. Plunging into the water, he seized the letter, clambered back up to the courtyard and escaped into the garden. The paper was sodden and torn, the writing almost erased, but what he could read was enough for him to realise that the Queen herself was deeply concerned in his welfare and upbringing, and that the tutor and nurse, who treated him with such respect, were themselves of noble rank. Since the villager who climbed down the well could find nothing, it might have been assumed that the letter had sunk out of sight, but the young man’s wet clothes aroused suspicions. When later he was taken ill with a violent fever, brought on by the chill and the excitement of the discovery, these suspicions were borne out. In his delirium he revealed all that had happened. The letter was found and the Queen was informed. The young man was arrested and taken to the Bastille.

What became of the tutor and nurse, the young man does not know, but Aramis does. They were poisoned, he says, and while the young man presses his icy fingers to his clammy brow, his trembling fingers to his beating heart, he goes on to reveal the direful secret of his birth. He produces a mirror and a portrait of Louis XIV to prove it. The resemblance of the young man and his brother, the King, is the God-given instrument of truth and justice, Aramis declares, the weapon which will restore the balance of fate. It was a crime against nature to render different in happiness and fortune brothers conceived and born so much the same. The equilibrium will be restored only when the rôles of prisoner and king have been exchanged. In that high endeavour Aramis intends to liberate the young man from the Bastille.

Scene Three: Deep night under arching foliage in the depths of the Forest of Sénart.¹⁸ A carriage-and-four pulled off the road and hidden in thickets of undergrowth. The horses snuffling as they nibble the young oak shoots. The driver lying silently on a slope beside them. Two figures emerge from the carriage and stand there, black in the darkness, keeping silence too: the young man entranced, feeling the night air on his face, the ecstasy of freedom; Aramis apprehensive, watching him. The young man has a decision to make. Aramis has offered to give him a thousand pistoles,¹⁹ two of his horses and the driver, as servant and guide, to take him far away to a place of safety and obscurity where no one will ever seek him; he can live out his life in ease and liberty close to nature and its honest laws among simple honourable men. Between that and a bid to substitute him for his brother, the King, with the immediate risk of failure, and the lifelong dangers in success, he is to choose. He bows his head and, at last, with a look full of courage and pride, his brow contracted, his jaw clenched, he makes his choice: the crown. Aramis has briefed him with all the information necessary to carry off the impersonation and he is confident that he can do it. Once he has taken his brother’s place, Colbert,²⁰ the King’s favourite minister, will be exiled and Fouquet,²¹ the minister out of favour, will be restored to office. Aramis will be elevated to the rank of Cardinal and become Prime Minister. Aramis will make him a great king, and he will make Aramis pope, then bound in mutual trust, crown and tiara together they will establish an empire greater than Charlemagne’s.

Scene Four: Vaux-le-Vicomte.²² Later that night. Aramis and the young man in the Blue Room, seated above a secret trapdoor, looking down through a hidden spyhole in the painted dome which spans the King’s chamber below. The King, in sour disgruntled mood, talking with Colbert. He is the guest of Fouquet, whose palatial new home this is, and he feels humiliated by the splendour of the hospitality and entertainment provided for him. The style and wealth of his host fills him with envy. He wants to know where Fouquet has found the money necessary for such a display and Colbert produces a letter which appears to prove that he stole it. There is a deficit in the state accounts of thirteen million francs and the letter written by Mazarin makes it clear that precisely such an amount was taken from the state coffers to be deposited with Fouquet.

Scene Five: Vaux-le-Victome. The following night. The King walking in the gardens with Colbert. Fouquet’s lavish generosity, through all the brilliant festivities of the day, has only made the King more resentful. Deep in the park, the King’s mistress, Louise de La Vallière, is waiting for him and, when she discovers that he is about to have Fouquet arrested, she persuades him that he cannot honourably do that so long as he is a guest in Fouquet’s house. Colbert bends a look of hatred upon the charming couple as they embrace behind a lime tree; when the young lady leaves, he takes a letter from his pocket and gives it to the King, pretending that she has just dropped it. The King assumes that it must be a love note meant for him, but it is an old letter of admiration and gallantry written to her by Fouquet.

Scene Six: Vaux-le-Vicomte. Later that night. The King in his chamber shuddering with loathing as Fouquet bends to kiss his hand. Through the windows the sky ablaze with fireworks which the King did not wish to see. He wants only to see d’Artagnan,²³ the Captain of the Musketeers, who arrives promptly as soon as everyone else has withdrawn. Handsome, noble d’Artagnan, whose heart is as kind and faithful as it is courageous, whose eyes are as frank and true as they are piercing, whose Gascon blood, tempered with the subtlety and irony of a great spirit, would civilize the most savage tyrant, the most brutal slave. The King wants Fouquet arrested and his rage explodes when d’Artagnan requests the order in writing. He stamps his feet and gnaws his lips, but the order is nonetheless moderated. Fouquet is to be kept under guard pending arrest. There is to be no fuss, no show, and the King will decide in the morning what is to be done with him. When d’Artagnan leaves, the King’s frenzy erupts once more. He strides about the room, knocking over the furniture, flings himself onto the bed and rolls from side to side, biting the sheets to smother his tears and groans. When finally he sleeps it is from sheer exhaustion. He dreams that the bed is descending slowly throught the floor, and wakes from his dream to find himself in a subterranean passage between the menacing silhouettes of two men, masked and cloaked. As they bundle him away through the darkness, the empty bed lifts slowly back to its original place in the chamber. One of the masked men is of huge stature and vast circumference; he is Porthos: honest, mighty, innocent, gentle, magnificent Porthos. The other man is Aramis.

Scene Seven: Vaux-le-Vicomte. Dawn the next morming. Fouquet alone in his bedroom. D’Artagnan, who has spent the night dozing in an armchair beside him, has gone to the King for further orders. When he returns he is bearing the good news that Fouquet is not to be arrested after all, and he is accompanied by Aramis, who for some extraordinary reason appears to have become the King’s confidant overnight. Fouquet is bewildered: he still does not understand why he was put under guard in the first place and, as soon as d’Artagnan has left the room, he asks for an explanation. Aramis tells him how Colbert turned the King against him and how the King’s apparent change of mind is in reality a change of kings: the King of yesterday being Fouquet’s implacable enemy, the King of today his friend. Confident of Fouquet’s collusion, Aramis reveals all: that Louis XIV has an identical twin brother who until yesterday was kept locked up in the Bastille, that last night their places were switched and the King became the prisoner while the prisoner became the King. Fouquet, however, is horrified. Never would he connive at an act of treason against the King, an act of treachery against a guest. Aramis, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth trembling, has plunged his hand into his breast, as though to grasp a dagger, but Fouquet is not intimidated: it is his sacred duty to denounce this execrable crime, he says, and he is ready to die for his honour. When Aramis draws out his hand, his fingers are covered in blood, but he has no weapon. In the passionate anguish of his defeat, he has torn open the flesh of his own breast with his bare hand. Leaving Aramis to make good his escape, Fouquet takes horse to rescue his King from the Bastille.

Scene Eight: Vaux-le-Vicomte. Later that morning. The King’s chamber with the shutters half-closed and the King, dressed in hunting costume, receiving his morning visitors. Though the Queen Mother has noticed a slight difference in his voice, the young man is imitating his brother’s lofty manner and controlling his own profound feelings so well that not the slightest suspicion has been aroused. The fact that Aramis and Fouquet have not yet appeared surprises him, and while someone is sent to fetch them, he lets it be known that Aramis is now established in his confidence and Fouquet re-established in his favour. The voice of Fouquet is heard from the secret staircase and when the door in the panelling opens, a cry of amazement and horror fills the chamber. Twin Kings, wearing by uncanny chance identical clothes, stand facing each other across the room, both pale as death and trembling, clenching their hands convulsively, their eyes bolting from their heads; then the King who has just entered leaps at one of the shutters and flings it open. Light floods the chamber, and the assembly looks on dumbfounded as both Kings kneel at the Queen Mother’s feet and beg to be acknowledged as her son. The newly arrived King then turns to d’Artagnan and demands to be recognized. Rousing himself from his shock and wonder, d’Artagnan places his hand on the shoulder of the other King. The choice is made. The triumphant King turns from his rival and sweeps from the room, taking everyone with him except the Queen Mother and Fouquet. Gently, with tragic nobility, the defeated King reproaches his mother for her cruelty. Graciously, with compassion and respect, d’Artagnan and Fouquet ask the young man’s forgiveness. Silently, without expression, Colbert appears in the doorway and gives d’Artagnan a written order from the King. The prisoner is to be conducted to the island of Sainte-Marguerite, his face covered with an iron mask, and if he attempts to remove the mask he is to be killed.

Scene Nine: The Harbour of Antibes.²⁴ Morning sunlight on the sea. Athos and his son, Raoul, together on the quay. Heroic, tragic Athos, the purest and wisest of them all, with his brave, heart-broken son. Betrayed in his love for Louise de La Vallière, Raoul has volunteered for service with the Duc de Beaufort, the Grand Admiral of France, who is leaving Toulon with the fleet on a punitive expedition against Gigelli²⁵ in North Africa. They are in Antibes to requisition fishing-boats to serve as lighters for the embarkation, and one of the fishermen they talk to has a strange tale to tell. Six days previously, a gentleman he did not know came in the night to hire his boat to go to the island of Saint-Honorat. ²⁶ The stranger had a huge trunk with him and, in spite of the dangers and difficulties of transporting such a thing, insisted on taking it along. In mid-crossing, however, he decided that the approach to Saint-Honorat was too dangerous in the dark and wanted to be landed at Sainte-Marguerite instead. The fisherman, who knew the waters well, was confident that he could make it to Saint-Honorat in safety, but when he refused to change course the stranger drew his sword. Seizing their hatchets, the fisherman and his mate made ready to defend themselves, when the huge trunk sprang open of its own accord and the devil himself climbed out, a phantom whose head was covered in a black mask like a helmet. Terrified, the fisherman and his mate jumped overboard. The stranger thanked the devil and the boat drifted on. When it was found the next day, it was beached and broken on the island of Sainte-Marguerite and the devil, the trunk and the stranger had vanished into thin air. The fisherman went at once to the fortress to tell what had happened, but the governor refused to believe his story and threatened to have him flogged if he persisted in it.

Scene Ten: Island of Sainte-Marguerite. That afternoon. Athos and Raoul in a garden at the foot of the fortress wall. Someone calls out and, looking up, they see a hand at a barred window throw a silver plate towards them. When they pick it up they discover that a message has been scratched into the metal with the point of a knife: ‘I am the brother of the King of France – a prisoner today – a madman tomorrow. French gentlemen and Christians, pray to God for the soul and the sanity of the son of your masters.’ A musket-ball fired from above strikes the ground at their feet. They are being shot at by two of the prison guards, but with an exclamation of surprise one of their assailants knocks up the musket of the other, and the next moment they are surrounded by soldiers. The governor would have them shot on the spot because the prisoner has made contact with them, but d’Artagnan arrives from the top of the wall in time to save them. They are Spanish, he says, and friends of his: he knows they have not read the prisoner’s message because they cannot read a word of French; and taking the plate from them, he scrapes out the writing with the tip of his sword.

Scene Eleven: Island of Sainte-Marguerite. That evening. The ramparts of the fortress in a storm. Dark wracks and wild seas. Thunder and lightning. D’Artagnan, Athos and Raoul have concealed themselves in an angle of the staircase to watch the governor go by with his prisoner. Under the fiery tumult of the exploding heavens, the lambent flash and flicker of lightning reflected, a man clothed all in black stops to look at the storm and breathe its sulphurous fumes; his head is encased in an iron helmet, a mask of iron covering his face, the iron sheathed in fire under the streaming rain. ‘Come, sir,’ cries the governor impatiently. ‘Say, “my lord”,’ exclaims Athos angrily. ‘Say neither,’ declares a hollow and dreadful voice from the iron mask. ‘Call me the Accursed.’

Not only is this version of the Iron Mask story the one most people know, often it is the only one they know. The novels of Dumas were always bestsellers and when in the twentieth century the cinema came to challenge and supersede the written word, his Musketeer stories were quickly reproduced in the new form. Since 1902 more than a score of films of the Iron Mask have been made in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German, and almost all have used or adapted the story of the twins as told by Dumas, with one actor playing the parts of both Louis XIV and the Iron Mask, as did Richard Chamberlain in 1976 and Leonardo Di Caprio in 1998, though in earlier films the star of the cast invariably took the rôle of d’Artagnan, as did Douglas Fairbanks in 1919 and Jean Marais in 1962. The story of the Iron Mask continues to be part of western popular myth in our own day, as it was part of French political myth two hundred years ago. With the passing of the years the bestseller has prevailed over history to such an extent that it is not perhaps too much of an exaggeration to suggest that by the vast majority of people today, at least outside of France, the illustrious Louis XIV is not likely to be known or remembered except as the monster-brother of the Man in the Iron Mask.

What in the meantime had become of the imaginary skeleton of the Iron Mask found in the Bastille in 1789 is not known. Presumably it was laid to rest in some imaginary tomb, liberated at last from its terrible mask of iron. Certainly the mask itself was not interred with the bones because half a century later it turned up again, discovered in a heap of old iron, far away from Paris, in the little town of Langres, just to the north of Dijon. How it reached Langres was not explained, but it was reasonable to suppose that it had been brought by one of the many scrap-iron merchants who served the booming cutlery industry there. The event was recorded by Paul Lacroix in his Revue Universelle des Arts for 1855.

It has been reported in several newspapers that the famous iron mask has been recovered in a heap of scrap-iron at a sale in Langres. Acquired first of all by a second-hand dealer, it was apparently passed on for a modest sum to a distinguished enthusiast, who having scratched at the thick coating of dust which covered the interior brought to light a little strip of parchment blackened with age on which it was still possible to see some half-erased letters. This strip, carefully washed and treated, revealed the following inscription: ‘Anno praesenti 1703 ferream mors avulsit personam quam postnato geminus imponi jusserat fra …’ (i.e. ‘In this year 1703, death removed the iron mask which the twin commanded to be fixed upon his younger bro …’). The rest of the inscription is missing; but according to a local newspaper, what there is of it is enough to prove that the mask in question is precisely the one which was used to cover the face of the state prisoner known by the name of the Man in the Iron Mask. This discovery of the famous iron mask, with its beautiful inscription broken off in the middle of the word ‘frater’, must have been made during carnival-time.

The story of the Mask of Langres, like all good stories, as with the story of the Iron Mask himself, has a basis in truth. An actual mask of iron was found, and still exists today as part of the collection of the Langres Museum. It was donated by a certain Canon Defay, who was the headmaster of a local school, but its provenance beyond that is not known, and it certainly bears no trace of any inscription. The dimension of the object, as given by the museum, are: ‘height 18.3 cms., width 17.3 cms., weight 470 grams’; that is to say, 7.2 inches from top to bottom, 6.8 inches from side to side, and a little more than one pound in weight. The catalogue-card reads as follows: ‘Mask of Iron. Hammered plate with cut-out eyes, nostrils and mouth. Formerly painted (traces of pink glaze around eyes and nostrils). Upper rim scalloped. Three holes in form of triangle in middle of forehead. Lower edge pierced with holes along entire length. Keyhole cut into left side of chin. Perforation in each ear-section.’

No doubt the holes around the edge of the mask were made for a web of straps which fastened around the wearer’s head. Presumably there was one strap attached to the top of the forehead, with two more attached to the ears, and they met at the back of the head where they were anchored by a fourth strap linking them to a collar which was secured to the chin. What the purpose of the keyhole was, one cannot say. There is no trace of a locking device, and it is difficult to imagine how any such mechanism could have been incorporated into the chin. Perhaps it was added later to suggest a lock which never existed. As it is, the mask appears to be very old and could well be Celtic. Beautiful and terrible, with its smoothly ridged features and asymmetric eyes, it defies interrogation. It could have been made for the wearer’s protection, a mask of war or of ritual, a defence against physical or spiritual harm. It is not even sure that it was made to cover the face of any living man. It might have been strapped to the head of an image or a corpse, a living god or a dead hero, the face of a totem or a trophy skull. Exhibited today with its startled, staring eyes and gaping, gasping mouth, it siezes the attention and demands an explanation. But its mystery remains as impenetrable as the mystery of the man who, in the popular imagination, was condemned to live out his life in prison, with such a mask on his face.

NOTES

1.   Louis XIV: King of France, b. 1638, reigned 1661–1715 after the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria, 1642–1661, and before the regency of his nephew, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, 1715–1723.

2.   Louis XVI: King of France, b. 1754, reigned 1774–1793, after the reign of his grandfather Louis XV, 1723–1774. He was deposed and executed during the French Revolution.

3.   Bastille: French state prison in Paris stormed, captured and destroyed in the early days of the French Revolution.

4.   Voltaire: pen-name of François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778. Controversial and influential French writer, best known for his historical and philosophical writings, for his satire and social criticism.

5.   Pantheon: Neoclassical-style building in Paris, built between 1758 and 1789. Originally intended as a church but secularized under the Revolution to serve as a national temple in honour of great Frenchmen.

6.   Cardinal Jules Mazarin: Prime Minister and virtual ruler of France under the regency of Anne of Austria.

7.   Sainte-Marguerite: an island facing the town of Cannes on the French Riviera.

8.   Benigne d’Auvergne de Saint-Mars, 1626–1708.

9.   Pignerol: modern town of Pinerolo, south-west of Turin in Piedmont, Italy.

10.  Michel Chamillart, 1652–1721. Minister of State under Louis XIV from 1699 to 1709.

11.  When in 1791 Louis XVI tried to escape the revolutionary forces and flee the country disguised as a valet, he was arrested in a provincial town because a simple postmaster there recognized him from his portrait on the coinage.

12.  Louis XV: King of France, b. 1710, reigned 1723–1774, great-grandson of Louis XIV.

13.  Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, 1674–1723, was the son of Louis XIV’s only brother.

14.  Armand de Vignerot, Duc de Richelieu, 1696–1788.

15.  Louis XIII: King of France, b. 1601, reigned 1617–1643, after the regency of his mother, Marie de’ Medici, 1610–1617, and before the regency of his widow, Anne of Austria.

16.  Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu: Prime Minister under Louis XIII from 1628 to 1642.

17.  M.D.: presumably the initials signify Monsieur le duc, i.e. her father the Regent.

18.  Forest of Sénart: south-east of Paris.

19.  pistole: Spanish gold coin.

20.  Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 1619–1683. Finance Minister under Louis XIV from 1665 to 1683.

21.  Nicolas Fouquet, 1615–1680. Finance Minister under Cardinal Mazarin from 1653 to 1661.

22.  Vaux-le-Vicomte: château built by Fouquet south-east of Paris.

23.  d’Artagnan: Dumas based his fictional character upon a real person: Charles de Batz-Castelmore d’Artagnan, 1610–1673.

24.  Antibes: town close to Cannes on the French Riviera.

25.  Gigelli: modern town of Djidjelli in Algeria.

26.  Island of Saint-Honorat: island close to Sainte-Marguerite.