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If Eustache Dauger was not Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, then who was he? Before Duvivier’s authorative but mistaken identification, only two other theories had been proposed. Jules Laire, in his book Nicolas Fouquet, published in 1890, had been the first to recognize that the prisoner in the mask of black velvet who died in the Bastille in 1703 was the man called Eustache Dauger arrested in 1669; who Dauger was and what he he had done he did not know, and since it was of little significance to his theme he did not bother to follow it up. ‘In all likelihood,’ he remarked, ‘Dauger was the kind of man who takes on a shady job: robbery, abduction, perhaps worse; and whose silence is ensured, once the job is done, by imprisoning him.’ He made no attempt to hunt out Eustache Dauger’s name in the events which preceded his arrest and it was not until 1931, just one year before Duvivier published his sensational discovery, that Emile Laloy made the first tentative steps in this direction.
From documents, Laloy discovered that ‘Daugers’ was the name of the King’s major-domo in 1652 and that ‘Daugé’ was the name of the chaplain of the Archbishop of Sens in 1670. Aware that in the orthographical confusion of that time ‘Daugers’, ‘Daugé’ and ‘Dauger’ could have been variant spellings of the same family name, he imagined a young man named Eustache Dauger who was the son of Daugers, the King’s major-domo, and nephew of Canon Daugé, the Archbishop’s chaplain, and who, following in his father’s footsteps, was a member of the King’s household in 1668 and 1669. The existence of such a person was purely hypothetical, but the events and circumstances which it brought into play were full of possibilities. The Archbishop of Sens was the uncle of Louis de Montespan, whose wife was the celebrated mistress of the King, and Canon Daugé was a tried and trusted friend of the Montespan family; in 1670, Montespan’s mother actually named him, along with the Archbishop, executor of her will.
The King’s adulterous relationship with Madame de Montespan began in July 1667, but for many months only their most intimate friends knew about it. Montespan himself was in the south of France at the time, engaged, at least ostensibly, in leading his own company of light cavalry against Spanish marauders in the Pyrenees. His troops were little better than brigands and, riding at their head with a shapely peasant-girl wearing breeches and a sword beside him, he terrorized French and Spanish alike, bullying and brawling, drinking and looting. In February 1668, he came to Paris to give his wife power of attorney to handle their affairs in his absence and then hurried back to the south. At that time it was still not realized that Madame de Montespan had become the King’s mistress. ‘The King loves La Montespan,’ the Marquis de Saint-Maurice, who was the Savoyard ambassador at the time, reported to Turin on 3 February. ‘She doesn’t dislike him, but she holds firm.’ Six months later, however, Montespan knew the truth and returned to Paris in a fury. He drove up to Saint-Germain in a hearse with stag’s horns on the roof instead of plumes and denounced the King as an adulterer. He slapped his wife in public, insulted anyone he suspected of aiding them in their illicit union, and let it be known that he had deliberately contracted syphillis so that he could pass it on to the King.
It was generally suspected that Montespan had been incited to cause this uproar by his uncle, the Archbishop of Sens, who joined in the attack himself from the pulpit. Preaching at Fontainbleau when the court was there, he denounced a woman in the congregation who was living openly with another woman’s husband, made her do public penance and then ordered the church laws on adultery to be published in all the parishes of his diocese. In September, Montespan was arrested and the Archbishop, fearing the same fate, kept to the sanctuary of his cathedral, sleeping in a bed put up for him behind the altar. Montespan was liberated after a couple of weeks, but banished to the south of France and the Archbishop though not arrested was confined to Sens.
The King, it is certain, was greatly alarmed by the furore. Montespan was capable of anything. Presumably he did not know then that his wife was expecting the King’s child, but once he did he was certainly reckless enough to abduct his wife, pregnant as she was, or later, after the birth, to abduct the child. If one can imagine Eustache Dauger as a member of the King’s household with close ties of loyalty to the Montespan family, one might also imagine him playing spy and agent against the King. No doubt he would have been the one who first informed the Archbishop of the King’s adulterous relationship with Madame de Montespan. No doubt he would have discovered eventually that she was pregnant and later that a child had been born in secret. The birth took place in March 1669 and the child was raised in hiding. Perhaps, in the summer of 1669, he managed to find out where the child was hidden, but before he could pass on the information to the Montespan family or while he was himself attempting to abduct the child, he was arrested. Plausible as the story might be, however, there is not a grain of evidence that this particular Eustache Dauger ever existed.
The name ‘Eustache Dauger’ was in fact ‘Eustache d’Auget’; so at least P.M. Dijol would have us believe in the book called Nabo which he published in 1978. His Eustache, like Laloy’s, was only a valet, but with a face which made him instantly recognizable: he was black. The valet’s true name was Nabo, but he was called Eustache because the governor of Dunkirk gave him to his wife on the day of Saint-Eustache; he was called d’Auget because he had been taught to play the guitar by Paul Auget, the Director of the King’s Music. Since he was a Moor from North Africa, his guards naturally nicknamed him ‘Ali’ and since he was a prisoner of consequence they also gave him the title of Marquis; thus he came to be known within the prison walls as the ‘Marquis Ali’, which on his burial certificate was rendered ‘Marchiali’. Dijol is quite sure of all this because his mother-in-law revealed it to him on her death-bed in 1970. She was the last of the Desgranges family, descended from the father-in-law of the youngest son of Saint-Mars, who apparently on his own death-bed had, for some mysterious reason, confided the secret of his mysterious prisoner to the in-laws of his dead son.
Dijol’s story, for all its extravagant claims, is based upon a modicum of fact. Nabo the Moor was real enough, and the crime he committed was certainly of sufficient gravity to merit the fate of the Iron Mask. On 16 November 1664, Queen Maria-Teresa, the wife of Louis XIV, gave birth to a black daughter. The child was said to be a month premature and so the usual witnesses were not present. The Grande Mademoiselle in her Mémoires reported what she heard about it from Monsieur, who was there: ‘that the daughter born to the Queen resembled a little Moor, given her by M. de Beaufort, who was very pretty and who was always with her; that when it had been remembered that her child might come to look like him he had been taken away from her but it was then too late; that the little girl was monstrous and would not live.’ The mere presence of the Moor, it was imagined, had made the child turn black. Officially both the Queen and her daughter were very ill. There were no visitors and the child’s death was announced on 26 December. What became of the little Moor who ‘had been taken away’ is not known.
In the popular view, the child’s death was only pretended. The Princess Palatine writing in 1719 observed: ‘one cannot get it out of people’s heads that the child is still living and that she is in a convent at Moret, near Fontainbleau’. This was a reference to the mysterious woman known since as ‘the Mooress of Moret’. In 1695 Madame de Maintenon, who married Louis XIV after the death of Maria-Teresa, acted sponsor for a black girl who took the veil at the Benedictine Convent of Moret. The King himself endowed the girl with 20,000 crowns and she took the name of Sister Louis-Marie-Thérèse. Madame de Maintenon visited her regularly thereafter, taking various members of the royal family along with her, and everyone at the convent, including her superiors, treated her with the greatest respect. It was said that she always claimed to be the daughter of the King, even though Madame de Maintenon assured her that she was not.
The little Moor was one of the wedding gifts received by the Queen at Saint Jean-de-Luz in June 1660. He was a dwarf just two feet three inches tall and, though not fully grown since he was only ten or twelve years old, was unlikely to grow more than a few inches more. The Queen was delighted with her pet black dwarf and by October of the same year he was already her favourite companion, riding up beside the coachman of the royal carriage and climbing inside to join her and the King when it was raining. According to Dijol, he had unusual musical talents and because of this was handed over to Paul Auget who taught him to play the guitar. These talents must have been discovered early and developed rapidly because Auget, who was sixty-eight years old, died that same year; although his place as Music Director was taken by the celebrated Lully, it was from the uncelebrated Auget that the Moor took his name.
The Queen bore the King a son in November 1661 and in November 1662 a daughter, who died after two weeks. The King meanwhile had a romantic affair with Madame, his sister-in-law, and then under the pretext of hiding that liaison from his mother and brother began a passionate relationship with Madame’s lady-of-honour, Madame de La Vallière. Madame, scorned and furious, turned to the Comte de Guiche for help, and with the Comtesse de Soissons and her lover the Marquis de Vardes sought a means to break up the relationship. Together they decided to send a letter to the Queen as though from her father, the King of Spain, informing her of the King’s attachment to Madame de La Vallière. Vardes composed the letter and Guiche translated it into Spanish. The letter reached the Queen, Dijol asserts, on 17 February 1664. She was so deeply hurt by the news that she turned to her black page for comfort and conceived that day the black daughter who was later known as the Mooress of Moret.
The point of Dijol’s story is that the Moor was the father of the Queen’s black daughter, something which fortunately for his argument can be accepted without his story. To keep the record straight, however, it should be recognized that the tale, as he tells it, is a concoction. Though such a letter was written and sent, it was not sent at this time and the Queen in any event did not receive it. Guiche went to Poland in September 1663 and did not return to France until June 1664. The letter was sent sometime in 1662 and it was delivered to the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, who finding it suspicious took it not to her mistress, but to the King. In 1664, moreover, the Queen was well aware of her husband’s affair with Madame de La Vallière. She had known about it as early as November 1662 when she is reported to have pointed out her husband’s mistress wearing diamond earrings in a crowd of court ladies. Exactly what the circumstances of the conception were, we do not know but, for what it is worth, it was precisely at this time that the King suddenly decided to change all the Queen’s ladies-of-honour.
Dijol would have us believe that the King really did believe that a black man’s presence could blacken the skin of a child in the womb and so it was only in June 1666, when the Queen was pregnant again, that he had the Moor removed from the palace. The Queen made such a fuss over losing her pet that the King decided to get rid of him for good. According to Dijol, he sent him to the Company of the Islands of America in Dunkirk, which had a monopoly on the French slave-trade, in the expectation that he would be shipped to America and sold. The president of the company, however, who was the governor of Dunkirk, realized that as a court page the boy had more value in Europe and so kept him for his own household. No one in Paris suspected that the Queen’s black page was in Dunkirk until in 1669 preparations were begun for a visit from the King. Madame was to go to Dover in May 1670 to speak with her brother Charles II of England. Louis XIV and his court were to accompany her to Dunkirk and wait there until she returned. In June 1669 someone, sent from Paris to make arrangements for the forthcoming royal visit, recognized the Moor and reported back to Louvois. Afraid that if the boy were allowed to remain he would meet the Queen again, the minister had him arrested and taken off to Pignerol. It was to avoid any possible complications, Dijol concludes, that the governor of Dunkirk was not informed of the arrest.
Saint-Mars must have been surprised to receive a black prisoner since, so Dijol claims, he already had a black man locked up in his prison. La Rivière, the valet of Fouquet, was also black. In February 1661 La Gazette reported the baptism of a convert from Islam named La Rivière. He was an African from the Cape Verde Islands, aged about thirty, and his godmother was Madame Fouquet, the mother of the Superintendent of Finance. According to Dijol, La Rivière was a groom at a fashionable riding school in Paris and being a skilful rider was often asked to give lessons to people of rank, including Madame de La Vallière. Towards the end of 1665, when Madame de La Vallière became pregnant, the King was alarmed about the possibility of La Rivière changing the colour of her baby’s skin so he rid himself of the man by packing him off to Pignerol with the son of his godmother. Why the King thought it necessary to send the poor man to the far reaches of his kingdom, or why, having chosen to send him so very far away, he did not banish him to some even more distant place – to America for instance where he had given orders to send the Moor – Dijol does not say. Nor does he explain how the King could have decided that a gentleman like Fouquet could be properly served by a man whose job it had been to look after horses.
As it was, when Fouquet died in 1680, the King was once again in difficulties, afraid that some word might reach Paris about the two black valets who were at Pignerol and that the Queen, hearing about them, would have her suspicions aroused. Lauzun knew that Eustache d’Auget was a prisoner, but the true danger lay elsewhere. The Abbé d’Estrades, who as ambassador to Turin had played such an important part in the kidnapping of Matthioli, was the son of Comte Godefroy d’Estrades, the governor of Dunkirk, and therefore had almost certainly met Eustache d’Auget before his arrest. If Lauzun told the Abbé that d’Auget was a prisoner, he might pass on the information to his parents, and through them the secret might reach the Queen. It was to forestall this possibility that Louvois gave orders to pretend that the two black valets had been liberated. Ironically, however, the Abbé D’Estrades already knew that Eustache d’Auget was a prisoner. Apparently he had kept the secret to himself, because Saint-Mars trusted him enough to go on keeping him informed. On 25 June 1681, when Saint-Mars wrote to d’Estrades to inform him of his appointment to Exiles, he included a word about the two black valets as well as about Matthioli: ‘I will have in my charge,’ he wrote, ‘two blackbirds that I have here, who have no other name than the gentleman of the Lower Tower. Matthioli will stay here with two other prisoners.’
To give Dijol his due, the basic theory he has to offer answers a number of major questions left unanswered by other theoreticians, not least the reason why the mysterious prisoner was obliged to wear a mask. In seventeenth-century France there were so few black men that a state prisoner who was black would have attracted a great deal of attention. His theory also explains why the prisoner was described as ‘only a valet’ and forbidden to speak of what he had done in the past. As valet to the Queen, he had been responsible, however one cares to view that responsibility, for giving her a black daughter. It is reasonable to presume that, as long as the Queen was alive, the King was concerned to keep her pet’s imprisonment secret. Since when she died in 1683 her black daughter was nineteen years of age and no doubt already convinced that she was the daugher of the Queen, it is also logical to suppose that the King thought it wise to continue the imprisonment and the secrecy. One might go further and conclude that if, as seems likely, the King had enough gumption to realize that a black child born to his wife must have been conceived by a black man, then it is even more reasonable to suppose that he would have wished to keep that man locked up and silent for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, however, Dijol’s theory raises one problem more difficult than any of the problems it resolves: his candidate for the Iron Mask was a dwarf. If the prisoner in the mask had been no taller than a child, then the witnesses who actually saw him, like Du Junca and the peasants at the Château de Palteau, would certainly have mentioned it. None of them did, of course, and what descriptions do exist are in agreement that on the contrary he was a fine figure of a man, tall and well-built.
According to Pierre-Jacques Arrèse, whose book Le Masque de Fer was published in 1969, it is not the identity of Eustache Dauger which is the important factor in the case, but the secrecy surrounding it. Who he was and what he had done were irrelevant. His significance was invented by the authorities to create the existence of a top-security prisoner whose identity was a mystery; a man unknown whose place could one day be taken by someone else who was well known and could in this way be made to disappear. No doubt he was really just a valet and whatever he had done would normally have got him hanged. He was forbidden to speak about his past, not because it contained some terrible secret, but precisely because it contained nothing of any consequence; such a disclosure would have raised suspicions about the motives of those responsible for the pretence. The plan to use him in this way was worked out and set in motion in the summer of 1669, the date at which he was sent to Pignerol. By that time, the man who was one day to take his place had already been in Pignerol for four and a half year: the man hated and feared alike by Louis XIV and all his ministers: the former Superintenent, Nicolas Fouquet.
Arrèse’s theory is thus a revamping of the old theory first presented by Paul Lacroix, and much of his argument is based upon the confusions and uncertainties surrounding Fouquet’s death. In his view, it was the death of Eustache Dauger which Saint-Mars reported in the letter he wrote to Louvois on 23 March 1680, and it was then that the minister was told to go ahead with the prepared substitution of one prisoner for the other. Presumably the original plan had been to choose the moment for the exchange and thus create the most favourable circumstances for its success, but Dauger’s sudden death left no alternative. The plan had to be adapted to the situation as given, or abandoned altogether. The chief difficulty, so far as the authorities were concerned, was that as soon as Fouquet’s death was announced, his family would ask to have the body. This in fact happened and to allay any suspicion it was necessary to grant that permission immediately; however, written authorization was deliberately delayed and did not reach Saint-Mars until nearly four weeks after the death, by which time, Arrèse assumes, the family would not have wished to open the coffin. Thus in spring 1680, Fouquet became the mysterious prisoner known later as the Iron Mask, while Eustache Dauger, the miserable nonentity who had acted the rôle of the original prisoner, was buried in his place.
That the mysterious prisoner arrested in 1669 was ‘only a valet’ was also the view offered in 1970 by Jean Christian Petitfils in his book L’Homme au Masque de fer. His theory was the development of a line of investigation first suggested by Théodore Jung, who ironically was himself unaware that the man he called ‘Eustache Dauger, Danger or d’Augers’ was the Iron Mask. Petitfils also insisted that the prisoner’s name was Danger (or d’Angers) and not Dauger. ‘It is because of a reading error made by the first investigators that the majority of historians, without themselves referring to the documents, have called him Eustache Dauger’, he maintained, and throughout his book he gave the prisoner’s name as Eustache Danger. The argument developed by Petitfils is one of the best recent contributions to the subject, made without sensationalism, trickery or distortion, and, though he often treads ground well-worn by others, the debt he owes to Jung or anyone else is finally minimal.
As other writers before him, Petitfils would have us recognize that there is a difference between the government attitude to the Iron Mask before his stay on Sainte-Marguerite and after. At some stage during the eleven years he was there, he ceased to be the prisoner of consequence he had been, and where once the authorities had shown great anxiety and vigilance on his account, they came to show no particular concern or interest. It is evident for instance from government dispatches that whereas the prisoner’s security was a major consideration in the decision to transfer Saint-Mars from Pignerol to Exiles, it was no longer an important issue when Saint-Mars was invited to move to the Bastille. In fact it is even possible that there was no intention of having Saint-Mars bring his prisoner with him to the Bastille until Saint-Mars himself proposed it.
The difference in treatment of the prisoner before and after Sainte-Marguerite is particularly noticeable in the way he was transported from one prison to another. For the journey to Exiles he was shut up inside a closed litter and for the journey to Sainte-Marguerite in a sedan-chair covered with oil-cloth. On the journey to the Bastille, however, he was merely given a loo-mask to wear and allowed to sit in an open litter with Saint-Mars. Though the journey was much longer than the previous ones, the open litter was not escorted, as were the closed litter and the sedan-chair, by a company of troops; Saint-Mars had no other guard with him than half a dozen members of his prison staff. It was no doubt for this reason that before setting out for Paris he applied for a royal warrant to empower him to requisition lodging for himself and his prisoner en route, but the authorities thought even this precaution excessive. ‘His Majesty does not consider it necessary,’ Barbezieux informed him on 4 August 1698, ‘to issue you with the authorization you request for lodging on your way to Paris. It will suffice for you to lodge and pay as comfortably and securely as you can wherever you judge it appropriate to stay.’ Clearly the prisoner’s security was no longer a top priority.
The same change of attitude can be found in all matters relating to the prisoner’s day-to-day life. Whereas at Pignerol, Exiles and Sainte-Marguerite special high-security cells had to be built for him to ensure that he would be completely sealed off from the world, even from the eyes and ears of the sentries who guarded him, at the Bastille he was lodged like any other prisoner in a normal prison cell. Until he and La Rivière became secret prisoners he was allowed to see a confessor four times a year and after that on strict orders from the minister only once a year; at the Bastille the minister himself imposed no restrictions at all. When he first arrived at Pignerol it was Saint-Mars who took him whatever he needed for the day and later, as a secret prisoner at Exiles and on Sainte-Marguerite, the minister was concerned that only the senior-lieutenant should deputize for Saint-Mars when he was ill or absent. At the Bastille, however, the prisoner was given over entirely to the care of a sergeant.
What happened to alter the prisoner’s status is not at all evident. No record exists of any conscious change of attitude directed by a minister. What did change, however, as Petitfils points out, was the actual minister. In July 1691, when the prisoner had been on Sainte-Marguerite for four years, Louvois died and was succeeded by his son, Barbezieux. It was after this date, Petitfils maintains, that government concern for the prisoner’s security declined. Neither Barbezieux before the move to the Bastille, nor Pontchartrain after it, ever showed the kind of obsessive concern that Louvois had always shown. Petitfils is thus brought to the conclusion that Louvois had some personal reason for keeping the prisoner under such tight security.
Under the absolute rule of Louis XIV, Petitfils reminds us, what passed for the will of the King was only too often some minister’s interpretation of the King’s intention, made according to his own will, and no one abused his ministerial powers more in this regard than Louvois. In his case it even happened that matters of personal interest unrelated to state affairs were conducted in the name of the King. In 1668, for instance, when he wanted to make Sidonia de Courcelles his mistress, he had her husband and Louis de Cavoye, who was her lover, held in prison on a charge for which they had been acquitted. Two years later he contrived to bypass a court order for their release and keep them in prison for another two years. When the lady in question refused nevertheless to become his mistress, he hounded her into prison too, and from there into permanent exile. This, as Petitfils points out with examples of even more outrageous conduct, was not at all an exceptional way for Louvois to behave, and so it is not on the face of it impossible that Eustache was the victim of just such a misuse of power. The official papers relating to his arrest and imprisonment make it clear that apart from Louvois, his father Le Tellier and his confidential agents, Vauroy and Saint-Mars, no one but the King could possibly have known of Eustache’s fate; and for the King to have been aware was not even necessary since Louvois had access to royal warrants already signed and sealed in blank. The evidence, such as it is, establishes the fact that Eustache’s imprisonment could have been arranged by Louvois for personal reasons and the truth kept hidden from everyone else in the government, including the King.
Louvois knew, and in all likelihood was the only one who did know, the truth of Eustache’s identity and crime. He referred to him as ‘only a valet’ and described his secret as ‘how he was employed before coming to Pignerol’; hence Petitfils thinks it reasonable to assume that Eustache had been ‘employed’ as a ‘valet’ under circumstances which Louvois wished to hide. Who his master had been was evidently an important part of the secret, and leads one to suppose that if that had been revealed, the crime itself would have been exposed. Presumably the crime was known, and the perpetrator thought to be a valet in the service of someone in particular. Presumably also this valet had escaped capture and had disappeared. A state prison was the last place anyone would have thought to look for such a man and if Eustache was that man then the only motive Louvois could have had for hiding him in such an extraordinary way was that he himself had instigated Eustache to commit the crime.
When Jung wrote about ‘Eustache Dauger, Danger or d’Augers’, he stated flatly that after all his researches he was sure that ‘there exists no trace of this person anywhere.’ Then he went on to give what little he had turned up that might be relevant, including a story he claimed to have had from the historian Pierre Clement that there was ‘a valet of Colbert who ran away, totally disappeared, and who was accused of having wished to poison his master in 1669.’ In fact Clement’s reference, which was given in a book entitled La Police sous Louis XIV, derives from a note made in 1679 by La Reynie about a possible conspiracy to poison Colbert in 1676. Certainly at that time poisons had been acquired to use against Colbert and for many years he had been suffering from bouts of recurring illness which La Reynie thought might have been the consequence of an earlier attempt to poison him. In his view, the poisons were probably administered by ‘a servant who had been bribed and used.’ La Reynie gives no date for ‘the time when M. Colbert was ill,’ but Petitfils, like Jung, traced its first appearance to a much earlier date than 1676.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1668, Colbert had been in poor health, tortured by repeated attacks of gout, but in December under treatment from the King’s own apothecaries his condition began to improve. However, on 27 December he suddenly became ill again with stomach pains as a result of some medicine he had taken. Petitfils would have us believe that it was ‘a violent burning of the stomach’, but there is in fact no evidence for this. On 28 December Colbert described his own condition thus: ‘Today I feel very out of sorts, the result I think of a physic I took yesterday which taxed me very much.’ Though after a week or so he appeared to recover, Petitfils claims that the effects of the ‘physic’ were serious and long-lasting. ‘Since I have a weak stomach,’ Colbert wrote to one of his brothers in November 1672, ‘I have for some time now followed a carefully regulated diet. I eat according to my own schedule and I take only chicken with soup for lunch and in the evening a piece of bread and more soup.’ Whether or not it occurred to anyone that the medicine he took on 27 December 1668 was poisoned, the suspicion was not voiced at the time and there was no enquiry. At that time poisoning was thought to be rare in France, the work of foreigners, especially Italians. It was not until seven years later that the Brinvilliers trial gave the first serious hint of an underworld traffic in poison, with murders committed at all levels of French society. One of the chief features of this wave of poisonings was that in many cases the valets and servants of the victims had been bribed or blackmailed to administer the poison.
The absence of a prime minister under Louis XIV caused fierce rivalry amongst his ministers, chief of whom were Colbert, the Controller of Finance, and Le Tellier, the Minister of War. In the struggle for ascendancy, each minister brought his family and friends to power around him, while the King sought to keep the reins of government in his own hands by playing one clan off against the other. It was in 1662, when Louvois was twenty-one, that he became his father’s associate and executive in the Ministry of War. He and Colbert were implacable enemies from the start. Saint-Simon, among others, maintains that Louvois was so determined to overthrow Colbert in the King’s opinion that he kept up a deliberate campaign to ruin the country’s economy, inciting the King to unnecessary extravagance in peace and the army to unnecessary destruction in war. His tactics were only too successful at first. In spring 1667 he was in high favour and Colbert, accused in the King’s ear of embezzling ‘ten millions a year’, was close to disgrace. Since Colbert was the only serious obstacle in his way, it seemed that Louvois at the age of twenty-six was about to realize supreme power. Then, unexpectedly, the wind turned. ‘Stories against M. Colbert are still going the rounds,’ Saint-Maurice reported home towards the end of 1668, ‘but he is completely in favour. M. de Louvois wants to get the better of him and they are at daggers drawn. Something unpleasant is sure to happen to one or the other. M. de Louvois has become unbearable with his abrupt, touchy behaviour. He is rude to everyone who speaks to him.’
The picture of Louvois left by his contemporaries leaves no doubt as to his capacity for murder. According to Saint-Simon, he was in every way ‘arrogant, brutal and boorish’. According to La Fare, he was ‘savage and bloody’, a man ‘whose sole aim was to be master’ and who was capable of destroying everything around him by his extreme ‘ferocity, pride and rashness’. According to the Princess Palatine he was ‘hard and brutish’. She thought him ‘detestable’, called him ‘horribly vicious’, and claimed that ‘it was nothing for him to burn, poison, lie and cheat.’ That he had secret contact with the criminal underworld of Paris, including those who dealt in poison and black magic arrested in the late 1670s, is an established fact. According to Primi Visconti, La Voisin, the notorious witch who was the mistress of Le Sage, ‘boasted that it was by her art that Madame de Montespan and Louvois kept themselves in favour.’ It is by no means inconceivable therefore that in December 1668, when Colbert unexpectedly came back into favour with the King, Louvois should have decided to take advantage of his illness to do away with him. Colbert was a very sick man, worn out by months of suffering. If his illness had taken a sudden turn for the worse and he had died, no one would have suspected foul play.
Thus Petitfils arrives at his hypothesis. Eustache Danger is one of Colbert’s valets, bought by Louvois and furnished by him with poison to use against his master. Danger adds the poison to Colbert’s medicine on 27 December 1668, but the dose is not strong enough and Colbert survives. Danger leaves Colbert’s service then or soon after, presumably because he is under suspicion for what he has done or as a result of some second attempt in which he failed go get the poison into the medicine. With or without the help of Louvois he then goes into hiding in England, but in July 1669 he believes, or is led to believe, that it is safe to return to France. Louvois, who with or without his knowledge has followed his movements closely, has him arrested and bundled off to prison the moment he lands in Dunkirk. For Louvois it is a great relief to know that the agent of his crime is safely locked up and silenced for ever. If Danger had fallen into the hands of La Reynie and had been made to talk, Louvois would certainly have been incriminated.
Thus Danger, who is ‘only a valet’, is arrested by a confidential agent of Louvois under circumstances of the greatest secrecy and is then taken all the way across the country to the custody of another of Louvois’ confidential agents. He is forbidden to speak to anyone about what he did and is held under conditions of the highest security. Eight months after his arrival, everyone is so curious to know who he is that Saint-Mars has taken to inventing preposterous stories about him. Then to everyone’s surprise, just one year after his arrival, Louvois himself decides to go to Pignerol. ‘They say that M. de Louvois is going to Pignerol to see what has to be done in that place to improve the fortifications,’ reports Saint-Maurice on 25 July 1670, and he continues: ‘I hardly think that he would undertake such a long journey in the heat of the summer and that he would separate himself from the person of the King for such a long time just for the supposed fortifications.’ At Pignerol, Louvois changes the garrison, giving no reason for his action and taking the precaution of allowing no contact between the newly-appointed officers and those they replace. Presumably the new garrison does not know that in the state prison there is a mysterious prisoner held incommunicado in a specially built cell, and so there is no more curiosity.
Though permission is given for Danger to act as valet to Fouquet, under no circumstances is he to be allowed contact with Lauzun. Since Fouquet was imprisoned more than seven years before the attempt on Colbert’s life, he is not likely to know anything about a valet who was under suspicion and, since he was imprisoned by Colbert, he is not likely to feel much concern for Colbert if Danger tells him about it. Lauzun by contrast is, in Saint-Simon’s words, a ‘long-standing friend’ of Colbert and will know his household well enough to recognize Danger as the suspect valet who disappeared. If Lauzun learns the truth from Danger, he will sooner or later somehow or other get the information to Colbert. Unknown to Saint-Mars and Louvois, however, Lauzun manages to communicate with Fouquet’s cell by way of the chimney, makes contact with Danger and discovers the secret.
Lauzun’s loyalties being first and foremost to himself, he decides to offer Louvois a deal: his liberty in return for his silence. On 27 January 1680 he writes to Louvois saying that he has information for him which ‘is in your interest’ to have delivered by ‘word of mouth.’ It is ‘of an importance for you above anything you could imagine’ and ‘you alone should be informed.’ He wants his friend Barrail sent to Pignerol to act as messenger and eventually Louvois agrees. Barrail arrives on 17 March, but as things turn out Fouquet dies while he is there, and Saint-Mars discovers the communicating hole. A full report of the new situation reaches Louvois from Saint-Mars just before Barrail arrives to deliver the message that Lauzun knows all about Danger and will keep the secret to himself only if he is liberated.
Louvois does not reply to Lauzun directly. He tells Saint-Mars to inform him that, since Fouquet is dead, Danger’s services are no longer required and so he has been released. Lauzun is thus left to deduce that the story he got from Danger is a ridiculous lie and that Louvois has more serious matters to concern himself with than his foolish attempt at blackmail. Danger, he is to believe, was not even a prisoner at Pignerol but was, like La Rivière, a simple valet hired to serve a prisoner and paid off when that prisoner died. Louvois is playing a game of bluff and to succeed in it he has to play the game with everyone at Pignerol; thus Danger from then on becomes a secret prisoner to be hidden away as well as silenced. Lauzun, however, is a wily bird and Louvois can never be sure that he has succeeded in deceiving him. A year later, when Lauzun is allowed to leave Pignerol and live under surveillance at Bourbon and Chalon, Louvois has all his mail intercepted, and when finally he is allowed to return to Paris, summons him to a private meeting before he has time to visit Colbert. To everyone’s surprise, the two men, hostile to each other though they always have been, stay talking together from half past ten until midnight. What they discuss is not known and no one can possibly imagine. Presumably in the course of their conversation Louvois refers to the story told by Danger and either does a deal with Lauzun or in some devious way contrives to smother any remaining suspicions he might have.
Petitfils acknowledges that his contribution is ‘only a hypothesis’, but maintains, with no small justification, that ‘no other explanation takes better account of the singular features which surround the arrest and imprisonment of Eustache Danger.’ It explains, one might add, why later governments were always unable to dig up any information on the prisoner and so fell back on the story of Matthioli. But what it does not explain is why, being the kind of man he was, Louvois chose to give himself so much trouble and anxiety. A knife in Danger’s back on a dark street one night and all his problems would have been over. Paris and London were full of men who, for a small fee and no questions asked, would have taken on such a job. If Louvois could hire a valet to assassinate a government minister, he could certainly hire someone to assassinate a valet.
Since 1970, when his L’Homme au Masque de fer appeared, Petitfils has made a considerable contribution to the study of seventeenth century French history with the publication of several major works, including biographies of Fouquet, Lauzun and Louis XIV, and after a number of important essays on the subject published over the years, has produced a second Iron Mask book, Le Masque de fer, which came out in January 2003. Returning to the problem after more than thirty years of scholarship, Petitfils brings the weight of all his erudition and discernment into play, and the result is magisterial, a book of reference.
In his assessment this time he renounces the hypothetical and, limiting himself to only the most plausible interpretations of the facts as we know them, concludes, like Lang and Barnes before him, that the place and date of Eustache Danger’s arrest strongly suggests a link with the under-cover negotiations then engaged between Charles II and his sister, Madame, towards the secret Treaty of Dover. This agreement, signed in June 1670, specified that the English would join the French in a military alliance against the Dutch on condition that Louis XIV supported Charles II financially and militarily in a plan to take himself and his kingdom into the Roman Catholic Church. In the view of Petitfils, it seems likely that Eustache Danger had been employed by Madame to carry secret letters to England and, whether intentionally or not, had seen and understood the contents. He was, of course, a valet but probably not one of Madame’s own household, since Monsieur, jealous and resentful of the attention she receieved from other men, surrounded her with spies and would have intercepted any message she tried to send through one of her own. Perhaps he was a man from the household of Charles and Madame’s mother, Henrietta of France, or alternatively a valet of the Comte de Saint-Albans. According to Lionne, writing to Croissy in February 1669, both of these servants were employed as courier to England by Madame at other times.
If Eustache Danger was arrested as a consequence of being a messenger for Madame then, Petitfils suggests, he could have been responsible for or at least involved in whatever incident it was which in July 1669 caused Louis XIV to question the reliability of Madame and seek to exclude her from the negotiations. That something of significance in the cross-Channel exchange did occur at that time seems likely since of all the correspondence which passed between Charles and Madame after 4 July 1669 until the secret treaty was signed nearly a year later, not a single letter has been allowed to survive. Such an identification of Eustache Danger would also explain why in the course of his stay at Exiles and even more noticeably on Sainte-Marguerite Island he lost importance in the eyes of the authorities in Paris. In 1685, two years before the move to Sainte-Marguerite, Charles II died and was succeeded by his Roman Catholic brother, James, and in 1688 the year after the move to Sainte-Marguerite, James was driven out of England and replaced by the Protestant couple William and Mary. Within the space of four years, from February 1685 to February 1689, the secret which had cost Eustache Danger his liberty lost its political relevance and the disruptive threat its disclosure would have posed.