5
Twenty-three years before Barclay’s attempted assassination of William, there was an abortive bid on the life of Louis XIV and, according to Théodore Jung, whose book La Verité sur le Masque de fer appeared in 1873, the Iron Mask was the ringleader of that conspiracy. At the time of his arrest, this man gave his name as Louis Oldendorf and claimed to be a Dutch national from Nijmegen but, when the French secret service first discovered him, he was in Brussels and was using at least two other names as well: Kiffenbach and Harmoises. Nothing more is known of his background, but Jung argues that he was a young nobleman from Lorraine who had previously been a cavalry officer in the service of the Empire, and whose true name might well have been ‘Marchiel’, as the Iron Mask’s name at burial was once transcribed.
The plan, so far as it can be made out, was to ambush the King’s carriage on the open road when he travelled north in April 1673 to follow his army in the spring offensive against Holland. Oldendorf was in contact with government agents from Holland, Spain and Austria and had with him in Brussels a band of ten men from Holland, Ireland and Lorraine. In Jung’s view, however, Oldendorf was no ordinary terrorist: he was one of the masterminds of an international organization which for more than a decade conspired to overthrow Louis XIV and his regime. Their sinister stratagems lay behind the attempted insurrections of Roux de Marcilly in 1669 and of La Tréaumont and Rohan in 1674, and behind the secret infiltration of the French court by the most vicious and degraded criminals of the underworld. Jung also held them responsible for a wave of assassinations which included the deaths of Monsieur’s first wife, Henrietta of England, in 1670, of Foreign Minister Lionne in 1671 and of the Duke of Savoy in 1675.1The organization, Jung would have us believe, had cells in all the capitals of western Europe and numbered among its leaders and supporters Catholics as well as Protestants, royalists as well as republicans, statesmen and bankers as well as exiles, gangsters and adventurers.
Louvois got wind of a plot against the person of the King sometime in 1672, and by October of that year his agents had the suspects under surveillance in Brussels. In March 1673, Versailles was put under heavy guard, the governors of the cities where the King was expected to pass on his journey north were ordered to tighten security, and police traps were set up on all the main arteries. The suspects vanished from Brussels on 27 March, but on the night of 28 March four horsemen crossing a ford over the River Somme near Péronne were ambushed. Only one was captured, the man who called himself Louis Oldendorf. He was moved to the Bastille on 1 April and there he was interrogated by Louvois himself. French agents in Brussels seized a box of papers belonging to the suspects and sent it to Paris. More travellers were arrested on the roads from the Spanish Netherlands and some of these like Oldendorf were taken to the Bastille. There was no attempt upon the King’s life, but no trial either. What happened to the arrested men, including Oldendorf, is not known.
Jung would have us believe that Louvois had all the evidence he needed to execute the conspirators but preferred to keep them alive as secret prisoners because Oldendorf possessed information which compromised a number of important people within the French court. Louvois later used this information as a means of insinuating his agents into the international organization and of blackmailing his personal enemies and political opponents. According to Jung, Oldendorf was kept in the Bastille for a year and then transferred to Pignerol where he arrived on 7 April 1674. It is true that a prisoner was moved from the Bastille to Pignerol at that time, but it was not Oldendorf.2 Jung’s book is one of the best-informed of all the books on the Iron Mask: his search for the truth ‘still buried in the dust of contemporary records’ was a major contribution to the subject; but ironically, paradoxically, the conclusion he drew from his discoveries is totally lacking in any supportive evidence.
That the Iron Mask was at the centre of an international conspiracy against Louis XIV was also proposed by Camille Bartoli, whose book J’ai découvert l’inconcevable secret du Masque de fer was published as recently as 1978. According to him, the conspirators were members of the Secret Order of the Temple, a clandestine organization which, he says, replaced the Order of the Knights Templar when it was destroyed by Philippe IV3 of France at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Bartoli gives a dramatic description of how he learned the ‘inconceivable secret’ from a mysterious stranger who in 1976 was staying at the Hotel Negresco in Nice, an elderly and distinguished-looking man who claimed to be himself a member of the Secret Order and who revealed the ‘inconceivable secret’ to him on condition that he publish it.
His revelation was that the Secret Templars of the seventeenth century were seeking, as were the Templar Knights before them, to impose their ‘Great Design’ upon the world, a political and religious system to unify all nations and sects; and as a first step towards this, they believed it was necessary to restore the throne of France to the legitimate Frankish Kings. The original rulers of the Franks were the Merovingians who were kings by right of birth, and the Carolingians who followed them were descended from a junior branch of the same family. However, the rulers of France thereafter, the Kings of the Capetian, Valois and Bourbon dynasties, were all descended from a usurper, Hugues Capet,4 and so were not legitimate. The crown of France belonged by divine right to the descendants of Charles de Lorraine,5 who was the true heir when Capet usurped the throne at the end of the tenth century.
One of these descendants, the crusader Godefroi de Bouillon,6 was the first King of Jerusalem, and it was in Jerusalem soon after his death that the Order of the Knights Templar was founded by a group of French knights. Sanctioned and supported by the Papacy, the Templars gradually developed into an international organization of great political and economic significance and two hundred years later were powerful enough to attempt to impose their Great Design. With ruthless and unprincipled cunning, however, the incumbent false King, Philippe IV, outmanoeuvered them. He installed a French pope at Avignon and got him to suppress the Order as heretical and immoral. Through the persecutions which followed, the organization lived on undercover, Bartoli claims, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century had regained sufficient strength, albeit secret, to attempt the Great Design again. The assassination of Louis XIV’s grandfather, Henri IV, the repeated conspiracies against Louis XIV’s minority, were all the work of the Secret Order of the Templars.
Finally in 1661, Bartoli explains, when Louis XIV took the reins of government into his own hands, he came to realize the conspiracy which menaced him and in 1664 managed to discover the identity of the ‘Great Monarch’ who was to replace him on the throne. The man in question, descended from Charlemagne and heir to the Merovingian kings, was Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise: one of the leading figures at court, former Archbishop of Reims, fifty years old and without heir. Though it would not have been difficult for Louis XIV to eliminate the man, it was altogether impossible for him to eliminate the threat he represented. Were he to have killed him, the divine inheritance would have passed to another member of the Lorraine family and the Secret Templars, believing Louis XIV guilty of regicide, would have had no qualms about assassinating him. The only way out of the danger for Louis XIV was to neutralize the Secret Templars by making the Great Monarch his prisoner and holding him hostage. It was certain that so long as the Duc de Guise was alive, the Secret Templars would give their allegiance to no one else, and so long as he was a prisoner they would do nothing to endanger his life. In that same year therefore, the Duc de Guise was kidnapped and, while it was given out that he had died, the Secret Templars were allowed to know that he was imprisoned in Pignerol and would be killed the moment any attempt was made to release him.
This, according to Bartoli, was how it was that the Duc de Guise became the prisoner known later as the Iron Mask. He was not, however, the masked prisoner who died in the Bastille in 1703. In fact, he died in 1694 at the age of eighty while he was on Sainte-Marguerite and another prisoner, a simple valet, was then made to wear the mask in his stead so that the Great Monarch should appear to be still alive and the Secret Templars would continue to remain in check. Since the masked valet was not replaced by another prisoner when he died in 1703, one must assume that the danger posed by the Secret Templars was at that time less acute, but a couple of years later Louis XIV was informed that his crime against the Great Monarch had been published for all posterity, written in some esoteric form and incorporated into one of the buildings of Nice. His advisers were of the opinion that the building was the castle, and so in 1706 French troops stormed into Nice and, against the counsel of all military experts, reduced the castle to rubble.
The information given to Louis XIV about the existence of such a message was correct, Bartoli tells us, but the advice as to its whereabouts was wrong. Thus it was that the ‘inconceivable secret’ of the Iron Mask escaped destruction, and hence it is that it may be seen in Nice today, represented in arcane emblematic form on the medallions which decorate the vaulting of the sacristy and oratory of the monastery of Cimiez, unchanged since they were painted in 1686: a winged dragon and the moon; a bee in the flame of a candle; a pearl in a scallop-shell; a hand holding a lance; a mirror leaning against a tree; a snake touching its head with its tail; etc. – although you would need to read Bartoli’s book and be enlightened on the appropriate meanings of these enigmas, as conceived by the mysterious stranger from the Negresco Hotel, in order to appreciate the secret in all its inconceivability.
Not only has the mystery of the Iron Mask been revealed by adepts of the secret art, it has also been solved by addicts of the art of secrecy. In 1893 Etienne Bazeries, in collaboration with Emile Burgaud, brought out a book entitled Le Masque de fer. Révélation de la correspondence chiffrée de Louis XIV in which he employed his talents as a cryptographer to establish yet another theory. His book was the consequence of a discovery he had made two years previously when he had been asked to decipher eight coded letters printed at the end of the Mémoires of Nicolas Catinat, a Marshal of France in the time of Louis XIV. One of these letters led him to the conclusion that the Iron Mask was a certain general by the name of Vivien de Bulonde.
In the summer of 1691, when the French were at war with the Savoyards in Piedmont, Catinat assigned to Bulonde the task of capturing the town of Cuneo. Bulonde made his assault on 23 June and, being repulsed, laid siege. He had been told to expect reinforcements, but when news came in of the approach of an Austrian army, he panicked and fled, abandoning his artillery, munitions and wounded. This action compromised the whole campaign; when report of it reached Paris, Louvois is said to have run ‘weeping and in desperation’ to the King. In July, Bulonde was arrested and sent to Pignerol. It was in a coded letter from Louvois to Catinat, where Bulonde’s arrest was ordered, that Bazeries made his discovery: ‘It is not necessary for me to tell you with what displeasure His Majesty has learned of M. de Bulonde’s gross negligence in deciding, against your orders and for no good reason, to lift the siege of Cuneo. Knowing the consequences better than anyone, His Majesty is aware how great a set-back it will be for us not to have taken this stronghold, which will now have to be taken during the winter. It is His Majesty’s wish that M. de Bulonde be arrested, conducted to the citadel of Pignerol and held there under guard, that at night he be kept locked up in a room of that same citadel and in the day be given liberty to walk upon the ramparts with …’
The next word, represented by the number of 330, Bazeries for some reason could not decipher. The interpretation most likely to occur would be ‘with a soldier’ or ‘with a guard’, but after consideration Bazeries decided it must mean ‘with a mask’: Bulonde was to be allowed to walk along the walls of the citadel wearing a mask. In fact the French language makes this interpretation unlikely because the usual meaning of the word ‘masque’ in the context of such a sentence would produce an altogether different meaning: not ‘with a mask’ but ‘accompanied by a masked man’. Bazeries, however, had made up his mind and set to work to find corroboration.
This he turned up eventually in a second letter, written six years after the first, not in code this time, and from the Minister of War to the Iron Mask’s gaoler on Sainte-Marguerite. There the following injunction appeared: ‘You have no other conduct to follow with regard to those who are confided to your charge than to continue to watch over their surety without saying anything to anyone about the past acts of your longtime prisoner.’ Bazeries, examining the original manuscript of this letter, noticed an error crossed out after the words ‘about the’ and claimed that he could distinguish the word ‘gal’ under the crossing-out. Since ‘gal’ was the commonly accepted abbreviation for ‘general’, it seemed to Bazeries very evident that the minister had forgotten himself for a moment and had referred to the mysterious prisoner by his true title. Bulonde was the only general to have been imprisoned at Pignerol, and all the prisoners at Pignerol were moved to Sainte-Marguerite in 1694. Conclusion: the Iron Mask was Bulonde.
From an unintelligible cipher and an illegible crossing-out, Bazeries felt confident that he had unlocked the state secret kept hidden for more than two hundred years. What he did not seem to appreciate was the fact that Bulonde’s disgrace and arrest had never been a secret from anyone. The affair was reported in La Gazette on 2 September 1691, and one did not need to be a cryptographer to read that. In fact Bulonde was never a prisoner in the state prison of Pignerol; he was merely confined within the citadel under the guard of the garrison commander, and indeed was only kept there for a few months, the order for his release being issued in November of that same year. Though further evidence against Bulonde’s candidature is unnecessary, it has been produced nonetheless: his signature on business receipts dated 1699 and 1705, and a record of his death in 1709.
One of the most remarkable theories ever proposed for the Iron Mask’s identity was one which first appeared in a pamphlet published in 1883 by a writer who, as though lacking the strength of his convictions, sought to hide his own identity under the pseudonym ‘Ubalde’. It was his belief that the Iron Mask was Jean Baptiste Poquelin, the master spirit of French theatre, known to the world as Molière. Unhappily for Ubalde, most people who read the pamphlet decided he was a crackpot, were more interested in identifying him than in his identification of the Iron Mask, and lost interest when they discovered that he was just an obscure music teacher by the name of Anatole Loquin. Nonetheless he persisted with further variations on his original theme in 1893 and 1898, culminating with a book in 1900 which contained the definitive version and bore the title Un secret d’état sous Louis XIV, le Prisonnier Masqué de la Bastille, son histoire authentique. Though he published the book under his own name, he sought to cover himself again, spending the entire first half of the volume reproducing material from Jung and refuting propositions by other writers. As it is, the theory itself, when finally he worked up the courage to launch himself upon it, is a good deal less wild and woolly than he was ever given credit for.
For a proper appreciation of the theory, some knowledge of Molière’s life is necessary, but this can be quickly given. He was born in Paris in 1622, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant-upholsterer, was educated by the Jesuits at the college of Clermont, the best secondary school of the day, and went on to study law, it being his father’s intention that he would one day succeed him in the family business. At the age of twenty-one, however, he abandoned his studies for the theatre, took the stage name Molière, and with an actress-friend called Madeleine Béjart formed an acting troupe. For two years the young couple struggled to establish their troupe in Paris, but unsuccessfully, and when Molière had been imprisoned for debt and obliged to beg help from his father, they gave up and moved to the provinces. There they lived as itinerant players, performing in market-towns and country mansions mainly in the south, and did not return to Paris until thirteen years later. By that time their repertory included plays of their own, farces and sketches written by Molière, and these won them the attention and protection of Monsieur, the King’s brother, who had them perform for the King.
Royal approbation paved the way for success and largely because of the popularity of Molière’s own pieces the troupe was soon well established. In 1661, Fouquet commissioned Molière to produce a spectacular entertainment as part of his grandiose house warming party at Vaux-le-Vicomte and for that he turned his hand to something new, the first of his highly successful comedy-ballets. In 1662, he went on to sound another new note in his comedy School for Wives, which proved highly controversial and a great success at the box-office. With Tartuffe in 1664 he took this new comedy form even further, ‘to castigate vice and folly’ in an attack upon religious hypocrisy, but the play was banned and his next play Dom Juan, though showing to full houses, was stopped after only fifteen performances. In that same year, however, his troupe was granted the title of ‘The King’s Troupe’ and he continued undeterred to write and produce his plays for the court and the town until his death in 1673: comedies like The Misanthropist in 1666 andThe Miser in 1668, comedy-ballets like The Would-Be Gentleman in 1670 and The Imaginary Invalid in 1673. In 1667, a revised version of Tartuffe was banned again, but in 1669 a third version was authorized and became an immediate and immense success. It was at the age of fifty and the height of his career that he died, a victim of the consumption from which he had suffered for several years.
In the view of Anatole Loquin, this death was a pretence and Molière lived on for another thirty years, a secret prisoner, masked to hide his identity. For all of ten years, and particularly for the last three years before his supposed death, powerful enemies had conspired to destroy him. A smear campaign had been mounted to convince the King that he was a criminal degenerate who if brought to trial for the monstrous crime he had committed would certainly be sent to the stake. Eventually in 1672 the King had come to realize that whether Molière was guilty or not, the case against him was too strong to be ignored. The pretended death was therefore arranged at the King’s command, with or without Molière’s collusion, or the connivance of his wife, or the realization of his enemies, and the horror of public trial and execution was thus avoided.
Hostility to Molière first manifested itself at the beginning of 1663 in the controversy over his comedy School for Wives. Rival playwrights and acting troupes objected to it on artistic grounds, but an important section of the public was scandalized by what was seen to be a lack of proper reverence and respect for things holy and established. Among these critics were members of a secret organization called the Company of the Holy Sacrament, the avowed aim of which, since its foundation more than thirty years before, was to guard the religious orthodoxy and moral probity of French society. Made up, as it was, of leading figures from the Church, the nobility and the magistrature, with cells in all the provincial capitals of France, it had enormous influence. Louis XIII had granted the organization legal status, and Anne of Austria gave continual support until her death in 1666. Vincent de Paul had been closely associated with its members in his work for orphans and the sick, galley-slaves and the victims of war, but more typical of the Company as a whole was its crusade ‘to stop all scandals and profanities’, by which was understood the theatre in general and artists like Molière in particular, along with a whole range of activities and attitudes thought depraved, from immodesty in dress to Protestantism.
To what extent Molière knew of the Company’s existence, the identity of its members and their animosity towards him, one cannot say. In 1663 he might not have known that the parish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who had made life difficult for him and his newly-formed troupe in 1643, was a member of the Company of the Holy Sacrament or that the reason his patron in the Languedoc, the Prince de Conti, withdrew his protection in 1655 was because he had been persuaded to join the same organization. No doubt he had heard that in Normandy and Bordeaux in 1658 and in Paris in 1660 a number of cases had come to light of apparently devout and saintly men making themselves rich by the appropriation and sequestration of other people’s property, but he might not have known that these were also members of the Company. Presumably he realized that the religious bigots who disapproved so strongly of his plays disapproved also of the King’s private life; but he might not have known that Mazarin and, after him, Colbert, alarmed by the political ambitions of these people, had tried to suppress the secret organization to which they belonged, and for all their ministerial powers had failed.
Though it is impossible to say whether Molière deliberately wrote his Tartuffe as an attack upon the Company, his subject was without question drawn from those scandals involving the Company men which first entered the news in 1658, and that being so, the Company certainly saw it as an attack. In April 1664, when word got out concerning the kind of play he was preparing, the Company called a secret meeting to discuss a means of having it banned. The play was performed in spite of their opposition on 12 May, but only for the court, and though the King liked it he gave way to Company pressure and declared it unsuitable for public performance. While Molière appealed for support to friends in high places and even persuaded the papal legate to speak favourably of his play, the Company went to work on the public with a pamphlet written by the parish priest of Saint-Barthélemy. According to this, Molière was ‘a demon rigged out in flesh and the clothes of a man, the most notorious free-thinker and blasphemer who ever was,’ and his play was ‘a profane and sacriligious act’ for which he deserved ‘to be publicly executed, and given a foretaste of the fires of hell by being burned to death.’ In a petition to the King, Molière pleaded that his play had been ‘judged diabolical without even being seen’, but apart from private performances for Monsieur and the Prince de Condé, he was unable to show it again. The play was banned because his picture of false religious devotion presented too close a resemblance to the Company-man and so was falsified by the Company into an attack upon religious devotion itself. When for his next play he chose as a subject the impious reprobate Don Juan, it was only too easy for the Company to denounce that as further evidence of his irreligion and to have that banned as well.
Twice in less than a year the Company had forced Moliére from the stage, but privately the King was sympathetic and publicly he gave his support by granting Molière’s troupe his name. Encouraged by this evidence of royal approval, Molière set to work on a revised version of his Tartuffe, changing the title to Panulfe, and on 5 August 1667, while the King was absent from capital, went ahead and staged it. The first night sold out and the play seemed set for a successful run, but the next day the following notice reached Molière from the President of the Parlement: ‘I know that you are not only an excellent actor, but also a very able man who does honour to his profession and to France. Nevertheless with all the good will that I have for you, I cannot allow you to perform your comedy. In my opinion it is very fine and instructive; but it is not the job of actors to instruct men on matters of Christian morality and religion.’ Molière closed his theatre and on 8 August prepared a petition to be delivered to the King. Just three days after that, however, before the King had time to intervene, the Archbishop of Paris issued a proscription on the play, forbidding anyone in his diocese to perform, watch, print or read it in public or private ‘under pain of excommunication’. The President of the Parlement, Guillaume de Lamoignon, and the Archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Péréfixe, were both members of the Company.
The doors of Molière’s theatre stayed closed for more than seven weeks, as though finally in the face of such powerful opposition he had been demoralized, but eighteen months later he came back with a third version of the play. This time he was armed in advance with a written authorization from the King to perform it in public. It was first shown on 5 February 1669, and was presented fifty-five times before the end of that year. In March it appeared in print and by June had reached a second edition. The Company had after all failed to silence him, and the play they had contrived to ban for almost five years proved so popular that of all his plays it was, as it still is, the most frequently performed. Neither the first nor the second version of the play survives, but so far as one can gather the differences from one version to another were minor and served only to diminish those ambiguities which had allowed the Company to get away with their original condemnation of the play. In the person of Tartuffe, religious fraud was pilloried and with him, in so far as he resembled him, the Company-man was exposed as a cheat and made to look ridiculous.
From the first scene of the play, Tartuffe is presented as a sanctimonious bigot and a self-righteous prude who with an ingratiating show of moral rectitude and spiritual devotion has wheedled his way into the confidence and home of a man called Orgon. Thereafter he is proved to be a hypocrite and a crook whose display of virtue and piety is as false as it is excessive, designed to win from Orgon the material and social advantages he pretends to reject. That Tartuffe is an imposter is evident to everyone in Orgon’s family, but their combined efforts to undeceive Orgon only push him further into Tartuffe’s control; eventually he even decides to break off his daughter’s engagement to the man she loves in order to give her in marriage to Tartuffe. Orgon’s wife speaks to Tartuffe on his own, hoping to persuade him against the plan, but he takes advantage of the occasion to try to seduce her. He yearns to possess the beauty of God, he tells her, and that divine loveliness he sees manifest in her. She need not fear for her honour, he tells her, because he is a man of discretion and will keep her favours a secret. Orgon’s son, having overheard these declarations, denounces him to his father, who refuses to believe the accusation. When his son persists in it, Orgon drives him from the house, disowned and cursed. Tartuffe, he decides, will be his sole heir and will marry his daughter that very evening. In proof of his trust he wants to go even further and make a deed of gift to Tartuffe of all his property. Tartuffe accepts but only, as he says, to ensure that Orgon’s wealth will be used for the glory of God and not given to someone who might employ it for evil purposes.
In a last desperate bid to open Orgon’s eyes, his wife has him hide under the table while she talks to Tartuffe again, deliberately leading the scoundrel on to repeat his earlier attempt at seduction. This time he makes the additional assertions that a sin kept secret is no sin at all and that Orgon is fool enough to believe anything Tartuffe wants him to believe. Orgon, at last disabused, orders Tartuffe from his house, but the deed of gift has already been made and, soon after Tartuffe’s departure, a bailiff arrives to expel the family; legally Orgon’s house and all his possessions now belong to Tartuffe. There is worse in store. Orgon had in his keeping a box of letters belonging to a friend in disgrace. Tartuffe has taken these letters to the King and, before Organ can flee, an officer arrives with a warrant for arrest. For a moment it seems that Tartuffe has perverted the judgement of the King just as he has perverted the teachings of God, but the officer’s warrant turns out to be for the arrest of Tartuffe, not Orgon. The King, who can read the hearts of men and knows the false man from the true, has not been deceived by the imposter. Tartuffe is taken off to prison. Orgon’s daughter is married to the man she loves, and everyone lives happily ever after.
For his victory over the Company of the Holy Sacrament, Moliére was to pay dearly; at least, that was the belief of Anatole Loquin. According to his theory, the success of Tartuffe only made the Company more determined to stifle Molière, and this time permanently, by destroying him in the eyes of his friends and especially in the good opinion of the King. The ground had already been prepared by scandalmongers and little was needed to set their work of character assassination in motion. The matter in question was Molière’s marriage in 1662 to Armande Béjart, the younger sister of Madeleine. There had been gossip at the time because of sympathy for Madeleine. She had shared so much of her life with Molière, had been his mistress once, his partner always, and had raised Armande as if she were her own daughter. Among Molière’s enemies the tittle-tattle had taken on an offensive tone and, in November 1663, during the slanging match which followed his play School for Wives, Racine reported to a friend that an actor from a rival company, Zacharie de Montfleury, had been using the story to make trouble for him: ‘Montfleury has made a suit against Molière and has given it to the King. He accuses him of marrying the daughter after sleeping with the mother. But Montfleury is not listened to at court’. In 1663, the King had no time for such back-biting and in 1664, when Molière’s first child was born, he was pleased to be the godfather.
In January 1670, however, just less than a year after Molière won the right to perform his Tartuffe, the gossip turned openly vicious as the result of a verse-comedy called Elomire which was published in pamphlet form. The play was obviously satirical and, since the title was an evident anagram of ‘Molière’, no one had any doubt about the author’s true meaning. Who the author was is not known, but in Loquin’s view the play was written to order for the Company. Everyone knew that Molière was old enough to be his wife’s father and that she was young enough to be the daughter of his one-time mistress; the allegation made in the play went just one step further. In Act I Scene iii, Elomire is made to declare that his wife is his own daughter. No doubt the slander was not in itself new, but until then it had never been made public. The accusation was serious. If Molière’s marriage was incestuous, the penalty demanded by law was death at the stake.
One may be sure that Molière’s friends, including the King, were eager to dismiss the charge as absurd, but presumably the facts of Armande’s birth were as uncertain then as they are today. No birth certificate exists and what documents remain are imprecise and contradictory. According to her contract of marriage she was ‘about twenty years of age’ in 1662, which would place her birth in about 1642, but according to her burial certificate she was fifty-five years old in 1700, which would fix her birth in 1645. This doubt about the year of her birth is enough to raise the possibility that she was indeed the daughter of Madeleine, and not her sister, because it is known that Joseph Béjart, the father of Madeleine, died in 1642. Nothing can be proved either way of course, but if Molière’s wife was the daughter of Madeleine and was born after 1643, when Madeleine had become Molière’s mistress, then Molière might very well have been the father of his own wife. It has been suggested that Armande’s own uncertainty about the situation, when exposed to whispered accusations of incest, was the chief reason for her infidelity to Molière and the breakdown of their marriage in 1664, but whatever her own feelings and beliefs, the allegation of incest followed her throughout her life. In 1676 she was openly traduced in a court of law as ‘the daughter of her husband, the wife of her father’ and in 1688 was slandered in the same way in a pamphlet called La Fameuse Comédienne.
As Loquin sees it, Elomire was the beginning of the end for Moliére. The seeds of doubt were sown and, with careful tending, grew to fruit. For a year or so he continued to enjoy popularity and patronage, but all the time his reputation was gradually being eroded by his inability to check the rumours about his marriage. In February 1672 Madeleine Béjart died, and it was in the course of the following months that Molière lost favour at court. Lully, the Master of the King’s Music, refused to work with him any more and so he was obliged to find someone else to write the music for his new play, The Imaginary Invalid. Lully made difficulties for him even then, demanding that the score be reworked repeatedly, and finally, when the play with its music was ready, the King did not wish to see it. According to Loquin, Lully’s hostility was not, as is often claimed, the cause of Molière’s fall from grace, but only an effect. Lully, feeling the King grow cool towards Molière, abandoned him in order to keep his own favoured position.
The King’s change of attitude towards Molière was, in Loquin’s opinion, directly related to Madeleine Béjart’s death. Since she was buried in Saint-Paul’s cemetery, it is certain that on her death-bed she renounced the acting profession and received the last sacraments because, without that, actors and actresses were denied burial in holy ground. Loquin speculates that the Company managed to convince the King that in her final confession she had acknowledged herself to be the mother, and Moliére to be the father, of the girl who had become Moliére’s wife, denouncing him as the guilty architect and the girl as the blameless victim of that heinous relationship. The King then determined to separate the incestuous couple and punish Molière but, to avoid any possible slur upon himself, he chose to do so without public scandal. The day chosen for Molière’s pretended death was one year to the day that Madeleine Béjart had died, a coincidence too striking in Loquin’s view to be the work of chance, though why the King should have wished that anniversary to be observed, he does not say.
The only contemporary description of the circumstances of Molière’s death was made by a fellow-actor and member of the troupe called Charles Varlet de La Grange. He kept a diary of the troupe’s activities, and for Friday 17 February 1673 he made the following entry: ‘This same day after the comedy, at ten o’clock at night, M. de Molière died in his house in the rue de Richelieu, having played the rôle of the Imaginary Invalid, greatly discomforted by a cold and inflammation of the chest which caused him to cough, and that so badly that in the strenuous efforts he made to clear his lungs he ruptured a vein.’ His death though sudden should not have been a surprise if it is true that he had been suffering from consumption for seven or eight years; but, in the preface to the collected works of Molière published nine years after his death, La Grange maintained that though for some years Molière had some chronic lung problem which caused him to cough, ‘his constitution was otherwise excellent and had it not been for the unhappy chance that his sickness was not treated, he would have had the strength to overcome it.’ La Grange considered that the ruptured vein was an accident, due to the violence of the coughing fit, and claimed that it ‘shortened his life by more than twenty years’. This point of view is of central importance to Loquin’s theory, for he would have us recognize that La Grange had seen and worked with Molière almost every day for ten years, had been with him at the theatre just a few hours before his death and yet, though fully aware of how ill he had been that day, was surprised to learn of his death. La Grange was not a doctor, it is true, but he was not a fool either. The seriousness of Molière’s illness, Loquin concludes, was an invention put about later to make his sudden death seem plausible.
It was not until 1704 that a biography of Molière appeared. Thirty-one years had elapsed since his supposed death and by that time most of the people who had known him intimately, including his wife and La Grange, were dead. Loquin finds some dark significance in this, as he does in the fact that only one year had elapsed since the death of the Iron Mask. The biography was written by Jean Léonor de Grimarest who had not known Molière but had got most of his information, including the circumstances of his death, from someone who had: the actor Michel Baron. Molière had adopted Baron at the age of twelve, taking him into his troupe and making him one of his own family. At the time of Molière’s death Baron was twenty and their relationship was closer than it had ever been. According to Baron, on the morning of that fateful day Molière confided to him that he knew he was going to die and, after the evening performance, sought him out in his dressing-room. Baron, realizing how ill he was, called a sedan-chair and had him carried home. There he got him into bed and stayed with him until he saw that he had begun to spit blood. At that he went to Molière’s wife, but by the time he returned with her to the bedroom Molière was dead. Later that same night he personally went to the palace to inform the King.
Baron’s account of Molière’s death, as recorded by Grimarest, is today the generally accepted version. It includes the kind of inconsequential detail that makes for credibility: Molière in bed not wanting to eat a bowl of his wife’s broth and asking for a piece of parmesan cheese instead. ‘I thought I should go into detail about Molière’s death,’ Grimarest declared, ‘in order to disabuse the public on the various stories that have been invented about it.’ What these stories were, he did not say, but one such story current at the time was that Molière had died on the stage, his real sickness not realized because he was acting the part of a man who imagined himself to be sick. That story, providing as it did a theatre full of imaginary witnesses, was in Loquin’s opinion deliberately concocted as part of the official cover-up for the imaginary corpse, though as Loquin saw it, Grimarest’s own account of Molière’s death was just as much a fabrication: Baron, fully aware that he was the sole survivor of Molière’s troupe and so could not be contradicted, took advantage of the situation to embroider the original story and give himself a star rôle in history. Loquin argues that for thirty-one years, until Grimarest gave Baron’s version of what happened, there was uncertainty about the circumstances of Molière’s death and the only good reason for this was that there were in fact no witnesses at all.
When it came to the circumstances of Molière’s burial, Grimarest did such a sketchy job that his book was sharply criticized by the writer of an anonymous letter published in 1706. If he had given all the information he should and could have given, his critic said, ‘he would have had enough material to fill a volume as big again as the book he wrote and it would have been packed with the very strangest things.’ Grimarest wrote a letter of his own in reply, acknowledging the truth of this assertion, and in the next printing of his book included both letters as an annex. ‘I found the material of that subject so delicate and difficult to deal with,’ he explained in his letter, ‘that I frankly admit I did not dare to undertake it.’ Fear of the authorities had stopped him publishing the full story of Molière’s burial, but as a responsible writer he considered the omission too important to pass over it in silence. If the claim is true, and it is a claim which his own son is supposed to have made, that he himself was the writer of the anonymous letter criticizing the book, then that importance was considerable in his eyes. What little he does say about the burial is peculiar enough. That day ‘an incredible mass of people’ gathered in the street outside Molière’s house. What kind of people they were and why they were there is not clear, but Molière’s wife was terrified by them, and they only dispersed after she had thrown them money. The burial itself took place at night by the light of ‘nearly a hundred torches’.
Some details are known of those ‘delicate and difficult’ matters which Grimarest was afraid to mention and Loquin produces them as further support for his theory. Molière’s body was refused burial in holy ground because, it was said, he had died without renouncing his profession of actor. When his widow appealed to the King, the burial was allowed, but only at night and without requiem mass. The body was taken directly from the house to the cemetery of Saint-Joseph and, since it was normal procedure for witnesses to sign the burial certificate in the church register while they were at the church, the entry certifying Molière’s burial remained unsigned. The widow had a monument erected on the grave, but a story circulated that the grave was empty. Soon after the burial, it was said, the body had been secretly moved to a common grave in unconsecrated ground ‘close to the chaplain’s house’. Such irregularities and uncertainties, Loquin argues, are perfectly consistent with the ‘delicate and difficult’ business of burying an empty coffin. Today Molière’s supposed remains are honoured in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise where they were placed in 1817. They were removed from Saint-Joseph in 1792 during the Revolution, not from Molière’s grave but from the common grave ‘close to the chaplain’s house’. Since under such circumstances no proper identification would have been possible, there is no good reason to believe that they are in fact the remains of Molière. That aside, however, the point for consideration is that presumably the remains were first looked for and not found under the tombstone erected by Molière’s widow.
Loquin’s investigation of the suspicious circumstances surrounding Molière’s death and burial does not end there. It was not just the body which disappeared. Apparently all Molière’s original manuscripts, his rough drafts, notes and fragments, his personal memos and private letters, vanished too. How is it possible, Loquin asks, that a writer, who wrote so much, left nothing in his own handwriting except ‘a couple of receipts and a few signatures?’ For Loquin there is only one possible explanation: his collected papers were deliberately destroyed by the organization which had destroyed him, the Company of the Holy Sacrament. To eliminate Molière and to restrict to Tartuffe the damage he had done was after all a minor achievement when compared to the full-scale anti-Protestant campaign undertaken by the Company which led eventually to the suppression of Jansenism7 and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.8
However preposterous Loquin’s theory may seem, the most commonly voiced arguments against it are invalid. If Molière was the Iron Mask, it is said, then he lived for thirty years in prison from the age of fifty to the age of eighty, and that would have been impossible for a man suffering from consumption. According to Loquin, however, the seriousness of Molière’s illness was invented as part of the cover-up: he was not consumptive at all. Molière’s wife remarried in 1677 and if Molière had still been alive, it is said, then the authorities would not have allowed her to do so. According to Loquin, however, Molière was believed to be the father of his wife and so their marriage was null and void.
Perhaps the most delightful feature of Loquin’s theory is the fact that the descriptions of the Iron Mask given by Voltaire and Palteau add up to what might very well be a portrait of Molière as an old man: white-haired, tall and well-built with a dark complexion and the voice of an actor which ‘held one’s attention by the mere sound’. But the most interesting feature is the fact that it answers a central question which most other theories evade or ignore: the reason for the mask. Molière’s face was not only known to the general public but familiar to them; and he would have been recognized in the South of France, where he had led his troupe for thirteen years, as well as in Paris.
Molière was not the only Iron Mask to be incarcerated by religious bigots. Another theory professed the masked prisoner to be Archbishop Avedik of the Armenian Orthodox Church, Patriarch of Constantinople and Jerusalem, a man of simple birth and honest faith, loved by his spiritual flock and respected by his temporal masters, who was hounded into exile from Turkey and smuggled into prison in France by Jesuit missionaries and the agents of Louis XIV. It has been asserted that Avedik’s first name was Michael, that the Armenian community actually called him saint during his lifetime and that the name ‘Marchioly’ in the Armenian language means ‘Saint Michael’: ‘Mar’ being the word for saint and ‘Kioly’ the diminutive for ‘Michael’. That much of the story is invention – ‘Mar Kioly’ has no meaning in the Armenian language and the first name of the patriarch was quite simply and precisely Avedik – but the truth of Avedik’s secret abduction and imprisonment in the Bastille is incontrovertible.
Avedik Yevtokiatsi was born at Tokat in Armenia in 1657, the son of a weaver who was himself the son of an Orthodox priest. Though prepared from childhood for the weaver’s trade, the influence of his grandfather, who taught him to read and write, led him into the priesthood. At the age of eighteen he became a deacon and, though he did not become a priest until the age of thirty-two, he so distinguished himself in defence of the Armenian community during an outbreak of brutal and bloody persecution by the Turkish population that just three years after his ordination he was nominated Bishop of Erzinkan and Erzurum. His reputation as a man of energy and discretion in his dealings not only with the Turkish and Moslem authorities but also with the Dominican and Jesuit missionaries in Armenia reached beyond his diocese and eventually prompted the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople to turn to him for help.
In the time of Louis XIV, as today, the Christians of Constantinople were members of the Greek or Armenian Churches, their faith being as much an expression of national origin and cultural identity as of religious belief. Missionaries from western Europe were received by them with cordiality and allowed to preach in their churches, but in their zeal to make converts to Catholicism the Jesuits went beyond the limits of good faith and plain sense, openly attacking Orthodox doctrine and secretly fomenting pastoral discord. By 1699 the situation was out of hand. The leaders of the Greek and Armenian communities appealed to the Sultan for protection and the Jesuit missionaries appealed to their embassies for support.
The French ambassador, though a priest himself, was not prepared to condone the excesses of the Jesuit campaign and so found himself accused in Versailles of sympathy to Islam. He was recalled and replaced by a man of more forceful temper, the Comte de Fériol. The new ambassador had distinguished himself in nothing except brawling over women and cards, and came to the post with nothing to recommend him except a sister-in-law who was the mistress of a government minister in Paris and a spell of service as a mercenary in the pay of the Turks in Hungary. Soon after his arrival in Constantinople he demonstrated his mastery of the situation by securing the exile of Avedik, the staunchest defender of the Armenian Church, on the charge that he had been heard to make some disrespectful remarks about Louis XIV. The Jesuit missionaries were delighted to have such a champion in their midst and direct contact between Fériol and Rome was quickly established.
Avedik, however, was not himself without influence. The Great Mufti, head of the Moslem religion in Turkey, was a personal friend of his and in February 1702 not only managed to have him released from exile but also to have him nominated Archbishop of Constantinople. Some retaliation against Fériol might have been expected, but Avedik showed no resentment. He insisted that the Jesuits should refrain from attacking Orthodox doctrine when preaching inside Orthodox churches but was otherwise conciliatory and exhorted the Armenians to tolerance and peace. Fériol, belligerent but powerless, bided his time and, when in July 1703 the Great Mufti was assassinated and the Sultan overthrown, rushed to persuade the new regime that Avedik should be deposed and imprisoned. The fortress of the Seven Towers in Constantinople, grim as it was, seemed to Fériol too pleasant a place for someone like Avedik. At his insistence the patriarch was moved to the island-prison of Ruad off the coast of Syria and kept, as Fériol himself reported with no small delight, ‘in a cell full of water from which he could see no daylight.’
The Armenian community, loyal and resolute, refused to recognize any patriarch but Avedik and in December 1704, having put together a large sum of money, bribed the Grand Vizier to release and restore him. Again Fériol and the Jesuits feared retaliation, but again Avedik was conciliatory. There seemed every reason for him to be as rabidly anti-French and anti-Catholic as Fériol claimed he was, but in fact he gave no sign of being so. His attitude from the outset and throughout was never other than defensive: unyielding but forbearing. In December 1705, a deputation from three hundred well-to-do Armenians, led by Avedik, appealed to Fériol in person for his support towards a peaceful settlement with the Jesuits, but in February 1706 Fériol went to the Grand Vizier with a bribe of his own to have Avedik sent back to Syria. This time the French Government was prepared to ensure that he would not return.
The boat carrying Avedik stopped on its way at the island of Chios and it was there that he was abducted. His guard, bribed before setting out, handed him over to the French vice-consul who put him aboard a French merchant ship bound for Marseilles. The story told by the guards afterwards was that Avedik had been carried off by pirates. As it was, bad weather forced the French ship to put in at Genoa and there Avedik managed to smuggle two letters into the hands of a Greek who was on his way to Constantinople. One was addressed to the chief interpreter of the Turkish government, the other to a leading figure in the Armenian community. The letters reached Constantinople within a matter of days, but it was Fériol who received them. The Greek had broken his journey at Smyrna and there had confided in friends who had persuaded him to sell the letters to the French consul. Avedik meanwhile had been brought to Marseilles and locked up in the prison of the Arsenal.
Whatever it was the French government and the Jesuit Society had hoped to achieve by their abduction of Avedik, it was certainly not what happened, although what did happen was perhaps only to be expected. The cover-up story of a pirate attack was not believed and eventually under torture the guard confessed the truth. The French Embassy was notified that, if Avedik was not returned, the Catholic community would be held responsible. Fériol replied that he knew nothing at all about the matter, but if Avedik had left Turkey he had no doubt done so by his own design to escape going back to prison. The Turkish authorities were not deceived and the threat of reprisals was carried out. The Jesuits were banned and their printing-press destroyed. All Turks who professed the Catholic faith were rounded up, and those who did not apostasise were executed.
About Avedik’s fate, however, nothing could be established. There were rumours that he had been seen in Malta and Messina, but people who went to hunt for him there could find no trace. The Vatican was greatly concerned that the truth should not get out, and warned Versailles repeatedly of the need to take every precaution. In February 1707, Louis XIV informed the Sultan that the French for their part had done their utmost to find the missing patriarch and after extensive investigations made in Italy and Spain had reason to believe that the poor man was dead. The Armenians knew the French were lying, and in 1708 a group of them even carried the search to Marseilles, but left without learning anything.
In the opinion of Pierre de Taulès, whose book L’Homme au Masque de fer was published in 1825, the story of Avedik, after his arrival in France, is the story of the Iron Mask. He was moved from Marseilles to the island of Sainte-Marguerite and from there some time later to the Bastille where, masked and anonymous, he died. Taulès was well aware that according to the journal of Du Junca the Iron Mask was brought to the Bastille on 19 September 1698 and died on 18 November 1703, the latter date being all of three years before Avedik’s abduction, but as Taulès pointed out, the man responsible for finding and publishing that journal was Henri Griffet and he was a Jesuit. Du Junca’s journal was a forgery, Taulès declared, invented by Griffet to cover up the fact that the Iron Mask had been a victim of the Jesuits, abuducted and imprisoned at their instigation, against all code and conscience, all law and sense.
In fact, what happened to Avedik after his arrival in France is not now a secret and , though certainly an indictment of Jesuits and the Catholic Church, of Louis XIV and his government, bears little resemblance to anything ever said about the Iron Mask. In November 1706, he was moved from Marseilles and the Mediterranean Sea across France to the Atlantic coast and a monk’s cell in the Benedictine abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. The orders given to the abbot were that he was to be kept in secret and allowed contact with no one. As it was, he could not speak French and so was unable to communicate at all. Only in July 1707 did the authorities decide that a monk who had some knowledge of the Armenian language could be sent from Rome to act as interpreter. The first communication made by Avedik through this interpreter was an appeal for justice: ‘Judge me’, he is reported to have said, ‘and condemn me to the punishment I deserve. Or else, if I am innocent, say so and set me free.’ He would only go free, he was told, when he confessed his crimes against God and the true Church, abjured the Orthodox faith and became a Catholic. In December 1709 he was transferred to the Bastille, and in September 1710 he made his abjuration. Some days later he was ordained a Catholic priest and went to live with his interpreter in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, where unknown and unnoticed he said mass everyday until his death in July 1711.
This is not the only theory in which Jesuit machinations were held responsible for the Iron Mask’s fate. The first version ever published of the mysterious prisoner’s identity made him out to be a victim of the Jesuits. It was reported by someone who had been a prisoner in the Bastille during the nine months Avedik was there, as well as being there earlier during the last year and a half of the Iron Mask’s life. On 16 May 1702, when according to Du Junca the masked prisoner had been in the Bastille for more than three and a half years, a certain René-Augustin Constantin de Renneville was arrested and imprisoned there. He had been working for the French secret service in Holland, but was a Protestant and suspected of being a double agent. No charge was ever made against him, but he was kept in the Bastille for eleven years and then exiled. From 1715 to 1719 he published his prison memoirs in four volumes under the title L’Inquisition Fran aise ou l’Histoire de la Bastille and in the preface to the first volume he spoke about the prisoner who had come to the Bastille with Saint-Mars. It was a story he had got from two members of the prison staff, a turnkey called Antoine Ru, who had accompanied the prisoner from Sainte-Marguerite, and the prison surgeon, Abraham Reilhe, whose signature appears on the prisoner’s burial certificate.
One day, when for some reason Renneville was taken out of his cell to some other part of the prison, he was led into a room where another prisoner happened to be and was quickly bundled out again. On the way back to his cell, he asked his guards who this prisoner was, and Ru replied ‘that he had been a prisoner for thirty-one years and that M. de Saint Mars had brought him with him from the island of Sainte-Marguerite.’ Renneville’s curiosity was aroused and, when he persisted with his questions, Ru at length explained that the prisoner ‘had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment for having written two lines of verse against the Jesuits when he was a schoolboy of twelve or thirteen.’ Ru was unable or unwilling to say more, but Renneville remembered that a great uproar had been caused about thirty years before by someone writing a couplet against the Jesuits and posting it on the gate of their college in Paris. The name of that college had been Clermont College of the Society of Jesus and those words had been emblazoned in large golden letters above the gate. The couplet made its appearance when that name was taken down and replaced by another. The story, as told by Renneville, is this:
The Jesuits invited the King and his court to honour with their presence a tragedy which they had staged to the glory of His Majesty and they had it performed by their very best students … The King was very pleased with it and as the rector of the college was escorting His Majesty away, one of the King’s favourites praised the Reverend Fathers of the Society on the great success of the play, at which the King exclaimed. ‘Is it so surprising? It’s my own college!’ The rector was too clever a courtier not to profit from this favourable remark. That very instant he sent for workers and ordered them to engrave ‘College of Louis the Great’ in large golden letters on black marble, insisting that it should be ready by the following morning … A schoolboy who witnessed the zeal of those Reverend Fathers wrote the following two lines of verse which he posted that night on the gate of the college and in various other places in Paris:-
They have erased JESUS from here and put up the name of the King.
Impious people! No other God do they worship.
The Society did not fail to clamour sacrilege and apparently the author was discovered. Though one of their youngest students, he was, if it was him whom I saw, condemned to perpetual imprisonment at the request of the Reverend Fathers and transferred to the Islands of Sainte Marguerite in Provence for that effect.
That however was not the end of Renneville’s story. Some time later he was told by Reilhe that the prisoner had been freed two or three months after he had seen him. His liberation, moreover, had been secured by the Jesuits themselves through the intervention of a certain Abbé Riquelet, who was attached to the Bastille as a confessor and was himself a Jesuit. ‘During the time of his imprisonment, he had become the sole heir of his family, which possessed great wealth. He was notified of this by the charitable Riquelet, his confessor. The shower of gold which opened the Tower of Danaë had the same effect upon that of the Bastille. The zeal of the Abbé Riquelet made apparent to the Fathers of the Society, very disinterested people as everyone knows, the useful necessity of liberating his penitent, and the Society begged the King to pardon a lord whose family without him would have been extinguished. The King, who had only consented to the imprisonment of this child out of consideration for the Reverend Fathers, willingly signed his liberation at their request.’
Since Saint-Mars brought only one prisoner with him from Sainte-Marguerite and since Ru had accompanied him and was therefore well aware which prisoner that was, it seems safe to assume that when Ru told his story to Renneville he believed that he was giving genuine information about the masked prisoner. But since the Iron Mask died in the Bastille and Reilhe signed his burial certificate, it seems equally safe to assume that when Reilhe told his story to Renneville he knew that he was giving false information about the masked prisoner. Renneville in any case was more interested in seeing the Jesuits unmasked than in lifting the mask from a prisoner. His accidental meeting with the prisoner had been so brief that he had not even noticed a mask. Where Ru got his information and why Reilhe gave his, are for us dimensions to a mystery of which Renneville was not even aware.
NOTES
1. These ‘assassinations’ are usually regarded as natural deaths, though there was talk of assassination at the time.
2. It was a Dominican monk, as will emerge later.
3. Philippe IV: King of France, b. 1268, reigned 1285–1314.
4. Hugues Capet: King of France, b. 939, reigned 987–996.
5. Charles, Duc de Lorraine: d. 995?, was the son of Louis IV, King of France, who died in 954; the brother of Lothaire, King of France, who reigned 954–986; and the uncle of Louis V, King of France, who reigned 986–987.
6. Godefroi de Bouillon: 1061–1100, became Duc de Lorraine in 1089 and King of Jerusalem in 1099.
7. Jansenism: a Roman Catholic religious movement of unorthodox tendencies condemned by the Pope and suppressed by Louis XIV.
8. Edict of Nantes: promulgated in 1598 by Henri IV, granting religious freedom to Protestants; revoked by Louis XIV in 1685.