3
The reason used by Voltaire to help his readers solve for themselves the mystery of the Iron Mask’s identity consisted of two simple syllogisms. The first was that in 1661, when the mysterious prisoner was arrested, no one well-known disappeared and so therefore the prisoner was a man unknown. The second was that though he was unknown no one was allowed to see his face, and so therefore he looked like someone who was well-known. Voltaire carried his argument no further, but on the basis of this intelligence the reader was expected to have no difficulty in deducing the rest for himself. Since the prisoner’s face was concealed with a mask, ordinary differences in styles of appearance and conditions of life were inadequate to counteract the resemblance, therefore he must have been the very double of the person he resembled. The only person sufficiently well-known to make such an absolute measure necessary was Louis XIV, and the only explanation for such a complete resemblance was that the prisoner and the King were identical twins. Amazing, but elementary.
The logic is impeccable, but the argument is specious. The first syllogism takes for both its premises suppositions which are unwarranted, and the second employs for one of its premises the conclusion of the first. It is untrue to say that in 1661 no one well-known disappeared. In fact someone very well-known was arrested in that year and not only disappeared from public life, but became soon after a prisoner of Saint-Mars at Pignerol.1 However, and in any case, there are simply no grounds for the belief that the mysterious prisoner was arrested in 1661. Lagrange-Chancel gives at least some reason to believe that the arrest took place in 1669, and as it happens a veritable celebrity did actually and literally disappear at that time.2 Voltaire’s swift logic is without foundation; nor is that the only reason to suspect that he has misrepresented the facts. His argument leads to a theory which makes sense only if he was guilty of inventing his description of the prisoner to suit a public misconception about the appearance of the King.
To anyone reading contemporary descriptions of Louis XIV, the description of the Iron Mask, as being above average height with a good figure and a noble bearing, might seem to support Voltaire’s hypothesis. All those who saw Louis XIV described him in those very terms, as for instance did the Venetian ambassador, Aloïse Grimani, who reported that he was of a ‘tall build and majestic appearance.’ The impression of tallness, however, was contrived: Louis XIV was a little man, very much below average height. He wore shoes with four-inch heels, a periwig, which added another six inches to the top of his head, and wherever he went, indoors or out, a high-crowned hat. His apparent height was something over six feet, but his actual height was only five feet two inches. The prisoner, we may presume, wore neither periwig nor high-heels and so if he looked tall the fact is that, unlike the King, he was tall. Identical twins, we may conclude, were never so unlike.
None of Voltaire’s readers seemed to appreciate the significance of this, but most of those who were tempted to play armchair detective were in any event satisfied with a logic less than elementary. In their haste to give the prisoner a princely identity they did not even pause to appreciate the necessity to Voltaire’s theory of a near-perfect resemblance. For them the mask could be explained by a much less striking resemblance, a likeness which was not even a full family-likeness, a similarity of feature due to the prisoner and the King being half-brothers by the same mother, Louis XIII’s wife, Anne of Austria. In the second edition of Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, published in 1771, Voltaire’s reference to the Iron Mask was developed along these lines in a long and laborious note inserted by the publisher:
From the manner in which M. de Voltaire has recounted the matter, the publisher conjectures that this famous historian is just as convinced as he is of the suspicion he now intends to reveal, but that M. de Voltaire, as a Frenchman, did not wish to say it openly, especially since he had said enough to ensure that the clue to the puzzle would not be difficult to find. Here then is my interpretation: the Iron Mask was doubtless a brother, and an elder brother, of Louis XIV, whose mother had that taste for fine linen referred to by M. de Voltaire. While reading contemporary memoirs which record this characteristic of the Queen, I remembered that the Iron Mask had the same taste and became convinced that he was her son, something which already seemed likely in the light of all other circumstances.
It is well known that for a long time Louis XIII had not lived with the Queen, and that the birth of Louis XIV was due to a happy chance cleverly exploited, a chance which compelled the King to sleep in the same bed as the Queen. Here then is how I believe things took place. The Queen imagined that it was her fault that an heir to Louis XIII had not been born. The birth of the Iron Mask undeceived her. The Cardinal, to whom she confided the secret, knew more than one way of profiting from it. He contrived to turn the event to his own benefit and the advantage of the State. Convinced from what had happened that the Queen could bear children to the King, he arranged the situation which produced the chance of a single bed for the King and the Queen.
The Queen and the Cardinal, equally aware of the necessity of hiding from Louis XIII the existence of the Iron Mask, had him raised in secret. It was a secret from Louis XIV until the death of Cardinal Mazarin and then he learned that he had a brother, an elder brother whom his mother could not disown and who moreover bore features which in a noticeable way declared his origin. Reflecting then that this child, born in wedlock, could not without embarrassment and scandal be declared illegitimate after the death of Louis XIII, Louis XIV judged that he could not use a wiser and more just method to assure his own security and the tranquillity of the State than the one which he employed. It was a method which spared him from committing a cruelty which a monarch less principled and magnaminous than Louis XIV would have considered a political necessity.
It has often been suggested that Voltaire himself is the real author of this note, that he used the publisher as a front to print his own final and conclusive revelation, but the note is so blurred and confused, so padded out with banality and repetition, that it is difficult to imagine how anyone could take such a suggestion seriously. Cleared of coyness and claptrap, the theory is simple enough: Louis XIV’s mother, unable to conceive a child by her husband, imagined herself to be sterile. When she and her husband stopped living together she took a lover and one day to her surprise and alarm she found herself to be pregnant. This child, born and raised in secret, became the Iron Mask. Louis XIV was born later, after the Queen arranged to have the King spend one night in her bed.
The publisher’s vague references to ‘the Cardinal’ appear to be a deliberate equivocation to cover confusion and uncertainty as to who the Cardinal in question was. At first sight it seems that Cardinal Mazarin is referred to since he is the only one mentioned by name. Mazarin was Prime Minister from 1642 to 1661 and the Queen’s devoted ally; there is even reason to believe that sometime after the death of Louis XIII in 1643 he became the Queen’s husband by morganatic marriage. That he would have protected her if she had turned to him for help is credible, but he was not at that time in a position to do so. If the Iron Mask was older than Louis XIV, then his birth was prior to 1638 and the Cardinal trusted by the Queen would then have to be Cardinal de Richelieu, who was Prime Minister before Mazarin from 1624 until 1642. Richelieu, however, was the Queen’s implacable enemy and exploited every opportunity possible to set the King against her. It is difficult to imagine that the Queen would have confided to him so perilous a secret.
To give the publisher his due, however, the basic theory he proposes is not altogether without interest. It is perfectly true that when Louis XIV’s parents brought him into the world they had been married for twenty-three years without producing a child, that for many years they had been living separately in mutual distrust, and that this conception had been the consequence of a deliberate plan to have the King spend just one night in the same bed as the Queen. In August 1637, she had been found guilty of treasonable correspondence with Spain and had been placed under house arrest at the Louvre. By that time she had already been estranged from her husband for more than ten years and the King certainly had no wish to share her bed ever again. On the night of 5 December 1637, so the story goes, the King was caught in a storm in the centre of Paris and was unable to reach his own bed, which had been prepared for him at the Condé estate of Saint-Maur, south-east of Vincennes. According to the custom of the time, his household staff, along with his bed and furniture, food and kitchen, went ahead of him each day to prepare his supper and lodging wherever it was that he planned to spend the night. Cut off from them, he literally had no bed to sleep in, and so was persuaded by Guitaut, the Captain of the Queen’s Guard, to spend the night at the Louvre. As a consequence, the King and Queen ate together and, since there was no other royal bed available except the Queen’s, slept together as well.
News of the event spread quickly through the city and the following morning, after the King’s departure, the Queen was informed by the Superior of the Franciscan Order in Paris that one of his fellow friars had received word from heaven that a Dauphin had been conceived. He was right: nine months later to the very day, the Queen bore a son, the future Louis XIV. The newborn baby was wonderfully large and well-developed, with two teeth already fully grown, and were it not for the fact that everyone knew the Queen had just given birth to him, one would have thought he was at least three months old. Such being the marvel of Louis XIV’s conception and birth, there is clearly room for conjecture on more than one score.
Louis XIII was not happy with women: he feared and distrusted them, and his Queen, Anne of Austria, was not the kind of women to help him overcome his difficulty. He was cold by nature and unsure of himself, a neurotic and chronic invalid, suspicious, prudish, repressed and morose. She, by contrast, was hot-blooded and self-possessed, coquettish and wilful. She was, moreover, Spanish and his lifelong fear and detestation of the Spanish bordered on paranoia. When they were married in 1615, they were both only fourteen years of age. The Queen Mother put them to bed together on the wedding-night, but thereafter no amount of persuasion could induce the young King to share his wife’s bed again until four years later when against his will and in spite of his tears, he was literally picked up and carried to her bedroom. Despite their incompatibility they then managed to live as man and wife, but the King only out of a sense of duty to beget a son and heir. In March 1622, the Queen was said to have had a miscarriage when she was six weeks pregnant, but not everyone was prepared to believe it, and the King’s obedient submission to the functions of procreator was otherwise without fruit. For many it was not without significance that the King continued into his middle twenties with no sign of a beard, being given his first shave, and that for form rather than necessity, only on 1 August 1624 when he was twenty-three years old. Hope for a son and heir grew dim and the relationship, such as it was, disintegrated gradually until in 1625 whatever sense of conjugal obligation remained in the King was shattered by his wife’s scandalous behaviour with the Duke of Buckingham.
Buckingham had been sent by Charles I of England to escort his future queen, Henrietta of France, the sister of Louis XIII, to London. Darling of fortune, favourite of kings, idol of society, Buckingham outshone all the most brilliant stars of the court of Europe. He had youth, beauty and charm along with fame, wealth and power, an irresistible combination which at first sight dazzled eyes to his arrogance and flippancy, his aggressiveness and conceit. He was an accomplished courtier, an exciting and romantic personality, but as a statesman, diplomat and commander he was brash, self-seeking and incompetent. He arrived in Paris on 24 May 1625 with a retinue worthy of a king and overwhelmed the French nobility with the kind of splendour and refinement they admired as characteristic of themselves: provocative, extravagant, exquisite. His appearances at court were a sensation, his clothes dripping with pearls and diamonds which broke off and fell as he moved, scattering beneath the feet of his admirers. Anne of Austria, twenty-three years old and her marriage already cold, was as fascinated by him as were her ladies-in-waiting, and Buckingham, sensing a personal triumph, played gallant to her with a total disregard for propriety.
On 2 June, Henrietta of France, escorted by Buckingham and his party, left Paris for Boulogne, and the Court, including Anne of Austria and the Queen Mother3 but not the King, accompanied them as far as Amiens. There one evening while walking in the garden of the house where Anne was staying, Buckingham lured her away from the company and seized her in his arms. At what stage her cry brought their companions rushing to the scene is not certain. However, her servants and attendants maintained that she could not have been held in Buckingham’s passionate embrace long enough to substantiate the story, told later by Cardinal de Retz, that the next morning she commissioned her friend the Duchesse de Chevreuse ‘to ask Buckingham if he was quite sure she was not in danger of being pregnant.’
Two days later, Henrietta’s party continued their journey to Boulogne alone, with farewells at the gates of Amiens. Buckingham, with his head in Anne’s carriage, screened by the curtains, wept disconsolately and she was deeply affected. At Boulogne, contrary winds delayed Henrietta’s departure and under the pretext of carrying a letter to the Queen Mother, Buckingham dashed back to Amiens to see Anne again. She had been so upset by the leave-taking that she was unwell and in bed surrounded by her ladies. Buckingham burst into her bedroom and threw himself down at her bedside, kissing the sheets and proclaiming his love in loud and reckless abandon. The Queen was flattered, the Court stupefied, the King outraged, and Buckingham was warned never to set foot in France again.
Whatever doubts Louis XIII might have had about his wife’s disloyalty, they were reinforced the following year when the ‘Chalais Conspiracy’ was uncovered. The ringleader was Anne’s closest friend the Duchesse de Chevreuse. She had persuaded the Comte de Chalais, who was her lover, to join in a plot to assassinate Cardinal de Richelieu. The King’s brother, Gaston, was found to have played a leading rôle in the conspiracy too. The accusation was made that with Richelieu out of the way the King was to be deposed and his marriage annulled so that Gaston could take his place on the throne and Anne could become Gaston’s wife. When questioned about this by Richelieu in front of the King and the Queen Mother, Anne denied any knowledge of the plan and sought to argue her innocence with the remark that ‘she would have had too little to gain in the exchange.’
The coup was to have been carried through on the wave of a French Protestant uprising backed by English troops promised by Buckingham and when in the following year French government troops were sent against the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, Buckingham sailed to its defence with a force of 8,000 men. His expedition was a disaster, but, though forced to withdraw, he planned to return. In England, however, his star had waned. An attempt by Parliament to impeach him had been blocked by Charles I, but he was universally detested for his perpetual profiteering and endless bungling. On 23 August 1628, while with the fleet in Portsmouth supervising preparations for a second expedition, he was assassinated by one of his own officers. When the news reached Anne of Austria, she was stunned and incredulous. ‘It’s a lie,’ she is reported to have exclaimed. ‘I’ve only just recieved a letter from him.’
With Anne of Austria’s honour called so evidently into question, the number of Iron Masks proliferating from her sullied reputation, whether as illegitimate progeny or as illicit progenitors, is legion. For those who claim that the Iron Mask was an illegitimate brother of Louis XIV, Buckingham is the favourite candidate for father and, since the only direct contact he ever had with the Queen was limited to the last week of May and the first week of June 1625, the birth date of this Iron Mask is established as the beginning of March 1626.4 A popular alternative to Buckingham is Mazarin: ‘You will like him, Madame,’ Richelieu is supposed to have said when presenting Mazarin to the Queen. ‘He looks like Buckingham.’ The champions of these theories do not explain how it was possible for the Queen to conceal a pregnancy throughout its full course and bear a child in secret, but it is a fact that at one time she did manage, for a while at least, to keep a pregnancy hidden.
At the beginning of 1631, she was taken ill with what has since been established was a miscarriage. The fact that she kept that pregnancy secret has allowed the conjecture that it was not her husband’s child and that after some hesitation she underwent an abortion. If in fact the King was the father of this child he gave no sign of being so either by mark of tenderness before the pregnancy or show of disappointment after the miscarriage. Those who propose that the King was not the father place the date of this conception to a time in September 1630, known later as the Day of the Dupes, when the King was so ill that everyone assumed he would die. Since at that date he had no son and heir, the crown would have passed to his brother Gaston, and in anticipation of this the Queen Mother made the mistake of ordering Richelieu’s arrest. At that same time, so the theory goes, the Queen also did some anticipating: she sought to preserve her position as Queen by becoming pregnant. Who it was she employed to impregnate her on command is not specified, but whoever he was he too has won a place among the candidates for the Iron Mask.
Another variation on the same theme makes the Iron Mask the father of Louis XIV himself. Already in the seventeenth century it was rumoured that Louis XIII was impotent and that to furnish him with an heir his wife had to resort to a lover. Louis XIV, to his enemies, was always ‘the Great Bastard’. An example of this belief is the anonymous libel entitled Les Amours d’Anne d’Autriche avec C.D.R., published at Cologne in 1692. That version goes as follows: since Louis XIII is unable to have children, his brother Gaston, who is a widower with just one daughter for heir, is sure to succeed to the throne. Cardinal Richelieu, with an eye to the main chance, proposes his niece to Gaston in marriage, hoping thus to provide Gaston with a son and himself with a grand-nephew who would one day be king. Gaston rejects the offer and in the resulting quarrel strikes him. Richelieu, angry, humiliated and afraid, looks about for an alternative. Anne of Austria meanwhile has fallen in love with a young foreigner, whose name is given only as C.D.R., and Richelieu has the clever idea of arranging to get this young man into her bed so that she will conceive a child and cut Gaston out of the succession. His plan works perfectly and the fruit of this union is Louis XIV. The book sold well and, to the fury of the French government, was published again in 1693 and 1696. A sequel was promised in which the author was to relate the ‘fatal catastrophe’ which overtook C.D.R. in consequence, but it never appeared. Fifty years later it was suggested that this ‘fatal catastrophe’ was an iron mask and life-imprisonment.
As recently as 1934 this same ground was reworked by Pierre Vernadeau in his book Le Médecin de la Reyne, and made to yield yet another candidate for the Iron Mask. The account he gives is derived from two separate sources in the Limousin region of France; one a tale passed on by generations of the medical profession in Limoges, the other a local tradition relating to the village of Saint-Léonard, fourteen miles east of Limoges. The church of this village, also called Saint-Léonard, was the centre of an ancient fertility cult still popular in the seventeenth century: pregnant women prayed to the relics of Saint Léonard for a safe and easy delivery, while women who wished to be pregnant addressed their prayers to a curious object known as ‘the bolt of Saint Léonard’.
It is known for certain that in May 1638 the relics of Saint Léonard were taken to the Queen in Paris to assure the birth of her child, but the people of Limousin claim that the bolt of the saint was also taken to her some months before that to ensure the child’s conception. The saint’s aid in the act of fecundation was not officially acknowledged because the miraculous nature of the operation might have been questioned. Though people of faith would have attributed the longed-for conception to the power of Saint Léonard, there were sceptics who might have entertained the view that the success of the bolt was due to the potency of a not disimilar object belonging to the young man who invariably accompanied it, in this instance a certain Nicard, known to his fellow contrymen as ‘Beautiful Legs’.
Apparently Beautiful Legs also accompanied the relics of the saint to Paris in May and presumably went there again to collect them sometime after the Queen was delivered of her child in September. That he had the wonder-working bolt with him then as well and remained in Paris at the Queen’s disposal until early the following year is thought more than likely since miraculously, just three months after the birth of her first child, the Queen conceived a second. Beautiful Legs was not, however, the Iron Mask, at least the people of Limousin do not make that claim. According to a Docteur Boulland of Limoges, who got his information from a Docteur Mazard, founder of the Limoges School of Medecine, the Iron Mask was nonetheless a man from Limousin, imprisoned for possessing the forbidden knowledge that Louis XIV was not the son of Louis XIII.
The Queen’s physician referred to in the title of Vernadeau’s book was a certain Pardoux Gondinet who was born and raised in the village of Saint-Yrieix twenty-five miles south of Limoges, studied medicine at Bordeaux University and took up practice in Paris. He was appointed physician to Anne of Austria on 5 November 1644 and after her death in 1666 returned to Saint-Yrieix, where he continued to practice with the title of ‘physician to the late Queen’ until his own death in 1679. In the following year, on 14 December 1680, his son-in-law Marc de Jarrigue de La Morelhie also died, or at least that is what the official records show; in fact tradition has it that he was kidnapped by the French secret police, was imprisoned in the fortress of Pignerol, and died in the Bastille twenty-three years later, masked and anonymous. While sorting through the private papers of his late father-in-law, Morelhie had come across the report of an autopsy carried out upon the body of Louis XIII, in which appeared clear proof that the King had been incapable of reproduction: the corpse had been found to have the testicles of a child. Unable to keep the evidence to himself, Morelhie foolishly confided the secret to his fellow-countryman, Nicolas de La Reynie who though his friend was also the King’s Lieutenant-General of Police. La Reynie informed Louvois, the Minister of War, who informed the King, and the result was that both Morelhie and the autopsy report were made to disappear in double quick time. How it had been possible for Gondinet to come into possession of this fateful report is not very clear. As Vernadeau heard the story, Gondinet had actually participated in the autopsy, but that is hardly likely. He was after all physician to the Queen, not the King, and in any event was not appointed to that position until the year after Louis XIII’s death.5
One other theory which relates directly to Louis XIV’s own birth was a claim put about at the end of the eighteenth century as propaganda for the House of Orléans, the junior branch of the Royal House of Bourbon. According to this, the Iron Mask was a woman. Inspiration for the idea probably came from one of Voltaire’s informants, a certain Madame Cathérine Cessis of Cannes, who in 1759, when she ‘was close on one hundred years old’, maintained that she had been allowed to meet the Iron Mask just before his departure for the Bastille. She claimed that he had removed a glove to take her hand and that she had recognized at once from the smoothness and softness of his skin that in fact he was a woman. Las Cases gives an account of the theory in his report of the conversation with Napoleon already mentioned. ‘It was supposed that Anne of Austria, pregnant after twenty-three years of sterility, gave birth to a daughter, and the fear that she might not have another child led Louis XIII to remove this daugher and fraudulently substitute for her a boy who later became Louis XIV.’ Thus the Iron Mask was revealedto be a tender maiden disguised as a man and the mask became a necessity to hide the napless delicacy of her cheek and chin. There were convents aplenty where this hypothetical daughter could have been safely hidden away, but her parents, the King and Queen, preferred to hand her over to prison guards and turnkeys. The point of the story as put about in Paris was political, however, not romantic, as Las Cases went on to explain. ‘The year after, the Queen gave birth again, this time to a boy, Philippe,6 the Head of the House of Orléans. Thus he and his offspring were the legitimate heirs, while Louis XIV and his offspring were nothing more than intruders and usurpers.’ In the events which led up to the Revolution, the then Duc d’Orléans7 sided with the people against the old regime and voted for the execution of Louis XVI, but his popularity, while it lasted, had nothing to do with any claim he might have had to the throne. ‘A pamphlet on the subject,’ Las Cases concluded, ‘was circulating in the provinces at the time of the fall of the Bastille, but the story was not successful and died out without ever catching on in the capital.’ Nevertheless the story was still going the rounds as late as 1895, when it was reported in the press that a former mayor of Cannes by the name of Mero had disclosed to a friend that one of his ancestors of the same name had served as doctor to the Iron Mask during his imprisonment on Sainte-Marguerite; he too had claimed that the prisoner was a woman.
The fall of the Bastille led to innumerable revelations and disclosures relevant to the Iron Mask. Soon after the supposed discovery of a mouldering skeleton in a rusted vizor, a journalist published a story about the discovery of a document hidden in a wall. He claimed that in late July 1789, when the Bastille was given over to sightseers and demolition workers, a Venetian tourist hunting for souvenirs was approached by a mason who wanted to sell an old piece of paper covered in writing. He had found it, he said, hidden in the wall of the Third Chamber of the Bertaudière Tower, the very room where the Iron Mask had been lodged on his arrival at the Bastille in September 1698. The mason wanted 3 livres for the paper, but the message it contained made it cheap at the price. The prisoner who had written it was one of Louis XIV’s own sons, the Comte de Vermandois, who by all accounts had never been a prisoner at any time, and he had written it in 1701 when officially he had been dead for eighteen years. The journalist made no attempt to produce the tourist or the document, but the supposed text he reproduced in full:
In the name of the Holy Virgin, protecting Saint of all the French, in my despair. May God concede, at her intercession, that one day all mankind is made to know the dreadful fate, kept secret from the world, to which the orders of a barbarous father have unjustly condemned me. I am Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Vermandois, Grand Admiral of France. As punishment for a rash and foolish act I was imprisoned in Pignerol Castle and after that on the island of Sainte-Marguerite and finally in the Bastille, where I will probably finish the course of my sad life. I have already tried several times to make it know that I am still alive but always in vain and so I write this note and hide it in a hole in the wall of my chamber hoping that some turn of fate will make it known to men. I have written and hidden this paper on my birthday, 2 October 1701, at six o’clock in the evening. They are going to make me move rooms and thus may Heaven grant that my prayers will be answered. Signed: Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Vermandois, the most miserable and the most innocent of men.
As candidate for the Iron Mask, Vermandois was not new. On the contrary he had been one of the first contenders, proposed by an anonymous writer as early as 1745, six years before Voltaire’s first published reference, and his case had been championed thereafter by Henri Griffet, the man who brought Du Junca’s journal to light. The tragically short life of Vermandois, as it is officially recorded, is quickly told.
He was born on 2 October 1667, the natural son of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière, their fifth love-child and their last. The love in which he was conceived died before he was born, and while he was still a small child his parents turned away from each other and from him, his father drawn to another woman and the children of her love, his mother to God and the isolation of a Carmelite convent. He and a sister, the only ones of the five children to survive infancy, were well provided for nonetheless. Acknowledged and proclaimed legitimate by their father, they were raised in the home of Colbert, the Controller of Finance, and given status and position at court: at the age of two, Vermandois was named Grand Admiral of France and at the age of thirteen, his sister was married to the Prince de Conti. They were, by all reliable accounts, as good-looking and good-hearted as their mother, and they were well-liked at court in spite of the active hostility of the new favourite, Athénais de Montespan,8 who saw them as rivals to the fortunes of her own children.
At the beginning of November 1683, soon after his sixteenth birthday, Vermandois was sent to join the army in Flanders and took part in the opening skirmishes of the siege of Courtrai. Only after he had distinguished himself in the battle line was it realized that he had been hiding a fever and was in fact very ill. On 4 November the King was informed of his son’s condition and sent orders that he be brought home immediately. The boy, however, was too ill to move. On 8 November he was bled and seemed to recover, but on 12 November his condition worsened and on 16 November he received the last sacraments. Throughout his illness the King received daily reports from the commanding officer, who was present on the night of 18 November when the young man died. The body was transferred in solemn procession to Arras on 24 November and on 27 November was interred with doleful pomp in the cathedral choir. The King then made an endowment of 10,000 livres to the cathedral chapter so that a requiem mass would be said every day for a year and a mass of remembrance on 18 November each year in perpetuity.
The unofficial version, offered by the anonymous writer in 1745, appeared in a book entitled Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’Histoire de Perse, which presented events at the French Court under the guise of Persian history. A simple key to the fictitious Persian names, published with the third edition in 1759, left no doubt as to the real significance of what was described. The Persian king, ‘Cha-Abas’, was Louis XIV; the ‘Indian maiden’ was Louise de La Vallière; their son, ‘Giafer’, was Vermandois; the King’s son and heir, ‘Sephir Mirza’, was the Dauphin;9 the place named ‘Feldran’ was Flanders; the ‘Island of Ormuz’ was the island of Sainte-Marguerite; and the citadel of ‘Ispahan’ was the Bastille.
This prince was passionately fond of women and had several favourites, one of the first of whom was an Indian who though plain was tall and shapely and blessed with a heart and mind to compensate for her lack of beauty. Her heart was full of that delicate tenderness which constitutes the magic of love and is perhaps the most important quality in a woman. Cha-Abas loved her beyond all measure and had a son by her whom he called Giafer. This young prince was raised with the greatest possible care; he was handsome, well-built and quick-witted, but arrogant and hot-tempered. To Sephir Mirza, the heir to the crown and the only son recognized by Cha-Abas, Giafer could not bring himself to show the respect due to a prince born to be his king.
These two princes, who were about the same age, had very different characters. Sephir Mirza had all the agreeable qualities Giafer had, but by the gentleness, affability and generosity of his disposition altogether surpassed him. It was these virtues, as admirable as they are rare in a prince born to succeed to the throne, which made Sephir Mirza the object of Giafer’s enmity, and the reason why he lost no opportunity to declare how much he pitied the Persians, destined as they were to be ruled one day by a prince who lacked character and the strength to command. Cha-Abas was aware of Giafer’s conduct and conscious of the impropriety of it, but his royal authority yielded to his paternal love and, absolute monarch though he was, he could not assert his will upon this son who abused his love.
At last one day Giafer forgot himself so far as to strike Prince Sephir Mirza. Cha-Abas, informed at once, feared for the guilty young man, but, whatever desire he might have had to pretend ignorance of the offence, the respect he owed to himself and to his crown and the commotion caused by the affair at court made it impossible for him to heed the promptings of his heart. With great reluctance he summoned his closest counsellors, explained to them his painful problem and asked for their advice. All agreed, considering the enormity of the crime and conforming to the laws of the state, that the penalty was death. What a blow for a doting father!
One of the ministers, more aware than the others of the suffering of Cha-Abas, told him that there was a way of punishing Giafer without taking his life: that he should be sent at once to the army, which at that time was on the frontiers of Feldran, and soon after his arrival it should be put about that he had contracted plague, thus to frighten and keep away anyone who might otherwise wish to see him; that after a few days of his pretended illness he should be said to be dead and then while the whole army witnessed his burial, with funeral honours worthy of his birth, he should be moved by night with the utmost secrecy to the citadel on the Island of Ormuz, there to live out his days. This proposal was well-received by everyone and especially by the unhappy Cha-Abas.
People of loyalty and discretion were chosen to carry out the scheme and Giafer left for the army with a magnificent retinue. Everything went off as planned; while the death of the unfortunate prince was mourned throughout the camp, he was taken by unfrequented roads to the Island of Ormuz and handed over to the governor there, who had received prior orders from Cha-Abas not to let his prisoner be seen by anyone.
One sole servant, who was party to the secret, was taken along with the prince, but he died on the journey. The officers in charge disfigured his face with knife slashes to stop him being recognized and, having stripped him as a further precaution, left him stretched out beside the road and continued on their way.
The governor of the citadel of Ormuz treated his prisoner with the greatest respect: he personally served him at table, carrying the dishes from the door of the apartment where they were brought by the cooks, none of whom ever saw Giafer’s face. One day the prince contrived to scratch his name with the point of a knife on the back of a plate. A slave who found the plate thought to curry favour by taking it to the governor, imagining that he would be rewarded for his trouble, but the poor man was mistaken: he lost his life on the spot and the secret which was of such great importance was buried with him. A useless precaution since, as is demonstrated by this account, the secret was badly kept …
Giafer stayed several years in the citadel of Ormuz and was only made to leave it to go to Ispahan, when Cha-Abas, in recognition of the governor’s faithful service, gave him the then vacant governorship of that citadel. It was in effect a prudent measure to make Giafer follow the destiny of the man to whom he had first been confided. It would have been acting against the laws of good sense to enlist a new confidant who might have proved less loyal and less conscientious.
Both at Ormuz and Ispahan the precaution was taken to put a mask on the prince whenever, because of sickness or some other circumstance, it was necesary to let him be seen. Several reliable witnesses maintained that they saw this masked prisoner more than once, and they reported that he addressed the governor with easy familiarity, although he by contrast was always most respectful.
If one wonders why, having outlived Cha-Abas and Sephir Mirza by so many years, Giafer was not set free as would have been proper, one should remember that it was not possible to re-establish him in his original condition, rank and dignity. His tomb existed and there were not only witnesses but written records of his burial, the authenticity of which could not be destroyed in the minds of the people, who to this day are still persuaded that Giafer died of plague in the army camp of Feldran.
It should be noted at once that as an account of what happened to Vermandois, this story rests upon a number of important misrepresentations of fact. Never was it said that Vermandois had contracted plague and at no time was it even suggested that his illness was contagious. Nor was there ever any commotion at court over a quarrel of any kind involving Vermandois and the Dauphin. Had there been so much as a rumour that Vermandois had struck the Dauphin it would have been mentioned by someone at the time, but nowhere in all the recorded gossip of the period is there any trace of such an incident. In a letter written on 6 June 1700, the Princess Palatine referred to a story published in German that a son of James II of England had once given the Dauphin a box on the ear and about that she declared: ‘There is not a word of truth in it.’ If anyone else had ever boxed the Dauphin’s ear she would surely have known and would certainly have said so. There is moreover no evidence for the belief that Vermandois disliked the Dauphin or lacked proper respect for him, and the fact that the sister of Vermandois was always one of the Dauphin’s closest friends makes it unlikely that there was ever any enmity between them. One might add furthermore that the Dauphin was a less agreeable person and Vermandois a more agreeable person than their respective representations in Persian dress, that the Dauphin was six years older than Vermandois and that so far as Vermandois was concerned Louis XIV was never a doting father.
Henri Griffet was nonetheless convinced that the tale of Giafer was the true story of Vermandois and the solution to the mystery of the Iron Mask. To support his opinion he had little real evidence to offer, but a passage he found in the Mémoires of the Grande Mademoiselle,10 who was first cousin to Louis XIV, did at least establish as fact the claim that Vermandois had done something serious enough to be in disgrace shortly before his departure for the army:
Some days previously, news came that the army, which so far that year had done nothing, had laid siege to Courtrai. M. de Vermandois left to go there and M. de Lauzun11 left Paris for the same destination. M. de Vermandois had only recently returned to court. The King had not been pleased with his conduct – he had taken part in orgies – and had banished him from his sight. He stayed on at Versailles but without seeing anyone, only going to the academy and in the morning to mass. The King did not like the company he had been keeping. One did not know the details and one did not wish to know. It caused Madame de La Vallière a great deal of pain. He was given a good talking to and he made a full confession, so it was supposed he would behave himself.
Unquestionably, Vermandois had been in disgrace, but the punishment described is perfectly consistent with the kind of discipline any sensible parent might decide necessary for an adolescent in danger of being led astray by bad company. There is certainly no suggestion of a crime serious enough to merit the fate of the Iron Mask, and one can be sure that the young man’s disgrace was represented in the worst possible light by the Grande Mademoiselle. Besides being a frustrated old maid and a malicious gossip, she was a fervent supporter of the Montespan faction, and Vermandois was the pet aversion of Madame de Montespan. As the older half-brother of her sons, the Duc de Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, she considered him to be their chief rival in the affection and favour of the King, and so missed no opportunity to defame him. What the Grande Mademoiselle had to say about the tragic death of Vermandois makes it clear that, if he had ever been guilty of anything more serious than ordinary adolescent misbehaviour, she would have recorded it: ‘Madame de Montespan sent me a letter. She said that M. de Vermandois was dead and that the King had given his charge of admiral to the Comte de Toulouse. He had fallen sick at the siege of Courtrai after drinking too much brandy. People said that he showed great courage and they talked about his character and conduct as people do about someone they like. As for me I was not at all upset. I was only too pleased that M. de Maine no longer had a brother to take precedence over him.’
What Griffet lacked in evidence for his advocacy of Vermandois as the Iron Mask, he made up for in ingenuity. He proposed that ‘Marchioly’, the name used on the Iron Mask’s burial certificate, which he read as ‘Marchiali’, was an anagram of ‘hic amiral’ (i.e. ‘in this space the admiral’) and thus denoted Vermandois as Grand Admiral of France. Of all the Iron Mask theories of the eighteenth century, Griffet’s was the most popular, and the conviction that Vermandois had died wearing a mask in the Bastille became so entrenched and widespread that in 1786, just three years before the pretended discovery of the letter hidden in the wall, Louis XVI ordered the opening of the tomb in Arras Cathedral. This was done in the presence of the Bishop of Arras and the Attorney-General who together signed an official report testifying to the discovery of ‘a body complete and well-formed’. Arguably, of course, it was not the body of Vermandois, but an extra body posed unlimited problems for the argument.12
NOTES
1. Nicolas Fouquet was arrested and imprisoned 5 September 1661.
2. The Duc de Beaufort disappeared at the siege of Candy 25 June 1669.
3. Queen Mother: Marie de’ Medici, 1574–1642, wife of Henri IV and mother of Louis XIII.
4. In a book entitled Les Grandes Heures des Iles de Lérins published in 1975, Jean-Jacques Antier reproduced in a French translation the text of a letter supposedly written by Benjamin Franklin to Sir James Jay on 28 November 1782. In this Franklin reported how he had talked with the Duc de Richelieu the day before on the subject of the Iron Mask and Richelieu had told him that the Iron Mask was the illegitimate child of Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham. According to Monsieur Antier, this letter was found in a collection of previously unpublished letters printed in Baltimore in 1863. When asked about this letter, the librarians of the Benjamin Franklin Collection at the Yale University Library could find no record in their archives of any such letter written to Sir James Jay on the date given, nor of such a letter written to anyone on any date, and no trace of a book containing any kind of letter by Franklin published in Baltimore or elsewhere in 1863. Significantly enough, however, they did find a letter written by Franklin to Sir James Jay on 28 November 1782 though in that he spoke about some matter involving a certain Captain Francis Dundas and made absolutely no mention of Richelieu or the Iron Mask. When Monsieur Antier himself was asked about the letter which he had reproduced in his book, he could not remember where he had found it, neither the text nor the references he had given for it. While it seems unlikely that Franklin would have written two letters to Sir James Jay on the same day without making some reference to the first, however brief, in the second, it is nonetheless perfectly possible that a man like the Duc de Richelieu would have been capable of telling such a story about the Iron Mask. However, there would be no more reason to believe this story true than there is to believe Monsieur Antier’s letter real.
5. Curiously enough Saint Léonard was the patron saint of prisoners as well as of hopeful and expectant mothers. It was believed that all prisoners who invoked his name were delivered from their chains and enabled to go free while their guards stood by powerless to stop them. His churches were often hung with broken chains left by escaped prisoners as proof of his miraculous intervention. There is however no tradition that he intervened in the case of Morelhie.
6. Philippe: 1640–1701. Only brother of Louis XIV. Inherited the title of Duc d’Orléans from his uncle Gaston and passed it on to his own son and descendants.
7. Duc d’Orléans: Louis Philippe Joseph, 1747–1793. Assumed the name ‘Egalite’ as proof of his revolutionary spirit.
8. Athénais de Montespan: 1641–1707. She replaced Louise de La Vallière as Louis XIV’s mistress in 1667.
9. Dauphin: Louis de France, 1661–1711, only legitimate son of Louis XIV.
10. Grande Mademoiselle: Duchesse de Montpensier, 1627–1693; daughter of Gaston.
11. Lauzun: Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, 1632–1723. As will emerge in later chapters, he was himself a prisoner of Saint-Mars at Pignerol from 1671 to 1681.
12. The Cathedral of Arras was entirely destroyed during the Revolution.