2
The report of a mysterious masked man held prisoner in the Bastille had been circulating in French society long before Voltaire began his investigations and though he was the first to get his information into print, he was not the only one to do so, nor was he the first to get it onto paper. The same basic story was told in a letter written while Louis XIV was still alive, forty years before Voltaire published his first account, but not itself published until one hundred and forty years after. It was written by Madame, the Princess Palatine, who was the second wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s brother, and the mother of the Regent who ruled after Louis XIV’s death. She was a big horsy woman who, as the sister-in-law of the King, graced the upper reaches of the court, albeit in hefty graceless fashion, and passed her time into old age collecting geological specimens and palace gossip, riding to hounds and writing to friends. Every day she wrote to her relatives in the ruling families of Europe, filling her letters with titbits of family news and tittle-tattle of court conversation. On 10 October 1711, when she informed her aunt Sophie, the Electress of Hanover, of the latest story she had heard, she had no idea that she was serving posterity:
A man spent many years in the Bastille and died there wearing a mask. Two musketeers were at his side to kill him if he removed his mask. He ate and slept with the mask on. No doubt this treatment was unavoidable because he was otherwise very well treated, well lodged and given everything he desired. He received communion in his mask. He was very devout and read continuously. No one could ever learn who he was.
Where Madame got her story from she did not say. However, since her contacts were restricted to the inner circles of the court, one may assume that her information originated with someone highly placed and presumably well informed.
At least one of Voltaire’s informants, the second Maréchal de La Feuillade, had the same credentials, although he had been dead for all of twenty-seven years when Voltaire presented his testimony. For him, apparently, the existence of the Man in the Iron Mask was not in question: it had been admitted by his father-in-law, Michel de Chamillart, who had been a government minister under Louis XIV from 1699 until 1709. Chamillart had claimed to know the prisoner’s identity, and on his death-bed in 1721 had acknowledged that it was a state secret.
Voltaire gave the names of two more of his informants, one a physician named Marsolan, the other an army officer named Riouffe. Their testimony, which like that of La Feuillade was at best second-hand, was at least third-hand by the time it reached Voltaire: Marsolan’s story by way of Maréchal de Richelieu and Riouffe’s story by way of the Marquis d’Argens.1 Marsolan claimed to be passing on information given him by his father-in-law, who professed to have been the physician who treated the Iron Mask in the Bastille. Riouffe claimed that once in his youth he had seen the Iron Mask in Cannes, but he offered no information on that experience; his contribution was based upon local traditions which had grown up around the mysterious prisoner during his stay on Sainte-Marguerite. Who Voltaire’s remaining sources were is not known. He dropped other names to suggest that his information was reliable, but was never specific about them.
The account he gave in 1751 was nonetheless particular and precise. In the excerpt already quoted he alleged that at the time of his arrest the Iron Mask was tall and young, handsome and noble, was made to wear a mask with a moveable jaw and threatened with death if he tried to take it off, that he stayed on Sainte-Marguerite from 1661 until 1690 and was then transferred by Saint-Mars to the Bastille where he died in 1703. In the rest of the passage he makes even more detailed assertions:
The Marquis de Louvois2 (who was the Minister of War at the time) went to see him on the island before he was moved, and remained standing while he talked with him, showing great respect. The unknown man was conducted to the Bastille where he was lodged as well as one could be in that castle. He was refused nothing that he asked for. His greatest pleasure was in lace and linen of exquisite fineness. He used to play the guitar. He was fed sumptuously and the governor rarely sat down in his presence. An old physician of the Bastille, who had often treated this extraordinary man when he was sick, said that he had never seen his face, although he had often examined his tongue and the rest of his body. That physician said that he was admirably well built, that his skin was rather brown, that he held one’s attention by the mere sound of his voice and that he never complained of his fate nor gave any hint of who he might be.
In the 1752 account, a story told by Riouffe and supposedly well known in the region of Cannes, was added. It was a story which later caught the imaginations of numerous writers including both Alfred de Vigny and Alexandre Dumas.
The governor himself used to serve him at table and then withdraw, locking him in. One day the prisoner wrote with a knife on a silver plate and threw it out of the window towards a boat which was near the shore, almost at the foot of the tower. The fisherman, whose boat it was, picked up the plate and took it to the governor. He in astonishment asked the fisherman: ‘Have you read what is written on this plate and has anyone seen it in your hand?’ ‘I cannot read,’ replied the fisherman. ‘I have just found it and no one else has seen it.’ The peasant was detained until the governor was sure that he could not read and that the plate had not been seen by anyone else. ‘Off you go,’ he said to him then, ‘and count yourself lucky that you cannot read.’
In 1758, an old man of eighty-two, living in Périgueux, read Voltaire’s book, found his account of the Iron Mask inaccurate and wrote off to an editor in Paris to set the record straight. The old man was Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel, a poet and playwright, who in the time of Louis XIV had been something of a prodigy at court, writing verse with ease when still a child and having his first tragedy performed when only eighteen. With the support of Racine3 and the protection of the Princesse de Conti,4 his reputation and fortune seemed well assured, but in 1717 he fell out of favour and in 1720 he took revenge by publishing an invective in verse against the Regent. He was arrested soon after and imprisoned on Sainte-Marguerite. Escaping after three years, he published another invective in Holland, but was pardoned after the Regent’s death and allowed to return to France. However, he was received coldly by his former friends and retired to live out his life on his estate at Périgueux. The letter he wrote was addressed to Elie Fréron, the editor of a periodical called L’Année Littéraire, a man detested by Voltaire as someone who sought to build a reputation for himself by contriving to demolish the reputations of others. Lagrange-Chancel wrote his letter on 4 June 1758 and died that same year without seeing it in print. Fréron loaned it to someone soon after he received it and was unable to get it back and publish it until May 1759.
According to Lagrange-Chancel, Voltaire was misinformed on two important points: the Iron Mask had been arrested in 1669 not 1661, and Saint-Mars had been the governor of Sainte-Marguerite and in charge of the Iron Mask before taking him to the Bastille. Three witnesses supplied Lagrange-Chancel with further evidence and all three claimed to have got their information at first hand. The first was Charles de Lamotte-Guérin, the deputy governor of Sainte-Marguerite, who had succeeded Saint-Mars in those duties and had also deputised for the King’s Lieutenant on the island for at least six years before that. The second was Louis de Formanoir, a lieutenant commanding the prison guard, who was the nephew of Saint-Mars and had been a member of the garrison in the time the Iron Mask was there. The third was a certain Dubuisson, who had been an employee of the great financier Samuel Bernard5 and had been imprisoned in the Bastille at the same time as the Iron Mask.
M. de Lamotte-Guérin, who had the command of those islands in the time that I was detained there, assured me … that M. de Saint-Mars, who obtained the governorship of these islands after that of Pignerol, showed great respect for this prisoner, that he always served him himself on dishes of silver and often provided him with clothes as rich as he might desire; that when he was ill or had need of a physician or surgeon he was obliged on pain of death not to appear in their presence except in his mask of iron, and when he was alone he could amuse himself by pulling out the hairs of his beard with tweezers of brilliantly polished steel. I saw a pair which he had used in this way in the hands of M. de Formanoir, nephew of Saint-Mars and lieutenant of a Free Company assigned to the guard of the prisoners. Several people told me that when Saint-Mars was leaving with his prisoner to take up the governorship of the Bastille the prisoner, who was wearing his iron mask, was heard to say to him, ‘Does the King want my life?’ ‘No, my prince,’ Saint-Mars replied, ‘your life is safe. You have only to allow yourself to be led.’ I learned more from a man named Dubuisson, cash-clerk of the famous Samuel Bernard, who after spending some years in the Bastille was transferred to Sainte-Marguerite. He was in a room with some other prisoners directly above the room occupied by this unknown man and by means of the chimney-flue they were able to communicate and exchange information. When they asked him why he refused to reveal his name and fortune, he replied that such a confession would cost him his life and the lives of those to whom he disclosed the secret.
In 1763 Voltaire came back to the subject in the sequel to his Essai sur l’Histoire Générale. He had received a letter from a certain Guillaume-Louis de Formanoir de Palteau of the Château de Palteau near Sens in Burgundy, claiming that the mysterious prisoner ‘stayed in this château, that several people saw him get down from a litter, that he was wearing a black mask and that the event is still remembered in the district.’ The credentials of this new informant were exceptional: he was the son and heir of the nephew and heir of Saint-Mars himself. When Saint-Mars died in 1708, his children were already dead. The property he had acquired during his lifetime went to the three sons of his sister, the youngest of whom, Louis de Formanoir, had been a lieutenant on Sainte-Marguerite when Lagrange-Chancel was there. The great house and estate of Palteau was inherited by the eldest of these nephews, Guillaume de Formanoir de Corbé, who like Louis had been a member of the prison staff serving under Saint-Mars. He had accompanied his uncle to the Bastille and had served as his lieutenant there, hoping to succeed him as governor. When on the death of Saint-Mars he was passed over in favour of someone else, he retired to Burgundy, married although already turned sixty, and left a son, born in 1712, to inherit the estate of Palteau along with its name. This son was Voltaire’s informant. The letter itself Voltaire did not publish, but five years later, on 19 June 1768, Guillaume-Louis de Palteau wrote another letter on the same subject to Fréron, who published it immediately in his L’Année Literaire. In his letter Palteau made frequent mention of another member of the family whom he called Blainvilliers. This was his uncle, Joseph de Formanoir de Blainvilliers, the third nephew and heir of Saint-Mars. He had served with the garrison of Sainte-Marguerite in the time Saint-Mars was governor there.
Since it appears that … the Man in the Iron Mask continues to exercise the imagination of our writers, I am going to inform you of what I know about this prisoner. On Sainte-Marguerite and at the Bastille he was known only by the name of ‘Tower’. The governor and the other officers showed him the greatest respect: he was accorded all that a prisoner could be. He often took walks and always with a mask on his face. It is only since the publication of M. de Voltaire’s Si cle de Louis XIV that I heard it said that the mask was made of iron and fitted with a spring mechanism: this circumstance was perhaps forgotten in the accounts I was told; but he only wore this mask when he went out to take the air or when he was obliged to appear before some stranger. M. de Blainvilliers, an infantry officer, who was a family friend of M. de Saint-Mars, the governor of Sainte-Marguerite and afterwards of the Bastille, told me on several occasions that to satisfy his curiosity, which had been greatly aroused by the lot of ‘Tower’, he had taken the uniform and arms of a soldier on sentry duty in a gallery under the window of the room which the prisoner occupied while on Sainte-Marguerite and from there he had spied on him all through the night and had seen him very clearly. He said that he was not wearing his mask, that he was white-faced, tall and well-built, though somewhat thick in the lower part of the leg, and white-haired although he was still in the prime of life. He spent almost the whole of that night pacing about his room. Blainvilliers added that he was always dressed in brown, that he was given fine linen and books, that the governor and officers remained standing with their hats off in his presence until he allowed them to put their hats back on and sit down, and that they often went to keep him company and to eat with him.
In 1698, M. de Saint-Mars moved from the governorship of the island of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille. On his way to take up his new post, he stopped off with his prisoner at his estate of Palteau. The man with the mask arrived in a litter which preceded that of M. de Saint-Mars and they were accompanied by several men on horseback. The peasants went to greet their master. M. de Saint-Mars ate with his prisoner, whose back was turned to the dining-room windows which gave onto the courtyard. The peasants I have questioned could not see if he ate with his mask on, but they saw very well that M. de Saint-Mars, who was facing him at the table, had two pistols beside his plate. They had only one man-servant to wait on them, and the dishes were brought to an ante-chamber where he went to get them, being careful to close the door of the dining-room behind him. Whenever the prisoner crossed the courtyard he had the black mask on his face; the peasants noticed that his teeth and lips were visible and that he was tall with white hair. M. de Saint-Mars slept in a bed put up for him beside the bed of the man with the mask. M. de Blainvilliers told me that when he died, which was in 1704, he was buried secretly at Saint-Paul’s and drugs were put into the coffin to consume the body. I never heard it said that he had any trace of a foreign accent.
This last remark was in reference to a story in the same connection which had been published earlier that year in the same periodical.
An English surgeon named Nelaton who used to go regularly to the Procope Coffee House, recounted on numerous occasions that during the time he was chief apprentice in a surgeon’s shop at the Saint-Antoine gate, he was sent to bleed a prisoner in the Bastille. The governor took him to a room where there was a man who complained a great deal of pain in his head which was enveloped in a towel knotted behind his neck. He recognized from the man’s accent that he was English.
The man responsible for this story was Poullain de Saint-Foix, a former cavalry officer who had established a literary reputation for himself with a string of fashionable plays. He was a much better duellist than he was a writer, but since he threatened to cut off the ears of anyone who criticized his work, his reputation was equally good in both.
Much later, in his Essais Historiques sur Paris, Saint-Fox offered two more pieces of information about the Iron Mask not previously published. The first referred to Palteau’s report that, when the mysterious prisoner died, drugs were put into the coffin. ‘These drugs were unnecessary,’ Saint-Foix remarked, ‘if the story is true that the day after the burial someone got the gravedigger to disinter the body so he could see it, and in place of the head they found a large stone.’ Where he got this story from he didn’t say, and no one dared to ask. Nor did he feel obliged to give the origin of his second revelation:
It is quite certain that Madame Le Bret, mother of the late M. Le Bret, the First President and Intendant of Provence, used to choose the finest linen and the most beautiful lace in Paris at the request of Madame de Saint-Mars, her close friend, and send it to her on Sainte-Marguerite Island for this prisoner, which confirms the account given by M. de Voltaire.
Still in 1769, however, the year Fréron published Palteau’s letter, a book appeared in Liège which established beyond reasonable doubt the foundation in fact of all the wild rumours and reports. The book was Traité des différentes sortes de preuves qui servent établir la verité de l’histoire and the author was Henri Griffet, a Jesuit who had been chaplain of the Bastille from 1745 until the Jesuit Order was banned from France in 1764. He was a man of impressive intelligence and learning even for a Jesuit, a teacher of humanities at the top Jesuit school in Paris when only seventeen and for some time Preacher in Ordinary to the King. He had already published a number of works on theology and history before his treatise appeared. The evidence he brought to light was documentary, drawn from a manuscript record of unquestionable validity which still exists and may be consulted today in the Bibliothéque de l’Arsenal in Paris: a personal journal of prison business kept by Etienne Du Junca, King’s Lieutenant and second in command at the Bastille from 1690 to 1706.
‘Of all that has been said or written about this man in the mask,’ Griffet wrote, ‘nothing can be compared for certitude to the authority of this journal. It is an authentic piece of evidence; a man on the spot, an eye-witness, who reports what he has seen in a journal written entirely in his own hand where he noted down each day what was happening under his own eyes’. Du Junca dated all his entries and in the course of 1698 included the following memorandum:
On Thursday 18 September at three o’clock in the afternoon M. de Saint-Mars, governor of the Château de la Bastille, arrived to take up his appointment coming from his governorship of the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and Honorat, having with him in his litter a longtime prisoner of his he had with him in Pignerol, whom he always keeps masked and whose name is not spoken. As soon as he got down from the litter, the prisoner was put into the First Room of the Basinière Tower to await nightfall, then at 9 p.m. he was moved by myself and M. de Rosarges, one of the sergeants brought by the governor, to the Third Room of the Bertaudière Tower which I had furnished some days before his arrival following instructions received from M. de Saint-Mars. The prisoner will be served and looked after by M. de Rosarges. The governor has charge of his upkeep.
No further news of the prisoner was given by Du Junca until five years later when he made the following entry:
On the same day, Monday 19 November 1703, the unknown prisoner in the mask of black velvet who was brought here by the governor, M. de Saint-Mars, when he came from the island of Sainte-Marguerite, and has been in his charge for a long time, died at ten o’clock in the evening without suffering any serious illness, having felt just a little sick after mass the day before. Surprised by death he did not receive the sacraments, but M. Giraut, the chaplain, had heard his confession the day before and exhorted him a little before he died. This prisoner unknown, who had been in prison for such a long time, was buried on Tuesday 20 November at 4 p.m. in the cemetery of the parish church of Saint-Paul. On the mortuary register he was given a name of as little account as the names of M. de Rosarges, major, and M. Reil, surgeon, who witnessed the register.
In the margin of this note, Du Junca then added a postscriptum: ‘I have since learned that on the register he was called M. de Marchiel and that 40 livres were paid for his burial.’
Griffet produced corroboration for Du Junca’s account by quoting another document: the prisoner’s burial certificate. ‘On the 19th, Marchioly, aged forty-five years or thereabouts, died in the Bastille and his body was buried in the cemetery of the parish church of Saint-Paul on the 20th of this month in the presence of M. Rosage, major of the Bastille, and M. Reghle, surgeon-major of the Bastille, whose signatures follow. Rosarges. Reilhe.’ Prison staff and parish priests were evidently not chosen for their prowess in orthography – ‘Rosage, Rosarges; Reil, Reghle, Reilhe; Marchiel, Marchioly’ – but, as Griffet pointed out, the name given to the prisoner for the burial register was pure invention anyway. It was standard practice to conceal the identity of even well-known prisoners in public records, so one may be quite sure that a false name and age were given for a prisoner so secret as to be a mystery even to the governor’s second in command.
Du Junca never saw the prisoner’s face, but he saw the mask he wore well enough to know that it was made not of iron but of black velvet. Nor did he notice anything exceptional in the form of the mask; no spring mechanism to move the jaw, presumably no jaw-piece at all, just a normal loo-mask which covered the brow, cheeks and nose. ‘It is unlikely,’ Griffet concluded, ‘that he had to keep on his mask when he ate alone in his room, in the presence of Rosarges or the governor, who knew him perfectly. He was therefore obliged to wear it only when he crossed the courtyard of the Bastille to go to mass, so that he was not recognized by the guards, or when some official, who was not a party to the secret, had to be allowed into the room.’
Finally Griffet offered testimony gathered while he was himself employed in the Bastille. In 1745, when he was appointed prison chaplain, the governor was René de Launey, who had been a member of the prison staff since 1710. From him Griffet passed on more information, not previously published.
Memory of the masked prisoner was still strong among the officers, soldiers and servants of the Bastille when M. de Launey, who has long been governor, arrived there to take up a post on the general staff of the garrison, and those who had seen him in his mask, when he went by in the courtyard to go to mass, said that there had been an order after his death to burn everything that had been in his personal use, like linen, clothes, mattress, blankets, etc., that even the walls of the room where he had lodged were scraped and white-washed and that the floor-tiles were pulled up and new ones laid, so much was it feared that he might have found a means to hide some note or sign, the discovery of which could have revealed his name.
After Griffet’s authoritative contribution nothing new, except the snippets of hearsay offered by Saint-Foix, was added to the evidence until 1780 when Jean-Pierre Papon published his Voyage Littéraire de Provence. Papon was a member of the Oratorian order and for many years the director of their library in Marseilles. His book was part of a much larger work, his Histoire Générale de Provence, which was published over a period of almost a decade with the last volume in 1786. In the course of his travels through Provence it was only natural that he should visit the island of Sainte-Marguerite in the Bay of Cannes and ask questions about ‘the famous prisoner in the iron mask whose name perhaps will never be known.’
‘On 2 February 1778, I had the curiosity to enter the room of this unfortunate prisoner. It was lit by only one window on the northern side, piercing a very thick wall and closed by three iron grilles placed at an equal distance apart. This window gives onto the sea.’ Though Papon did not make the point himself, it was clearly impossible for Blainvilliers to have spied on the prisoner through this window, as Palteau had claimed. Apart from Lagrange-Chancel, Papon was the first investigator ever to visit the island, and the rest of his contribution came from people he met who claimed to have got their information from witnesses who were living when the mysterious prisoner was there. From them he learned how strict the security precautions surrounding the prisoner had been.
One day as M. de Saint-Mars was in conversation with him, keeping outside the room in a kind of corridor so that he could see at a distance anyone who approached, the son of one of his friends arrived and headed towards the place where he heard the noise. When the governor saw the young man, he closed the door of the room immediately, ran quickly to meet him and in a state of agitation asked him if he had overheard anything. As soon as he was assured that he had not, he sent him off that same day and wrote to his friend to say that this adventure had come so close to costing his son dearly that he was sending him home to avoid any further accident.
No one interviewed by Papon knew the story of the fisherman and the silver plate related by Voltaire. He was told that ‘two sentries were posted at the two extremities of the fort facing the sea and they had orders to shoot on boats which approached within a certain distance,’ which made Voltaire’s story unlikely. There was, however, a new story to tell in place of the old.
I found in the citadel an officer of the Free Company who was seventy-nine years old. He told me that his father, who had served in the same company, had told him several times that one day a ‘frater’ – that is to say a barber – saw something white floating on the water under the window of the prisoner. He went to get it and took it to M. de Saint-Mars. It was a very fine shirt, carelessly rumpled up, and the prisoner had written upon it from one end to the other. When M. de Saint-Mars had smoothed it out and read a few lines, he asked the ‘frater’ in great consternation if he had been curious enough to read what it said. The ‘frater’ protested that he had read nothing, but two days later he was found dead in his bed. It was a story that the officer had heard told so many times by his father and by the chaplain of the fort at that time that he regarded it as incontestable.
Papon had one more tale to tell.
The following story seems to me equally certain, after all the evidence which I collected on the spot and in the monastery of Lérins6 where the tradition is preserved. Someone of the opposite sex was sought to serve the prisoner and a woman of the village of Mougins7 came to offer herself in the belief that this would be a way to make the fortune of her children. But she was told that she would have to renounce seeing them and anyone else in the world and she refused to be locked up with a prisoner, the knowledge of whom cost so dearly … The person who served the prisoner died on Sainte-Marguerite. The father of the officer of whom I was just speaking, who had been used as a trusted agent by Saint-Mars for certain matters, often told his son that he had gone to the prison at midnight to get the corpse and had carried it on his shoulders to the burial spot. He thought it was the prisoner himself who was dead; it was, as I have just said, the person who served him, and that was why a woman was sought to replace him.
Nine years after the publication of Papon’s book, the Bastille fell to the people and from those who had read the various accounts of the masked prisoner published to that date, including the extracts from Du Junca’s journal reproduced by Griffet, the sensational stories of finding a skeleton in an iron mask abandoned in some forgotten dungeon drew not the slightest attention. Their interest was riveted on the story that something else had not been found. In the great prison register, two hundred and fifty folio-sized pages in a locked portfolio of morocco leather, page 120 was missing, and that was the very page on which, according to the date recorded by Du Junca, the registration of the prisoner should have appeared. An official committee, set up to collect and examine all the papers of the Bastille, published their findings in instalments during 1789 and 1790. The best they were able to produce for the missing page was a separate record made in 1775 by the then major of the Bastille, a man called Godillon Chevalier, whose information could have been taken entirely from Griffet’s book. Chevalier was quoted as saying that the original page had not been removed in any attempted cover-up. On the contrary, the page was missing precisely because of a government attempt to elucidate the affair. It had been in the prison files until 1775 when an official inquiry had been ordered into the existence and identity of the mysterious prisoner. The page had then become part of a special government dossier in which all records relative to the prisoner were gathered together. What had become of the dossier, however, no one knew, nor unfortunately could anyone find out.
NOTES
1. Marquis d’Argens: Jean Baptiste de Boyer, 1704–1771. French writer who had a position of influence at the Prussian Court where Voltaire stayed from 1750 to 1753 while writing his Si cle de Louis XIV.
2. François-Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, 1639–1691. Minister of War under Louis XIV from 1662 to 1691.
3. Racine: Jean, poet and dramatist, 1639–1699.
4. Conti: junior branch of the House of Condé which was itself a branch of the Royal House of Bourbon.
5. Samuel Bernard: Comte de Courbet, 1651–1739. French banker and financier through whom and from whom Louis XIV raised enormous loans.
6. Monastery of Lérins: on the island of Saint-Honorat.
7. Mougins: village close to Cannes.