13
‘Not even a Hindu god’, it has been said of the Iron Mask, ‘ever underwent so many transformations, so many incarnations’, and looking back at the welter of theories produced so far, the multitude of candidates presented in these pages, it may seem that unless and until more relevant and reliable documents are uncovered the mystery will never be solved. Ill-served though we are, I would nonetheless venture to propose that we already have all the information we need to solve the mystery. I would even suggest that the mask has been lifted many times already but, because those who lifted it could never understand why the face behind it should have been masked in the first place, the mystery has been allowed to continue. It is the mask which fascinates and mystifies us, drawing our attention to the prisoner even while rendering him anonymous, and among all the contradictions which rise to baffle us in the Iron Mask story it is this contradiction at the heart of the mystery, the fact that the masked prisoner was made noticeable by the very means used to hide his identity, that none of the theories advanced so far has ever been able to resolve. My own theory does not pretend to answer all the questions posed, but this particular contradiction it does explain. Illogical as it may seem, I suggest that the prisoner known to the world as the Man in the Iron Mask was a nonentity whose face without the mask would have meant nothing to anyone and, irrational as it may seem, I suggest that the mystery surrounding him, including the fact that he was once even made to wear an actual mask of steel, was the fabrication pure and simple of his gaoler Saint-Mars.
Little is known about the prisoner but, though for the moment we cannot say much about who he was, we can say a great deal about who he was not. He was not for instance Eustache Dauger or Eustache d’Auget. His name was Danger or d’Angers, as Petitfils maintained back in 1970. Most theorists since that time, like Mast and Dijol, have ignored this claim but, at the International Symposium on the Iron Mask held in Cannes in 1987, Bernard Caire removed all remaining doubt on the matter with an analysis of the handwriting of the original warrants and dispatches.1 Furthermore, this man called Danger was neither well-born nor well-known. For all his importance as a prisoner, he was not in himself a person of any significance. The fact that Louvois described him as ‘only a valet’, that Saint-Mars thought he would make ‘a fine valet’ for Lauzun, that he was given to Fouquet ‘as a servant’ and ‘to serve as a valet’, and that La Rivière was described as ‘his colleague’, is evidence enough: in seventeenth-century France only a valet would have been required, or indeed prepared, to act as a valet.
If further proof of the prisoner’s humble condition is needed, it is not lacking. When in July 1669 Louvois told Saint-Mars to make ready for Danger’s arrival he was quite specific about the man’s social status: ‘you will prepare the furniture necessary’, he wrote, ‘taking note of the fact that since the prisoner is only a valet he will need nothing of any significance’, and later, when Saint-Mars moved Danger from Exiles to Sainte-Marguerite, he informed Louvois that all the prisoner’s belongings including his bed had been so old and broken that they had not been worth the expense of transporting them. By contrast the overall cost of what furniture, linen and clothes were judged necessary to prepare a prison apartment for a gentleman like Lauzun amounted to more than 4,000 livres and included the provision of 460 livres worth of table-silver and such things as twelve lace nightcaps, four pairs of gloves and a Bergamo tapestry. In 1681, when Danger and La Rivière were the only prisoners Saint-Mars had, Louvois wrote to him: ‘You may buy new clothes for your prisoners, but clothes for that kind of people should be expected to last three or four years.’ For Danger’s upkeep at Pignerol, Saint-Mars was allowed 4 livres per day and at Exiles 5 livres per day, the same as for La Rivière; the allowance he was given merely for feeding Lauzun and his servant amounted to 20 livres per day. Just to provide Lauzun with sheets and towels cost the equivalent of Danger’s entire upkeep for more than four months.2
It has been argued that if Danger had been only a valet, the authorities would not have wasted so much time and money keeping him in prison. A valet, as Pagnol put it, ‘could have been hanged in five minutes with a rope for forty sous’; but Pagnol was wrong. Though the power of Louis XIV and his ministers was supreme, it was nonetheless governed by law and there was no place in the legal order for them to save government time and money by killing people. As it was, La Rivière, who was certainly nothing but a valet, was not killed when it was discovered that he knew too much, and Matthioli’s valet, who was kidnapped to stop him talking about the circumstances of his master’s disappearance, was not killed either. Both were kept in prison, like Danger at a cost of 5 livres per day, La Rivière until his death from dropsy seven years later and Matthioli’s valet until his death more than fifteen years later.
The valet Eustache Danger was certainly the prisoner who ended his days wearing a mask in the Bastille in November 1703, but when he was arrested and imprisoned in August 1669 there was no concern to hide his face. Captain de Vauroy was simply ordered to arrest him on sight and take him immediately to Pignerol where Saint-Mars was ordered ‘to keep him under safe custody preventing him from communicating with anyone by word of mouth or in writing.’ The order for reimbursement issued to Vauroy for his journey from Dunkirk to Calais and from there to Pignerol makes it clear that he had with him only three constables to serve as escort and that the group travelled on horseback by regular roads, stopping to eat and sleep and change horses at the ordinary post-houses along their way. The danger to the State which the prisoner represented was real enough, but it had nothing to do with his face. He knew something which the authorities were afraid he might reveal and he was arrested and imprisoned to stop him talking. ‘You must make sure,’ Louvois warned Saint-Mars, ‘that the windows are so placed that they do not give on to anywhere accessible to anyone and that there are enough doors closing one upon the other that the sentries will not be able to hear anything. You personally must take the wretch whatever he needs for the day once a day and you must never listen to anything he tries to tell you, no matter what the pretext might be.’ The following month, the prisoner was allowed the services of a doctor and of a priest, and still the only concern voiced by Louvois was that he should ‘speak to no one’. That the doctor or the priest would see his face was a matter of no significance at all and later, when he was allowed to leave his cell to serve Fouquet and even to walk with him in the citadel, the question of hiding his face was never raised.
What Danger’s secret knowledge was we do not know. It was something which the authorities believed Fouquet could be trusted with, but not Lauzun. Louvois writing to Fouquet about the risk of Danger revealing the secret to others declared: ‘you know how important it is that no one has knowledge of what he knows’, and according to Bernard Caire the secret was something which Danger had seen. In the letter from Louvois to Fouquet ‘regarding what Eustache may have said of his past life to his colleague’, Louvois asked ‘if the man named Eustache, given to you as a servant, has not spoken in front of your other valet of how he was employed before coming to Pignerol.’ From an examination of the original first draft of this letter Caire discovered that the minister had first dictated ‘of what he had seen’, then changed his mind, had the clerk cross it out and write in its place ‘of how he was employed’. As things are, we know precious little about the secret and even that little is not without its contradictions; for all the concern to stop Lauzun discovering what it was, it was something which apparently he could nevertheless be persuaded not to believe.
In April 1680 the security measures surrounding Danger were changed. La Rivière, suspected of having learned whatever forbidden knowledge it was that had cost Danger his liberty, lost his liberty too. Both became secret prisoners, their names suppressed in all subsequent correspondance, while word was put about in Pignerol that they had been released. The reason for this change was the discovery made by Saint-Mars at the time of Fouquet’s death that Lauzun had been visiting Fouqet in secret and so had probably met and talked with Danger. The purpose of the subterfuge was to deceive Lauzun into believing that Danger, like La Rivière, had never been more than an ordinary valet, engaged at Pignerol to serve Fouquet, and that in consequence any revelations he might have made were pure inventions. Presumably the increased security around Danger included the precaution that his face should not be seen, but it was a measure which applied equally to La Rivière. Moreover it was necessary only for so long as Lauzun or anyone capable of informing him was in a position to discover that the two valets had not been set free. In April 1681, Lauzun was released from Pignerol; the following September Saint-Mars left for Exiles with the two secret prisoners, hidden ‘in a litter’ by order of Louvois; and in the following November, the crisis over, Louvois informed Saint-Mars that once again he could allow his prisoners the services of a doctor and of a priest. Far away from Lauzun and his friends at Pignerol, the security measures surrounding the prisoners could become the same as they had been for Danger at the time of his arrest and the only concern voiced by the minister thereafter was that they should be ‘unable to speak with anyone not only from outside but even from among the garrison of Exiles.’
Since Danger and La Rivière had been secret prisoners at Pignerol, it was important that they should not be recognized when they left for Exiles and it was for this reason that Louvois ordered Saint-Mars to have them ‘leave the citadel of Pignerol in a litter’. So far as the minister was concerned, the use of a litter was quite sufficient to meet the demands of the situation. This form of conveyance was a box-like structure built on a framework like a stretcher with shafts front and back to which horses or mules were harnessed. Being curtained with leather or oilcloth, it could easily be kept closed from the outside. Moreover, since it was a common means of transport at the time, it was not likely to attract undue attention; and as it happened it appears to have attracted no attention at all. According to Ettore Patria, who contributed a study of the Exiles period to the Cannes Symposium in 1987, no one in the region of Exiles had the least suspicion that Saint-Mars had brought any prisoners with him; and the Savoyard governor of nearby Susa, who kept his superiors in Turin constantly informed on what was happening over the border, of the doings of the French in general and of Saint-Mars in particular, did not at any time realize that there were prisoners in the fort.
In all the time Saint-Mars was governor of Exiles, nothing happened to trouble the security of his two prisoners and the simple directive in force when they arrived, ‘that no one should be able to communicate with them’, remained unchanged, reiterated by Louvois in almost identical form from year to year. And yet, though the security status of the two prisoners did not change in the five and a half years they were there, it was during the transfer from Exiles to Saint-Marguerite that the secret prisoner, who we know was ‘only a valet’, became the mysterious prisoner known to the world as the Man in the Iron Mask. In January 1687 La Rivière died, in the following month Saint-Mars went to Sainte-Marguerite to make a tour of inspection and in April it was common knowledge in the region of Cannes that a mysterious prisoner of great importance was going to be brought to the island. In May the prisoner arrived in a sedan-chair on the shoulders of four porters who, in relay with four others, had carried him over mountain roads for twelve days, and in September it was reported in Paris that the prisoner in the chair had arrived ‘with a steel mask on his face’. What had happened to transform Danger from being one of the two secret prisoners in a litter who arrived in Exiles unnoticed in September 1681 into being the well-publicized sensation he was on his arrival at Sainte-Marguerite in May 1687 has nothing to do with any order issued by Louvois. The idea of using a sedan chair and a mask of steel was the responsibility solely and simply of his gaoler Saint-Mars and he chose to transport his wretched prisoner in that way not for reasons of state, but for reasons of his own. To understand how Saint-Mars could have become capable of such a thing, a brief recapitulation is necessary.
It was no secret in Pignerol that Saint-Mars had been sent from Paris to take charge of a prison where there was only one prisoner. Pignerol was no ordinary prison. It had been upgraded to a state prison under the command of Saint-Mars for the sole purpose of guarding Fouquet and when after four and a half years Saint-Mars received another prisoner, the assumption was naturally made that the second prisoner was as extraordinary as the first. On 31 August 1669, just one week after Eustache Danger’s arrival, Saint-Mars reported to Louvois that ‘many people here believe he is a Marshal of France and others say a President’. Word got out that transformations were being made in the Lower Tower to provide a special high-security cell for this new prisoner and Saint-Mars, finding himself the focus of everyone’s interest, enjoyed the attention. On 12 April 1670 he wrote to Louvois: ‘There are sometimes people who are so curious to know about my prisoner and why I am having such fortifications built for his security, that I am obliged to tell them preposterous stories to make fun of them.’ Who the secret prisoner was, no one could say, but two and a half years after his arrival the belief that the state prison of Pignerol was reserved for prisoners of only the highest rank and importance seemed confirmed by the arrival of a third prisoner, every bit as exceptional as the first: the King’s favourite, Lauzun. Judging by what evidence there was, it seemed reasonable to assume that the mysterious prisoner was someone of birth, position and influence who could count on powerful supporters to attempt his liberation.
Saint-Mars knew differently. The secret prisoner was ‘only a valet’. His importance lay not in anything he was, but in something he knew. No doubt it struck Saint-Mars as ironical that, while his two other prisoners were served by valets, he personally was obliged to fetch and carry for this man who was ‘only a valet’. But apart from occasional bouts of illness, Danger gave no trouble. Unlike the prisoners of rank, he was meek and acquiescent. Indeed he was so obedient and sensible that in February 1672 Saint-Mars thought he could trust him enough to put him with Lauzun as valet and spy. Louvois did not approve of the idea, but Saint-Mars saw little sense in trying to persuade valets to serve in his prison when one of his prisoners was actually a valet and eventually in January 1675 he won the minister’s approval to have Danger act valet to Fouquet. Seven years later in the isolation of Exiles, he must have pondered with amazement the strange turn of fate which had transformed him from the commander of the state prison of Pignerol, the celebrated keeper of Fouquet and Lauzun, into the governor of a run-down fortress in the middle of nowhere, the gaoler of two wretched valets.
The name Saint-Mars was the sword-name of Benigne d’Auvergne, assumed by him when as a boy of fourteen he was enrolled as an army cadet. Both his parents died when he was a child and he was raised by an uncle, Gilles de Biot de Blainvilliers, who packed him off to the army at the age of twelve. In 1650, when he was twenty-four, he was given a place in the First Company of the King’s Musketeers and, though he was thirty-four before he was promoted corporal and thirty-eight before he was made sergeant, he could flatter himself that to achieve rank at all in the Musketeers, where every man was a gentleman, was a mark of some distinction for a man with neither birth nor money behind him. It was as a sergeant that, in December 1664, he was appointed governor of the State Prison of Pignerol and he was recommended for that post by the commander of his company, d’Artagnan, who recognized in him all the qualities necessary for a gaoler. He was the perfect subordinate, ready to carry out the orders of his superiors no matter how arbitrary, and to the letter, without question, hesitation or scruple. He was moreover a man who knew his place in society and the place of others, the rights and duties of class and office: an ideal warden for prisoners of rank. As it happened, the honours and responsibilities of his new post brought out the worst in him as well as the best; he was vain, ambitious, ruthless and rapacious, but his masters quickly came to believe that he could be kept in line and firmly handled so long as they valued his services and proved it with hard cash.
Soon after his arrival in Pignerol, he became friendly with a certain Damorezan who was the military commissioner there and a trusted agent of Louvois. Damorezan had married the daughter of an apothecary named Collot who had two other daughters, as beautiful by all accounts as they were stupid. Saint-Mars married one and a secretary of Louvois, named Dufresnoy, married the other. After this union in triplicate of the Collot sisters with Louvois men, Damorezan, Dufresnoy and Saint-Mars, it was not altogether a surprise when one of the sisters went on to union with Louvois himself. In 1670, Madame Dufresnoy became the mistress of her husband’s master and, since her husband was accommodating, everyone in the family, including Saint-Mars, could reap the benefit. Four years later, Louvois had the woman of his bed created Lady of the Queen’s Bed, which for all the smothered laughter it produced at court, gave her immense standing and influence. She was flattered on all sides and responded, according to La Fare, ‘with all the insolence that can be derived from beauty and prosperity when combined with low birth and limited intelligence.’
The 24th of August 1669 was a providential day for Saint-Mars: he received not only the custody of Eustache Danger, but also possession of the Château de Palteau. An uncle, Cantien Garrot, died that day and left him both the château and the governorship of Sens. Fortune chose to make Saint-Mars a man of substance, but a wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. Within ten years of his appointment to Pignerol, he had exploited every possible channel for advancement and had made himself not only rich but noble. As well as being governor of Pignerol prison and a sergeant in the Musketeers, he had half a dozen lucrative positions as non-resident governor of towns and forts elsewhere in France and was captain of his own Free Company. It was to be expected that on top of his regular salary and frequent bonuses he would, like all other gaolers, make money out of the allowances supplied for his prisoners, but he quite surpassed all precedent in the field. With prisoners of rank, where the allowance for food alone was in the region of 7,000 livres a year, there was a great deal of money to be made, but no sum however petty was too small for Saint-Mars to pass up, and he stole from all his prisoners, even those with a minimum allowance. What the authorities objected to was not this, however, but his continual attempts to gain even more from the government by claiming false expenses. Louvois indulged his greed with enormous gifts of money and even so was obliged to admonish him repeatedly for cheating on his day-to-day accounts. By 1673, he had enough property to apply for and receive letters of nobility.
The driving force behind Saint-Mars was not a need to make money, however. No doubt at the beginning a fear of poverty played some part in his voracious appetite, but the desire to enjoy the wealth he amassed played no part at all. Throughout his life he never spent more than a few days in the magnificent house he owned at Palteau, nor on any of the other estates he managed to acquire. He lived out his life in prisons, a virtual prisoner himself, and preferred to finish his days in the Bastille rather than in Palteau. What impelled him to make money, and to go on making money when he was already rich, was the desperate and deluded belief that a man of substance is a man of standing; his striving for wealth became an obsession as a direct consequence of his frustrated need for prestige. ‘My lord,’ he wrote to Louvois on 27 February 1672, ‘I take the liberty to inform you that what could make me live here in health would be a little honour. I have been a sergeant for so long that I am the doyen of the lot … If you don’t have the kindness, my lord, to remind His Majesty of my seniority, I will die what I am.’ To quieten him, Louvois sent a bonus of 6,000 livres by return post, but money was not enough and on 18 December 1675 Saint-Mars repeated the same plea: ‘I beg you in grace, my lord, to accord me some mark of honour or else allow me to go and break my head in the army.’ Again Louvois put him off with a large sum of money, but in the following year a promotion was finally agreed. To be elevated to the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Musketeers was certainly an honour, but, when the recipient had been made to wait until the age of fifty, it must have seemed too little and too late. Honour was a good deal more difficult to acquire than money and unhappily for Saint-Mars there were honours of rank and status which no amount of money could buy.
Saint-Mars, the self-made man, was far and away the most influential member of his family, as is proved by the fact that so many of his relatives turned to him for a job. When he took up the post at Pignerol, he brought with him two cousins, both former musketeers, to serve as his lieutenants, one of whom was Blainvilliers, the son of his guardian. Later when he had established himself he found positions in the prison guard for two of his nephews, sons of his sister Marguerite, who had married a man of little means by the name of Eloi de Formanoir de Corbé. He stayed at Pignerol for sixteen years during which time his wife bore him two sons.
In the eyes of his own family and the lowly creatures he employed, Saint-Mars was all that he wished to be, a member of the wealthy and powerful élite, but, in the eyes of the élite, he was an upstart. The governor-general of the city of Pignerol, himself a marquis, resented the fact that such a low-born, low-grade officer was not answerable to him, and so refused to accept him in society. The snub hurt Saint-Mars where he felt it most, his inflated self-esteem, but taking the stand that at Pignerol he was no-one’s subordinate served to give him standing of a kind anyway; and as things turned out, for his last three years at Pignerol he was in his element. The French acquisition of Casale, with all the complications which that entailed, brought him into close relationship with men of mark like d’Estrades and Catinat, and the opening of the prison to the families and friends of Fouquet and Lauzun brought him into regular contact with visitors of quality. At his request, Louvois even authorized him to play host to these visitors and have them dine with Fouquet and Lauzun at his own table in the company of Madame de Saint-Mars. To all appearances he had made the grade, had become a man of position and influence, accepted by people of birth and breeding, and he enjoyed the rôle immensely.
In retrospect, those were palmy days. Exiles by contrast was a grim, isolated spot where he felt neglected, thwarted and depressed. Technically, in his new job, he was the governor of a fort not a prison, but the fort was too far behind the frontier and the times to have any military significance. Without prisoners of rank to give him importance, without friends of rank to give him reassurance, he lacked direction and purpose. He did not like anything about the Exiles job, except the money, and his health as well as his spirits suffered. Dufresnoy, the accommodating husband, thrived meanwhile, but not Damorezan. Like Saint-Mars, he had been swindling the government for every penny he could get, and in 1683 a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of embezzlement. Fortunately for him, Louvois tipped him off in time and he was able to take refuge with Saint-Mars before escaping to Turin. After the achievement and promise of Pignerol, Exiles was a wretched and humiliating anticlimax. Anyone else in such a spot, aged almost sixty as Saint-Mars then was, would have recognized that he had been put out to grass, but Saint-Mars pestered his superiors for a better post and even sent his wife to Paris to petition Louvois on his behalf.
The transfer to Sainte-Marguerite was a merciful reprieve, and Saint-Mars exploited it at once and to the full. From the moment he arrived on the island to carry out his preliminary inspection, he sought to make up the ground he had lost at Exiles by impressing everyone with a show of his importance. The secrecy and security surrounding Danger had once intrigued and excited the people of Pignerol. Their curiosity had been aroused by circumstances beyond the control of Saint-Mars, but he had enjoyed the attention it brought him, the aura of mystery and significance he acquired as the secret prisoner’s keeper. On Sainte-Marguerite that situation was repeated, but this time because Saint-Mars deliberately aroused that curiosity, spreading stories about his prisoner’s importance before anyone had any reason to know that the man even existed. Tourists like the Abbé Mauvans, stopping off at the island while the prisoner was still actually at Exiles, heard all about the ‘unknown prisoner’ who was to be ‘transported with such great precaution’ and who would get ‘a pistol-ball in the head’ if ever he tried ‘to speak out his name’. They also heard about the new prison which was being built for him ‘connected to the governor’s lodging’ so that the governor himself would ‘be almost his only gaoler and guard’.
As implied in this version of things, the important thing about the prisoner was his identity and, since the authorities were prepared to kill him if he attempted to reveal his name, there was every reason to believe that his identity was one which even ordinary people could be expected to know. Such an impression of the prisoner’s importance was altogether false. In the first place it was not true that there was an order to kill him if he should try to reveal his name. The only government order with any resemblance to this pretence was given at the time of the prisoner’s arrival at Pignerol when Louvois warned Saint-Mars that he must ‘threaten to kill him’ if ever he tried to speak about anything other than the bare necessities of life; as it was the prisoner had gone on to reveal his secret to Fouquet, La Rivière and Lauzun without suffering any such dire consequence. Moreover, the name Eustache Danger would have meant nothing to anyone anyway, except perhaps Lauzun, and it was not even certain that seven years after his last meeting with him Lauzun would have remembered the name of a mere valet. Even before moving to Sainte-Marguerite with his prisoner, Saint-Mars had the people of the region agog with expectation, convinced that his prisoner was someone of such fame and consequence that the authorities would stop at nothing to conceal his identity; and in May, when finally he arrived with his prisoner, he staged a show sensational enough to satisfy those expectations.
To transport Danger from Exiles, the most discreet form of conveyance would have been a litter, as demonstrated by its success for the journey to Exiles, but Saint-Mars wanted something else. ‘I think the most secure mode of transport for conducting him to the islands would be a sedan-chair covered in oilcloth,’ he wrote to Louvois. ‘It will be less troublesome than a litter which can often get broken.’ Outside of major cities, the use of sedan-chairs was in effect, albeit not in principle, restricted to people of only the highest rank, but Louvois, having no reason to suspect that Saint-Mars would be anything but discreet, did not object. In all probability he assumed that it was his intention to escape notice by avoiding main roads and towns and there was no doubt that a sedan-chair would have been more manageable than a litter on small roads or cross-country. In the event, however, Saint-Mars chose to go by main roads and through main towns, stopping two days in Briançon and long enough in Grasse for the prisoner’s appearance to make such an impression that tales of ‘the guise under which he was seen’ were reported to the Abbé Mauvans. If in the region of Cannes any doubts had remained that the fort of Sainte-Marguerite was to receive a prisoner of the highest importance, they were dispelled the moment the prisoner arrived in Grasse, carried in a sedan-chair by two teams of porters who, so far as anyone could discover, had carried him all the way from Pignerol. Far from trying to pass with his prisoner unnoticed, as presumably Louvois supposed he would, Saint-Mars had done everything to draw attention to him and give the impression that he was both famous and noble.
Nor was that all. At the International Symposium held in Cannes in 1987, Stanislas Brugnon produced a document which until that time had been unknown to investigators of the Iron Mask mystery. A letter, unsigned but thought to be by Louis Fouquet, the Bishop of Agde, and written from Paris on 4 September 1687, a mere four months after the arrival of Saint-Mars and his prisoner at Sainte-Marguerite, it gives news of that arrival in even more sensational terms than those reported by the Abbé Mauvans:
Monsieur de Cinq-Mars (sic) has by order of the King transported a state prisoner from Pignerol to the island of Sainte-Marguerite. No-one knows who he is: there is an interdiction on speaking his name and an order to kill him if he should pronounce it … He was enclosed in a sedan-chair with a steel mask on his face, and all that one could learn from Cinq-Mars is that this prisoner was at Pignerol for many years and that all the people one believes to be dead are not.
Until this letter was uncovered by Brugnon, it was generally believed that the mask of iron was a myth invented or at least popularized by Voltaire. Now we know that it was not a myth at all, that Saint-Mars made use of just such a mask when he moved his prisoner from Exiles to Sainte-Marguerite. It seems scarcely imaginable that Saint-Mars could have gone so far in his pretence as to make the valet Danger wear a mask of steel, and yet this letter leaves no doubt about it. That Louvois could have ordered Saint-Mars to draw attention to his wretched prisoner in such a spectacular way is not within the realms of possibility. If hiding his face had indeed been necessary, then a sack pulled over his head would have done the job just as well, but that we know was not the real purpose of the mask. Saint-Mars had received no order telling him to hide the prisoner’s face. The only concern ever voiced by Louvois was that the prisoner should be kept from speaking to anyone. If for extra security he had chosen to recommend anything at all it would have been a gag, not a mask. The idea of masking the prisoner was a ploy thought up by Saint-Mars to advertise the supposed secret of his prisoner’s identity, and he chose to do it in such a theatrical way because he knew a steel mask would have greater impact on those who saw it than would a normal mask. From the suspense-publicity mounted before ever the prisoner left Exiles to the shock appearance of the star-product himself, with the altogether convincing sight of a sedan-chair and the altogether stupefying glimpse of a mask of steel, Saint-Mars conducted his campaign with all the flash and flair of a modern promoter. No wonder his invention3, created to impress his public in 1687, survived as myth to bamboozle the public ever after.
Three days after reaching the island, Saint-Mars wrote to Louvois to announce that all was well. In fact his prisoner had been almost suffocated and rendered even more ill than usual by twelve days of sedan-chair and steel mask, but Saint-Mars was still enjoying the triumph of his new-found image. His choice of words betrays him: ‘I can assure you, my lord, that no one in the world saw him and that the way in which I guarded and conducted him throughout the journey left everyone guessing as to who my prisoner could be.’ One must suppose that Louvois, reading these words, imagined that Saint-Mars had expressed himself badly, but we know that what he said was an accurate description of the situation he had gone to such pains to create. The way he had guarded and conducted his prisoner had indeed set everyone guessing as to who he might be, and later he could not resist revealing the high success of his endeavour. ‘Throughout the province,’ he wrote to Louvois in January 1688, ‘they say that my prisoner is M. de Beaufort or that he is the son of the late Cromwell.’
Years before in Pignerol, when people had been curious to know why a special cell was needed for Danger, Saint-Mars had amused himself by telling ‘preposterous stories’ about him and one can only wonder whether a new batch of ‘preposterous stories’ was not responsible for this particular rumour that his prisoner was the Duc de Beaufort. The letter uncovered by Brugnon states quite specifically that Saint-Mars not only said that his prisoner had spent many years in Pignerol, but also implied that he was someone whom everyone believed to be dead. The Duc de Beaufort had disappeared at the siege of Candy just two months before Danger had been imprisoned at Pignerol, and rumous that Beaufort was not dead but in prison were still circulating at court as late as 1682. As a preposterous story it was not after all so preposterous, and Saint-Mars would have been aware of the possible deductions people were likely to make on the strength of such a suggestion. That the former keeper of Fouquet and Lauzun should also be the keeper of Beaufort was not in itself impossible; and Beaufort, being grandson of the King’s royal grandfather and himself ‘King of the Market’, was certainly noble enough and famous enough to be the mysterious prisoner who was treated in such an exceptional manner – masked with steel and carried all the way from Pignerol, a distance of more than 200 miles, in a sedan-chair. It was Lamotte-Guérin, the successor of Saint-Mars on Sainte-Marguerite, who assured Lagrange-Chancel that the prisoner was Beaufort.
For a man as vain and ambitious as Saint-Mars, however, bluffing his way to the admiration and deference of the people around him was not enough. His dream was to be what he once had been, the keeper of prisoners of rank and consequence who were known to be in his charge; men of fame and former power living on in the faded gold of lost privilege and office, who received visits from their still gilded families and friends; who, though out of favour, retained influence and sympathy at court, who got themselves and their gaoler talked about; and who, knowing where their immediate best interests lay, were ready to flatter their gaoler with the consideration and respect he yearned to have. Following the orders of Louvois, he set about building new prison cells and in January 1688, when they were finished, he wrote to Louvois to describe them: ‘They are large, handsome and well-lit, and as for their excellence as prisons I do not think there could be any safer and sounder in Europe. This is especially so with regard to the danger of prisoners communicating orally with someone nearby or far off, and that could never be said for any of the places where I had charge of M. Fouquet after his arrest.’ The reference to Fouquet is significant; Saint-Mars had space for another prisoner and was reminding the minister of his past glory in the hope that he would trust him with another prisoner of rank. ‘With relatively few precautions one can even have prisoners taking walks about the island without fear that they might escape or pass messages.’ Since only prisoners of rank would ever be allowed such a privilege, the hint was obvious. ‘I take the liberty, my lord, to inform you in detail of the excellence of this place in the eventuality that you may have prisoners you wish to keep in complete security but with a reasonable degree of freedom.’ Saint-Mars could exploit the mystery of Danger to give himself an appearance of importance, but to re-live the great days of Pignerol he needed more prisoners like Fouquet and Lauzun.
It would be wrong to underestimate the concern for Danger’s security, which was shown by those responsible for his arrest and imprisonment, the fact that he was kept incommunicado from the beginning and, after his contact with Lauzun, incognito as well; the fact too that having been given in custody to Saint-Mars there seemed to be no question, at least until 1698, of entrusting him to anyone else. But it would be equally wrong to overestimate his importance with the claim that Saint-Mars built a special prison on Sainte-Marguerite to accommodate him and that it cost a great deal of money. That prison was certainly special, though it cost no more than the regular yearly allowance which Saint-Mars received for feeding a prisoner of rank like Fouquet or Lauzun, and it was not made solely for him. Saint-Mars initially constructed two cells and then added four more, all of which shared the same exceptional features of security. It was a model prison, deliberately planned by Saint-Mars, and possibly even intended by the minister, to serve for future prisoners of rank. As things turned out, however, those hopes for a prisoner of fame never materialised and that was at least partly the reason why there did materialise the fame of the prisoner known later as the Iron Mask.
Though the move to Sainte-Marguerite was for Saint-Mars a happy deliverance, it came too late. He was already sixty-one years of age and, when after a few years it became clear that the only other prisoners he was going to get were Protestant ministers and old lags from Pignerol, his aspirations for the future became centred upon his sons. For both boys he planned army careers and, as they came of age, he bought them commissions in the Dragoons. Such was the wealth that he had amassed, wheedling his superiors and cheating his prisoners, that he could afford to launch them well. In 1693, however, his eldest son, aged twenty-two and already a lieutenant-colonel, was killed in action and his youngest son, still only seventeen, was seriously wounded. Four years later his wife died, and when in the following year he was offered the most prestigious prison-command in France, the governorship of the Bastille, he hesitated to take it. He was too old to change his ways, too old to benefit from such an accolade. Through all the years of waiting he had bluffed and bought his way to an appearance of importance which he had been prepared to settle for. Not that he was wiser and more content. On the contrary, his urge to make money had become a compulsion and Barbezieux was able to persuade him to take the job by a description of the fabulous revenues it carried: over 21,000 livres per year for himself and whatever prison staff he employed, the amount he paid to them being left completely to his own discretion, and on top of that, to use the minister’s own words, ‘the profit normally made on what is given for the upkeep of the prisoners, which being what it is, cannot be anything but considerable’.
For Danger, in the meantime, the years spent on Sainte-Marguerite, eleven of them in all, were dragged out with no apparent change. He continued to live in solitary confinement, having contact with no one except Saint-Mars and his lieutenants, a doctor when he was ill and at set times a confessor. However, though the minister’s orders regarding his custody did not change, the minister himself did and the consequences of that were significant. On 16 July 1691 Louvois died and was succeeded by his son Barbezieux who had been only two years old at the time of Danger’s arrest and clearly did not care to lose sleep over an old problem which to all intents and purposes had been resolved. For instance, in his view, Danger was less important than at least one, if not all, of the prisoners who were then at Pignerol.4 On 20 March 1694, when preparations were being made to move these prisoners to Sainte-Marguerite, he wrote to Saint-Mars: ‘since you know that they are more important, at least one of them, than those who are at present on the islands, you must give them priority and put them in the most secure of your prison cells.’ The only occasion on which Barbezieux ever showed concern over Danger was in 1697 when he was annoyed to hear that Pontchartrain, the Controller of Finance, had been questioning Saint-Mars about his prisoners and the reasons why they had been arrested. In fact he was not upset because of any risk this might have posed to Danger’s security; he simply resented the interference of another minister in his domain. As it was, Saint-Mars was at that time answerable to Pontchartrain for a number of prisoners in his charge, those arrested as Protestants, and in the event he became answerable to Pontchartrain for all his prisoners, including Danger, when he moved to the Bastille the following year.
Danger’s importance in the eyes of the authorities in Paris diminished so much in the time he was on Sainte-Marguerite that, when in 1698 they offered Saint-Mars the post of governor of the Bastille, the idea of transferring him too did not occur to them. Saint-Mars received the offer in a letter from Barbezieux written on 1 May and he replied on 8 May. This reply is now lost, but from what Barbezieux said when he in turn replied on 15 June it seems reasonable to deduce that, along with his acceptance of the post, Saint-Mars pleaded the importance of his longtime prisoner and the necessity of transferring him as well. ‘I have been a long time replying to the letter which you took the trouble to write to me on the 8th of last month,’ Barbezieux explained, ‘because the King did not inform me of his intentions sooner. You can make your dispositions to be ready to leave when I instruct you to do so, and (you can)5 bring with you your longtime prisoner under safe guard.’
The fact that the King took a month to grant his permission gives reason to believe that he did not consider the prisoner to be as important as Saint-Mars made him out to be, and this is confirmed by a letter from Barbezieux to Saint-Mars written on 4 August. ‘His Majesty has not judged it necessary to send the order you requested to commandeer lodging on your journey to Paris: it will suffice for you to find and pay for the most convenient and secure lodging possible in the places you decide proper to stay.’ Saint-Mars and his prisoner were to travel to Paris by regular roads stopping at ordinary post-houses along the way, just as Capain de Vauroy had done on his journey with Danger to Pignerol. Nor did Saint-Mars have more than half a dozen men to serve as escort and they were the motley crew who later at the Bastille were to be described by Renneville as nothing better than a gang of louts and bullies, thieves and thugs: Corbé, Rosarges, L’Ecuyer, Ru, the Abbé Giraut and possibly Jacques La France. For the transfer from Pignerol to Exiles and from Exiles to Sainte-Marguerite, Saint-Mars had been at the head of his own Free Company, a troop of over forty men, but these he had been obliged to leave behind on the island. So far as the King and his minister were concerned, major security measures were no longer necessary for Danger’s safekeeping. Far from being more important than he had ever been before, as the move to the Bastille in a mask would seem to imply, Danger was a good deal less important. The length of his captivity, which by that time was twenty-nine years, had reduced the danger his secret represented and without the intervention of Saint-Mars he would have finished his days on the island of Sainte-Marguerite under the custody of Lamotte-Guérin.
In more romantic theories than the one I propose, much has been made of the wording of the official order which Barbezieux sent to Saint-Mars on 19 July. ‘The King sees fit that you leave the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and come to the Bastille with your longtime prisoner, taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone.’ There, it has been said, is proof that the prisoner’s face was so well known or in some way so exceptional that it had to be masked, but in the context of the correspondence which preceded and succeeded this letter, and in the light of all we know about Danger’s personal insignificance, no such conclusion is possible. Arguably the words ‘taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone’ were a conventional turn of phrase in common use for such orders and therefore not to be taken literally, but even if that were not the case it seems certain that Barbezieux did not mean them to suggest that Saint-Mars should cover the prisoner’s face with a mask. No such order was ever given and indeed from what we know of the prisoner such an order would have been absurd. In all probability the reason why Barbezieux expressed himself in this way arose from his lack of interest rather than his concern, it being a phrase he was echoing from something Saint-Mars himself had said. Years before in Pignerol, Saint-Mars had indeed been ordered to avoid Danger being seen or known to anyone. The same order had applied to La Rivière, of course, and its purpose had been to deceive Lauzun into the belief that they had been liberated, but no doubt Saint-Mars had embroidered upon this story to persuade Barbezieux of Danger’s importance. Though Barbezieux and the King were certainly aware that the prisoner’s identity was not of major importance, they would have seen no reason to contradict an old man like Saint-Mars in what after all appeared to be nothing more than an excess of concern. If they had been genuinely afraid lest the prisoner should be ‘seen or known to anyone’, they would not have left Saint-Mars to find lodging for him wherever he could, including post-houses, on his way to Paris.
And so to the Bastille Saint-Mars brought his longtime prisoner, hiding his face in a mask of black velvet as if otherwise the mystery-man would have been recognized. The change from steel to velvet was a necessity in view of the more sophisticated spectators he could expect to find in Paris. A steel mask there would have caused such a sensation that the King and his ministers would have come down on him for an explanation, but a velvet mask, though sure to attract attention, was not without precedent. Saint-Mars almost certainly knew that a similar mask had been used just three years before to cover the face of a prisoner brought to the Bastille. On 21 March 1695 La Gazette d’Amsterdam published the following report: ‘A lieutenant of the galleys accompanied by twenty horsemen has conducted to the Bastille a masked prisoner, brought from Provence in a litter and closely guarded throughout the journey, which leads one to believe that he is someone of importance, especially since his name is kept secret and those who brought him say that it is a secret from them.’ Saint-Mars knew this line of thinking well: he had been exploiting it for years, and if like the lieutenant of the galleys he chose to mask his prisoner, it was with the deliberate intention of leading people to believe that the masked man was someone of unusual importance, proof to the world that he himself was, and always had been, a gaoler of unusual importance.
As it happens, the identity of the earlier masked prisoner is known, and he was not important at all. It was a certain Gesnon Fillibert, a captain of the galleys who was a Protestant, suspected of trying to reveal war-secrets to the English fleet then cruising in the Mediterranean. He was arrested at sea out of Genoa and was brought to Paris in a mask because he had to be taken by way of Lyon where his family lived; the authorities did not wish his father, who was a banker, to know about his arbitrary arrest. According to Du Junca, he arrived at the Bastille ‘in a litter with his face hidden’ on 15 February 1695 and was liberated on 15 October 1697. Though the effect of Danger’s mask was the same as that of Fillibert, the reason he wore it was not. Danger’s mask was not to hide who the wearer was, but to hide who he was not. He was not a Marshal of France nor a President of the Parlement. He was not Richard Cromwell nor the Duc de Beaufort. He was not in himself anyone of any significance, but it was necessary for the image of his gaoler that he should appear to be so. Hiding the prisoner’s face with a mask was the gaoler’s way of saving his own face.
As governor of the Bastille Saint-Mars no longer needed to bluff his way to an image of importance, but the game begun at Sainte-Marguerite had to be played to the end or his pretence would have been discovered. Nor at that stage was he capable of changing his ways, let alone his game. Though in Paris he had finally become all that he had always longed to be, the honour came too late for him to enjoy the respect and consideration which his new post gave him. Seventy-two years old, as then he was, a widower, often ill and almost without friends, deaf and infirm, back-bent and trembling, he no longer had the force or the will to remake or rethink his life; imprisoned in his own masquerade, like poor Danger in his mask, he was obliged to live out his remaining years the swaggering mythomaniac he had allowed himself to become, the vainglorious old fool who in 1702 boasted of pretended past exploits in such a ridiculous way in front of Renneville:
He told me that he had left Holland the day after the birth of King William … because the day before, when everyone was celebrating, he had picked a quarrel with seven Dutchmen, had killed four and disarmed the other three … From there he had embarked for Lisbon where he had carried off the prize in a famous tourney. After that he had moved to the court of Madrid where he had won acclaim in a bullfight, carrying off the prize for that too and the admiration of all the ladies, who had wellnigh drowned him in a deluge of perfume-eggs filled with scented waters. And every fourth word he uttered was an oath to assert this big talk which was so at odds with his puny size.
The idea of keeping a prisoner masked in prison was altogether unprecedented in France, but for Saint-Mars it was a logical extension of the idea of having his prisoner masked for the journey. In this way he could be sure that under day to day circumstances which he could no longer personally control, he would be able to keep up the pretence that his prisoner’s hidden identity was significant. On Sainte-Marguerite, all his prisoners had been sealed off behind his own quarters, making it possible for him to supervise and restrict all movement and contact. At the Bastille, such personal control was impossible. The staff including Du Junca had been greatly impressed by his arrival with a mysterious prisoner. Without comment from him they had assumed that a mask was needed to keep the man’s identity secret, and with just a word from him they had learned that the man had been in his personal custody ever since Pignerol and the days of Fouquet and Lauzun. Saint-Mars was not the type to risk losing the magic of such a powerful first impact and was careful to keep Du Junca away from the prisoner from the outset. Du Junca owed his appointment to the King and, unlike the sorry creatures employed by Saint-Mars, he was neither a fool nor a knave. If he had been allowed into contact with the prisoner, he would sooner or later have seen through the hoax and raised questions. As it was he accepted the situation without question or resentment and to all appearances without curiosity, his lack of interest being due no doubt to his realisation that the prisoner was not of much consequence anyway. He must certainly have recognized that the man was not of high rank. Even if he never saw him close enough to know that he was dressed in a suit ‘expected to last three or four years’, he did know that he had no valet to serve him and that he was to be looked after by the drunken clown Rosarges, as stupid as he was ignorant and as brutal as he was dishonest.
Nonetheless, the older members of the Bastille staff had once been accustomed to the everyday sight of someone masked and under guard. François de Besmaux, the predecessor of Saint-Mars, had in earlier days kept his wife masked and guarded in public, at least that was the claim made in 1700 by Courtilz de Sandras in the third volume of his Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan. Before ever he became governor of the Bastille. Besmaux had lived in constant fear that someone might try to steal his money and his wife. He put his money in a strong-box and, according to Courtilz de Sandras, would have put his wife in one too if he could, or at least kept her locked up in a chastity-belt; ‘but since that was even less permitted than the other, he bought one of the biggest masks in Paris with one of the biggest chin-pieces and obliged her to wear it on her face all the time.’ It was because he judged that the Bastille was the safest place to hide away his wife and his money that he bribed and swindled his way to the governorship, and thereafter his poor wife was as much a prisoner as any of the inmates. ‘He did not want her to go out except to attend mass at the Sisters of Mary which was nearby nor to spend the least amount of money. Moreover she was only allowed out in her big mask with its big chin-piece, for all the world as if she were afraid of a sunburn, and two soldiers of the Bastille accompanied her even in her devotions.’ Presumably Saint-Mars knew all about his predecessor’s masked wife because in June 1663 he had been second-in-command to d’Artagnan when he had moved Fouquet to the Bastille. At that time Besmaux had been alarmed because the thirty or so musketeers who installed themselves in his prison to guard Fouquet were all fascinated by his masked wife and, as Courtilz de Sandras claimed, ‘there was no chin-piece proof against their great appetite though it were double the thickness and bigger again than the one she was wearing.’ It was of course the mask which attracted Saint-Mars and his fellow-musketeers, it being their understandable assumption that if she had not been beautiful Besmaux would not have masked her. In his use of a mask for his prisoner, Saint-Mars was deliberately seeking a similar response: the assumption that if his prisoner had not been easily recognisable he would not have masked him.
At the Bastille, Saint-Mars came under a new master, the Controller of Finance, and the secretary of that minister, a man called Desgranges, cultivated his friendship. After more than thirty years in the provinces, Saint-Mars had few friends in Paris. Desgranges flattered him with shows of respect and attention in society and indulged him at the ministry by wangling gifts of government money and closing his eyes to irregularities in his accounts. ‘It is known,’ the Marquis de Sourches commented wryly in his Mémoiresfor 14 June 1699, ‘that the King has given a bonus of 5,000 livres to old Saint-Mars, the governor of the Bastille, to compensate him for what he did to feed the prisoners more economically than his predecessor managed to do.’ For Desgranges it was a sprat to catch a mackerel. In 1700 the son of Saint-Mars and the daughter of Desgranges were married, and even though Saint-Mars outlived his son and there were no grand-children, he included his son’s widow in his will. When Saint-Mars died in 1708, at the age of eighty-two, the fortune he left behind was enormous. Each of his three nephews received a titled estate: Palteau, Dimon and Blainvilliers; and the daughter of Desgranges received the rest: furniture, arms, silver and ‘jewels of great value’, as well as coffers containing ‘more than 600,000 silver francs in cash’. No one mourned his loss. Only the heirs showed any concern at his passing, and what concerned them was the extent of their share in the inheritance.
For Saint-Mars himself in the last years of his life, it was probably not the legacy of his wealth that concerned him most; to the vile and servile Corbé, whom he detested anyway, went the magnificent house and estate of Plateau. In all likelihood what he valued more was somethig he had been unable to buy and so at one time had been obliged to invent: a means to attain the awe and admiration of society. As governor of Sainte-Marguerite he had managed to impress the people around him by making a display of secrecy and importance over one of his prisoners who, whatever significance he might have had in the eyes of the authorities, would have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. As governor of the Bastille he kept up that pretence and saw the image he had invented for the prisoner outlive the prisoner’s death. During the remaining years of his own life, he may even have come to realise that the myth would live on after his death too and carry his name with it to impress the world when he had gone. If the idea occurred to him, it no doubt gave him pleasure; but even he could not have imagined how, in the years that followed, coincidence and circumstance would combine to inflate the myth to archetypal proportions and make his name as famous in history as anyone in his age.
Surrounded as he was by creatures of his own mark and making, he was not alone in his exploitation of the mystery which enveloped the imprisoned valet. Blainvilliers, pretending to his young nephew Palteau that he had seen the famous prisoner through the window of his cell on Sainte-Marguerite, was playing the same game, as was his brother, Louis de Formanoir, telling the preposterous story he had concocted around a pair of steel tweezers. Since it is unlikely that either of these men had any direct contact with the prisoner, they may have believed that he was all that Saint-Mars made him out to be, but their brother Corbé knew differently. As prison lieutenant, he had accompanied Saint-Mars into the prisoner’s cell and had supervised the to and fro of dishes, clothes and linen. Though he lived until 1740, outliving both his brothers, he said nothing to his son Palteau to contradict their stories, nothing of the truth, so far as we are aware, to anyone. By his silence, he contributed as much to the myth as his brothers did by their inventions.
Memories of the masked prisoner, confused with memories of Fillibert and Besmaux’s wife, were already a tradition at the Bastille by the time Voltaire heard them. It is just possible that the story reported by the Princess Palatine in 1711 included details remembered from the masked and guarded excursions of Besmaux’s wife, but it seems wellnigh certain that the description of the prisoner’s mask given by Voltaire in 1751 was derived directly from some recollection of that poor woman’s mask. An important feature of that mask had been its chin-piece, and in Voltaire’s account the chin-piece was an essential feature of the prisoner’s mask of iron; in fact, we know that the mask actually worn by the prisoner at the Bastille was an ordinary loo-mask which covered only the upper part of his face. The transition from velvet to iron was once difficult to explain, but not today, knowing as we now do that the prisoner was actually seen on his way to Sainte-Marguerite with his face hidden by a mask of steel.6 Most of Voltaire’s information was based on local tradition picked up in the region of Cannes, and it was there no doubt that the name Iron Mask7 originated.
Voltaire, like Saint-Mars, had a direct hand in the creation of the myth of the Iron Mask, but like all great myths it arose from circumstances and evolved by processes which were accidental, from semblance and coincidence, by rumour and tradition. Saint-Mars was not responsible for the original conjectures about marshals and presidents, just as the eventual confusions with Fillibert and Besmaux’s wife were not of Voltaire’s making. Consciously and deliberately they nourished the myth’s growth: Saint-Mars gave it life, Voltaire gave it form, and in due time Dumas gave it immortality; but the story of the masked prisoner grew with a momentum of its own, accumulating and assimilating whatever stories it touched: Louvois at Pignerol removing his hat in the presence of Fouquet; Madame Le Bret in Paris buying lace and fine linen for Madame de Saint-Mars; Salves on Sainte-Marguerite trying to pass messages on shirts and plates. Possibly some dim memory of Fillibert disembarking from a galley at Marseilles, masked and under guard, led to the tradition still popular today that the Iron Mask was imprisoned for a time in the Château d’If; and no doubt a vague recollection of special precautions taken at the Bastille, when some prisoner was thought to have died of cholera or plague, led to the tradition that, when the Iron Mask died, the order was given to burn everything in his cell and scrape the walls and floor, for fear that he had left some message or sign.
In the mystery of the Iron Mask there is finally more irony than iron: he was a nonentity who became famous precisely because he was a nonentity; but though one can explain how the myth developed, one cannot explain it away. Even the best attempts to disentangle the truth and uncover the prisoner’s identity have only added to the lore of the mystery. From Griffet to Brugnon, from Soulavie to Pagnol, the fact-finding as much as the fiction-making has served the same process which Saint-Mars, Voltaire and Dumas served. No solution is finally satisfying because the mystery is itself a resolution, an image formed in the collective thought-patterns of Europe in the eighteenth century and still charged with meaning today. The prisoner is no one, a man without a face or identity, type of the unknown political prisoner, victim and nonentity; but out of thirty years of his life have come three hundred years of living myth: he is anyone and everyone, a man with many faces and many identities, archetypal projection of lost liberty and void identity, of failed potential and fouled fortune. When all that there is to say about the Iron Mask has been said, when the evidence for the actual prisoner has been presented and the errors, deceptions, inventions and confusions which went to make his image have been exposed, the iconic transfiguration wrought by the mask rests nonetheless unchanged, the mystery and fascination of his iron face unimpaired.
In April 1786, a section of the underground quarries of Paris were consecrated to serve as a catacomb, and the transport began of all the bones in the cemetries and charnel-houses of Paris. The graves of Saint-Paul were emptied along with the rest, and for fifteen months cart-loads of jumbled skeletons were poured down chutes into the subterranean passageways. There went the remains of the masked prisoner, and with them the remains of Saint-Mars and Louvois, of Avedick, Molière, Cavoye and six million others, sundered and sorted by thigh-bone and skull into six thousand cubic metres of stacked bones. The myth and the mystery of the Iron Mask is as much this simple fact as the simple fiction that three years later his skeleton was found still masked and chained in some abandoned dungeon in the depths of the Bastille.
NOTES
1. Nor is this end of the problem. The name ‘Eustache Danger’ is misleading because it appears to be, like any ordinary name today, composed of a first name ‘Eustache’ with a family name ‘Danger’. and that, indeed, is the way most writers on the Iron Mask, including myself, have used it. In the context of all that has been written on the subject, it is convenient to do so, but it is incorrect, as Stanislas Brugnon made clear at the Cannes Symposium in 1987. In all the government dispatches where he is mentioned, the prisoner is referred to as ‘Eustache’ or as ‘Eustache Danger’ but never as ‘Danger’. In the 17th century first names were not known and used as they are today. People were referred to by their family names or the names of their titled estates. Thus ‘Eustache’, we may be sure, was not a first name but a family name, and ‘Danger’, originally ‘d’Angers’ (=coming from the town of Angers), was a defining suffix to distinguish one family or person called Eustache from another. In the case of the prisoner, it is possible that the suffix had been added to his name to distinguish him from another valet called Eustache.
2. These figures are taken from the regular payment-orders made to Saint-Mars by the Royal Treasury, the original documents of which may be consulted today in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
3. his invention: In 17th century Provence it was generally believed that a man whose life had been destroyed by ill fortune had been cursed or ‘masked’ (Provençal = enmasqué) by a witch (Provençal = uno masco). It is not impossible, therefore, that members of the prison staff who came from Provence described the prisoner as masked (in the sense of being cursed) long before he was masked (in the sense of having his face hidden), and that it was from hearing him so decsribed that Saint-Mars got his idea of using an actual mask.
4. the prisoners who were then at Pignerol: There were four state prisoners at Pignerol in March 1694, but of them only Matthioli and his valet remained of the original four left there by Saint-Mars when he moved to Exiles in 1681. Dubreuil was liberated soon after the Treaty of Regensburg in August 1684, and the Dominican monk died in January 1694. The two new prisoners were Breton, imprisoned there in November 1682, and Herse, moved there from the Bastille in August 1687. Little is known of Breton except that Louvois described his crime as nothing more than ‘a knavery’ and that he died still a prisoner on Sainte-Marguerite in August 1700. Herse was a tailor’s apprentice who was arrested and imprisoned at the age of fifteen for declaring that he was ready to assassinate the King if he could find someone willing to pay him for doing so. Official correspondence shows that in 1689 he tried to commit suicide and in 1692 to escape. No more is known of him except that he was still a prisoner on Sainte-Marguerite in 1701. As for Matthioli, he died in May 1694 soon after his arrival on Sainte-Marguerite. His unfortunate valet, who lived out his life under the prison-name ‘Rousseau’, died on the island in December 1699.
5. The grammatical sequence in French, more obvious than in English, leaves no doubt that you can governs bring as much as it governs make.
6. mask of steel: There is no reason to believe that Saint-Mars went to the trouble and expense of having a steel mask made. No doubt he simply made use of some old vizored helmet he found in the Château d’Exiles. The château had been the home of the Lesduiguières family for 87 years, from 1595 until 1682 when Saint-Mars received his command, and one may be sure that amongst the furniture which the Lesduiguières left behind were bits and pieces of display armour commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries to furnish the halls of great houses.
7. Iron Mask: the first published use of the name was made in 1750 by Charles de Fieux de Mouhy in a sensational novel which though called Le Masque de fer had nothing to do with the masked prisoner guarded by Saint-Mars. The preface to Mouhy’s book is not without interest however. To give some pretence of verisimilitude to the extravagant story he was to relate, he gave examples of four more Iron Mask stories, all fictions presented as fact:
The Turks tell the story that one of their emperors, wishing to be sure upon his throne, had his eldest son locked up in the Seven Towers, and fearing that the gentleness and majesty manifest in the features of that prince might seduce his guards and fill them with compassion, he covered his face with an iron mask made in such a way that it was impossible even for the most skilled craftsman to break or open it. There is also a tradition that in the time of Cromwell, a Scots prince was sent to the islands of the archipelago, and in order that he would not be recognized the method just described was employed. In the time of Dom Pedre, the cruel King of Spain, a father used the same device on one of his sons who had dishonoured him by a shameful act. At Stockholm they say that a prince named Jean Theull, who was jealous of his wife, made use of this method to achieve his ends: the day after his marriage, he put a sleeping-powder into his wife’s drink, and while she was asleep he enclosed her face in an iron mask made almost like a helmet: when his unfortunate princess awoke he made her believe that the misfortune which had happened to her was a punishment from Heaven for having gloried too much in her own beauty and inspired love in men other than himself.