6
‘Mde Saint-Mars has taken up the post of governor of the Bastille, bringing with him a prisoner and leaving another at Pierre-Encise on his way through Lyon’: thus reported La Gazette d’Amsterdam on 3 October 1698. In the Bastille itself, Etienne Du Junca, the King’s Lieutenant, recorded in his prison journal that the new governor arrived on 18 September direct from Sainte-Marguerite and that the prisoner who accompanied him was ‘a longtime prisoner of his he had with him in Pignerol, whom he always keeps masked and whose name is never spoken.’ According to Du Junca, it was three o’clock in the afternoon when the governor’s party arrived and the prisoner was put into the First Chamber of the Basinière Tower. Rosarges, who was one of the men Saint-Mars had brought with him from Sainte-Marguerite, was given charge of the mysterious prisoner, and Du Junca had nothing more to say about him, and possibly nothing more to do with him, until he recorded his death five years later. He referred to him then as ‘the unknown prisoner in the mask of black velvet’ and noted that his burial certificate had been signed by Rosarges, promoted in the meantime to major, and by a surgeon called Reilhe, who also held the rank of major. The actual burial certificate, destroyed in a fire in 1871 but preserved in a facsimile copy published the year before, verifies the information given by Du Junca, albeit with orthographical differences. No other official record referring to the prisoner while he was in the Bastille is known to exist, except a short despatch from the Comte de Pontchartrain,1 Controller of Finance, to Saint-Mars on 3 November 1698, just six and a half weeks after the prisoner’s arrival, which says: ‘The King vouchsafes that your prisoner from Provence makes his confession and takes communion whenever you judge proper.’
According to later information, based it was claimed on the evidence of eye-witnesses, the masked prisoner used to go back and forth through the courtyard on his way to and from mass, but other than that nothing is known about his life in the Bastille. By all accounts, the Third Chamber of the Bertaudière Tower was large and well-lit, one of the best rooms in the prison, but the prisoner did not stay there until his death. One year after his arrival, it was given to a man called Falaiseau; a year and a half after that it was occupied by a woman called Anne Randon; and a year and a half after that, it was shared by three prisoners: a French count, an English banker and an Italian priest. All that can be said for certain is that, since the masked prisoner had to pass through the courtyard to go to mass, he was not kept in the Liberty Tower where the chapel was at that time, but in one of the seven other towers of the prison. So far as one can make out, all these towers were constructed in more or less the same way, with prison rooms one on top of the other: one or two basement dungeons, three or four large chambers numbered upwards, the upper ones being the best, and a small vaulted room at the top. The towers were round and the rooms octagonal, varying in size according to the thickness of the wall, but up to seven yards across in the largest chambers. The lowest dungeons were cold, wet and black, with air-vents but no windows, and always liable to flooding from the moat. The upper chambers in contrast had large fireplaces and windows six feet high giving panoramic views across the rooftops of Paris.
All eight towers were a hundred feet high, linked by curtain-walls of the same height, and they were disposed in a simple rectangular form, except for the two central towers of the eastern side which were slightly advanced to form a bay. Originally the castle had served as a city gate and the archway of this, still crowned with statues on the outer face, could be seen in outline in the structure of the wall between the two projecting towers. The castle was surrounded by a moat, forty yards across, and beyond that by an outer wall, sixty feet high. One entered from the rue Saint-Antoine through a gate with a guardhouse; thence by a drawbridge and another gate to the governor’s residence; thence by another drawbridge, gate and guardhouse to a barrier in the entrance of the castle proper; and thence into the main courtyard which was about forty yards long by twenty-five wide, shut in by six of the towers: the County Tower, Treasure Tower and Chapel Tower in line on the right; the Basinière Tower, Bertaudière Tower and Liberty Tower on the left. Warrens of lean-to shacks stretched along the foot of the walls between the towers, those on the right serving as barrack-rooms for the soldiers and those on the left as dormitories for the prison staff. A row of buildings filled the open space between Chapel Tower and Liberty Tower, closing off the yard from the remaining two towers. In these buildings were the kitchens, storerooms, and offices, the living-quarters of the King’s Lieutenant and the interrogation room. Steps and an alley-way led through them to a small courtyard full of chickens and garbage with the Corner Tower on the right, the Well Tower on the left and a line of hovels, where the servants lived, along the wall between them.
Knowledge of the particular people who were employed as prison staff at any given time is fragmentary at best, but for the men who guarded the Iron Mask when he was there, including those who came with him from Sainte-Marguerite, a fund of information is provided by Renneville’s account of his own imprisonment. Most of his portraits are grotesque and derisive, filled with hatred and condemnation, but there are enough precisions in his accounts, enough exceptions and qualifications in his judgements, to argue that the pictures though harsh are not altogether unfair, as is demonstrated by the description he gives of his arrival at the Bastille:
At last we reached the dreadful place and, as we entered, the sentinels put their hats in front of their faces the moment they saw us. I learned afterwards that they practice this strange custom because they are forbidden to look any prisoner in the face. When we arrived at the courtyard of the governor’s quarters and got down, we were met at the foot of the steps by an agreeable-looking man, who I learned later was the King’s Lieutenant, M. Du Junca, and another little figure of a man, very unpleasant-looking and very shabbily dressed, who was the nephew of the governor and called Corbé. They conducted us, the officer and myself, into the apartment of M. de Saint-Mars. The two guards had begun to climb the steps to follow us in, but M. Du Junca turned and made them go back, saying haughtily: ‘You have surrendered this gentleman to us and we are quite equal to the responsibility. Wait at the bottom of the steps’. We entered a chamber draped in yellow damask fringed with silver which seemed to me appropriate enough, as did the governor who was in front of a big fire. He was a little old man of very meagre appearance, whose head and hands and whole body kept shaking all the time. He received us very politely, reached out his trembling hand and put it into mine. It was as cold as a lump of ice and I said to myself: ‘There’s a bad sign. Death or his deputy is making a bond with me.’
The officer gave him the King’s letter or the letter of arrest and took him into a corner of the room so that he could whisper something in his ear, but since the governor was too deaf to hear he had to repeat what he said in a louder voice and I heard these words distinctly: ‘M. Chamillart ordered me to recommend this gentleman to you and to bid you treat him more favourably than the other prisoners …’ The governor offered everyone breakfast, but the officer thanked him saying that I had already taken care of that and had given them an excellent burgundy to drink. He then took leave of the governor and his companions and left me with them. The governor ordered his nephew to go and prepare the Second Chamber of the Chapel Tower for me, at which that little man replied with astonishment ‘The Second Chapel?’ ‘Yes,’ replied his uncle, swearing by the holy name of God and shooting terrible glances through him for all that his eyes were cloudy and dull. ‘Do what I say and don’t answer back.’ His nephew went off at the double, and when I was alone with him and M. Du Junca, the governor asked me if I had been long at court. I told him that I had arrived there from Holland just four months before, and he began then to puff himself up and boast of his exploits, which under the circumstances was not in the least appropriate.
He told me that he had left Holland the day after the birth of King William, formerly the Prince of Orange, because the day before, when everyone was celebrating, he had picked a quarrel with seven Dutchmen, had killed four and disarmed the other three. I looked at this paladin who made himself out to be Hercules and he seemed to me little better than excrement. From there he had embarked for Lisbon where he had carried off the prize in a famous tourney. After that he had moved to the court of Madrid where he had won acclaim in a bullfight, carrying off the prize for that too and the admiration of all the ladies, who had well-nigh drowned him in a deluge of perfume-eggs filled with scented water. Every fourth word he uttered was an oath to assert this big talk which was so at odds with his puny size. Apparently he was going to take me to India to carry off some princess there when his nephew came to say that I could leave because everything was ready. My new host protested at great length that he would have every possible consideration for me, that I would be well treated and that he would visit me often.
Eight days later, Renneville was taken to see Saint-Mars for a routine interrogation and that was the only other time that he ever saw him.
Apart from Saint-Mars, Du Junca was the only prison officer commissioned and nominated by the King and he had already been adjutant at the Bastille for eight years when Saint-Mars arrived. ‘It is true’, Renneville says, ‘that it was M. Du Junca who was the first to put double doors on the rooms and also extra grilles on many windows to deprive prisoners of the view over the streets of Paris. Moreover, in almost all the rooms, he blocked up all but one of the windows, something which was extremely detrimental to the health of the occupants. Furthermore, he would not permit any communication at all between the prisoners. In his eyes, a hole made in a fireplace or a floor to effect contact between neighbours was a serious offence and he punished it severely.’ Nevertheless, Renneville says he was ‘obliging, affable, mild, honest,’ and declares: ‘So far as I am concerned, he never did anything but good to me personally, and I must report my feelings sincerely: the good qualities he had far outweighed the bad.’
The prison physician, whose name was Fresquier, and the Abbé Riquelet, the Jesuit priest who was attached to the prison as confessor, were nominated respectively by the King’s own physician and the King’s own confessor, but for all the rest of the prison staff, the hiring and firing was done by the governor. Saint-Mars brought five members of his previous team with him when he moved to the Bastille, and of these Jacques Rosarges was the one chosen to take special charge of the masked prisoner. Renneville calls Rosarges ‘the monster’ and describes him as a short-built, slack-limbed, gargoyle-headed figure in a coarse cloth coat of rags and patches, ignorant, stupid, brutal and drunk. His face was bloated and discoloured with drink, his eyes were bleary red, his lips, which were thick, were blue and covered in pustules, while his nose was like a squashed fruit ‘charged with twenty or thirty other little noses of different colours’. Whenever he made an appearance he was reeling drunk, bowing low and flourishing his hat in a ludicrous imitation of what he thought to be good manners. From what he told Renneville, he had been in service with Saint-Mars ever since Pignerol and had risen through the ranks, starting out as a simple soldier with a musket. For a bribe he would promise anything and, to keep himself in brandy, he was ready to plunder anything of value the prisoners might have, including even the clothes on their backs.
The prison chaplain, the Abbé Giraut, had also been brought by Saint-Mars from Sainte-Marguerite. There, presumably, he had been the sole spiritual guide and confessor of the masked prisoner and certainly it was he who, according to Du Junca, heard his confession the day before he died and exhorted him on his death-bed. His hold over the governor, Renneville tells us, was very strong: ‘The priest was the pet of Saint-Mars and Saint-Mars was the puppet of the priest’. It was on Giraut’s recommendation that Saint-Mars chose the extra members of staff he needed once he arrived at the Bastille. Renneville describes him as a man of average height, neat and dapper in dress, with hollow eyes, protruding mouth and a nose ‘like the beak of a parrot’. His complexion was unhealthily pale and he was coughing and spitting continuously, but his lungs, Renneville would have us believe, were less corrupt than his soul. The man was a whited sepulchre, ‘an execrable goat’ who debauched the women under his spiritual care, including even the nuns of nearby convents. Along with Corbé, he made the women prisoners, willing or not, his jades. Those who abandoned themselves to his lechery received favoured treatment, while those who resisted were punished and threatened until they surrendered, or were simply brutalized and raped.
Corbé’s full name was Guillaume de Formanoir de Corbé. As the nephew of Saint-Mars, he later inherited the Château de Palteau and it was his son, born in 1712, who supplied information on the masked prisoner in letters to Voltaire in 1763 and Fréron in 1768. Renneville says he was about fifty years old when he first saw him, and at that time he had been in the service of his uncle for about eighteen years. ‘From his appearance’, Renneville declares, ‘it never occurred to me that it was the nephew of the governor I was speaking to.’ Dressed as he was in a poor grey coat of short-napped cloth worn threadbare, a pair of shabby blue breeches frayed and patched at the knee, a rusty outmoded wig and a dilapidated hat stuck with an old black half-bare feather, he looked ‘more like a bumbailiff than an officer’. He was dirty and unshaven with a mouthful of rotten teeth and ‘at least two thirds of his face was mouth’. His forehead was narrow, his eyes small and black and his sharp-pointed nose looked ‘like a suppository’. That Renneville detested the man is obvious, but he claims that everyone detested him, his fellow gaolers as much as the prisoners. ‘He walked bent double with knock-kneed legs as contorted as those of a basset, but his spirit was even more deformed and crooked than his body’. Seconded by an illegitimate son called Jacques La France, who acted as his lackey, ‘one of the most vicious and villainous characters’ in the Bastille. Corbé altogether surpassed his worst colleagues in the maltreatment and exploitation of the prisoners, more brazen in his thievery than Rosarges, more savage in his lechery than Giraut.
The chief turnkey, a man called L’Ecuyer, had also come to the Bastille from Sainte-Marguerite. He told Renneville that he had been with Saint-Mars for thirty-two years, a year longer than Rosarges, but had been passed over for promotion because he could not read or write. He was a heavily built, hump-backed, round-shouldered man whose head appeared to grow out of the middle of his chest. Apart from a few strands of greasy hair around the ears, this misplaced head was bald and had a dark red face ‘like the mask of a devil in an opera’. Dreadful though he appeared, however, ‘he still had some kind of fear of God’, Renneville thought, and found him ‘the least vicious … and the most conscientious of the officers’.
Under L’Ecuyer there were three turnkeys, Boutonnier, Bourgouin and Ru, all of whom, Renneville says, were better than their masters. Boutonnier was a Jew from Paris and had been a button-maker before working at the Bastille. Renneville saw little of him but found him compassionate. Bourgouin was from Burgundy and had been a dragoon until Giraut, who knew his uncle, had got him the job of turnkey. He was, Renneville says, an honest man, friendly and kind: all the prisoners liked him, but he did not fit in such a place and did not keep his job for long. Antoine Ru was the least benign of the three, but, though he stole the prisoners’ food and would do little for them unless he was bribed, he laughed a great deal and was far from being a wicked man. He had been with Saint-Mars on Sainte-Marguerite and was about fifty years old when Renneville first saw him. His head and face were a mass of tangled red hair, stiff with dirt, and he went around in nothing but a dirty shirt and drawers, stinking ‘worse than the filthiest goat’.
Both Ru and L’Ecuyer must have known something about the masked prisoner but probably little more than the fact of his existence, along with some general idea of the duration of his imprisonment. Normally the prisoners’ meals were brought to the cells by the turnkeys, but from what Du Junca had to say about the masked prisoner it seems that in his case Rosarges was personally responsible. Presumably it was also Rosarges, and not Ru or L’Ecuyer, who had served at table for Saint-Mars and the masked prisoner during their stop-over at the Château de Palteau, reported by Corbé’s son in his letter to Fréron.
One more member of the prison staff remains to be mentioned, a man who was not previously with Saint-Mars on Sainte-Marguerite, but who nonetheless must have had contact of some kind with the masked prisoner for it was he, with Rosarges, who signed the burial certificate. This was Abraham Reilhe, the surgeon of the Bastille. The title ‘surgeon’ is today misleading. At that time, when the common treatment for most illnesses was to bleed the patient, the surgeon was simply the man called in to do it. Usually he was a barber by profession, though he might also administer purges on demand, pull teeth, lance boils or sear wounds, and if he had some knowledge of the butcher’s trade might very well offer to perform amputations as well. Reilhe had been a barber in an infantry company prior to his job at the Bastille and Saint-Mars had hired him on the recommendation of Giraut shortly before Renneville’s arrival. As a surgeon he was, according to Renneville, so ignorant and incompetent that he was responsible for the death of more than one prisoner. He was a little man, quick-witted and adaptable, acquisitive and ambitious, a sycophant and an opportunist. When he first came to the Bastille he had nothing to wear but an old army uniform and he was deferential to an extreme with everyone, but once he had settled in and established himself in the good opinion of his superiors, he took to wearing the governor’s cast-off clothes, his old jerkins and wigs, and treating the prisoners with insolence and contempt.
Not only did Renneville give us a full portrait gallery of the men who guarded the masked prisoner, but also what is almost certainly a brief glimpse of the prisoner himself. When he entered the room where the prisoner from Sainte-Marguerite happened to be, he was bundled straight out again so he did not have time to see much at all. He did not notice that the prisoner’s face was covered by a mask, but he did not see the prisoner’s face anyway. ‘As soon as the officers saw me coming in,’ he explains, ‘they made him turn his back towards me which stopped me seeing his face.’ The prisoner turned so quickly that he glimpsed nothing more than the back of his head. ‘He was a man of average height,’ he says, ‘but well built and his hair which he wore in a very thick pony-tail was black with not a single strand of white in it.’ Jet black hair, thick and strong, is not what one would have expected. According to Palteau, who got his information from eye-witnesses, the prisoner’s hair at this time was white. If Palteau’s information was correct, Ru’s identification was wrong; but it is unlikely that Ru could have been mistaken or deliberately untruthful about the prisoner Renneville saw, and the fact that the prisoner was made to turn around as soon as Renneville walked in does seem to bear him out.
The contradiction between Palteau and Renneville defies all resolution unless, as might easily have happened in that sudden and rapid glimpse. Renneville himself made a mistake. What he took to be a pony-tail of black hair might very well have been the knot and tail of two broad bands of black velvet which wrapped the prisoner’s head and held his mask in place. If the prisoner was really the man Ru said he was, then he was certainly wearing a mask because, according to Du Junca, the prisoner from Provence was always kept masked. Renneville, however, had no reason to suppose that he had seen the back of a mask. In all the record of his eleven years in the Bastille, he never once mentions seeing or hearing of prisoners wearing masks. Presumably therefore it did not occur to him that the prisoner he glimpsed was wearing one.
Unfortunately Renneville’s picture of the mysterious prisoner, obscure as it is amidst the vivid portraits of his gaolers, is blurred by yet another error. The date he gives for the encounter was sometime in 1705 and we know from Du Junca that the prisoner died in 1703. The mistake this time is certainly Renneville’s. If his date is correct, then his informants were wrong and that is out of the question. Although it is only unlikely that Ru would have mistaken another man for the prisoner he travelled with from Sainte-Marguerite, it is altogether impossible that Reilhe could have mistaken another inmate for the man whose burial certificate he had signed. The only possible explanation is that Renneville, writing twelve years or more after the event, made a mistake in the date, or alternatively that ‘1705’ was a printer’s error, overlooked in the reading of the proofs. The first edition of Renneville’s book has so many printer’s errors that two and a half pages of major corrections had to be included at the end. Three words were accidentally omitted from the text just six lines before the mention of 1705 and there is yet another error in the catchword at the foot of the same page. So far as one can learn from Renneville’s account, there were only two occasions between the time of his arrival in May 1702 and the death of the masked prisoner in November 1703 when he was taken from his cell to any room other than another cell. The first was 24 May 1702 when he had to be questioned by Saint-Mars, and the second was 13 May 1703 when he had to be questioned by Du Junca. It was on one or other of these two occasions that, by accident and without knowing it, he met the prisoner who was later known as the Man in the Iron Mask.
The lack of official records and communications referring to the masked prisoner in the time he was in the Bastille is no doubt due to the fact that, in matters of security, the minister responsible could deal with the governor in person without needing to put anything on paper. The Comte de Pontchartrain, who was the minister in charge, rarely visited the prison, but his deputy, M. Desgranges, did so regularly. As the father-in-law of the youngest son of Saint-Mars, he made social as well as official calls. In prisons far from Paris, however, even secret communications could only be made by correspondence, and before being at the Bastille Saint-Mars had always received directions from his superiors in writing, and had sent regular written reports to them. A great many of these dispatches have survived, especially those received by Saint-Mars, and there is a good deal of information to be had from them. By way of clarification it should be noted that the Bastille came under the control of the Ministry of Finance, but all the other state prisons in France were the concern of the Ministry of War. The last Minister of War with whom Saint-Mars had to deal was the Marquis de Barbezieux.2 On 19 July 1698 the governor received from him the following dispatch: ‘The King sees fit that you leave the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and come to the Bastille with your long-time prisoner, taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone. You can write in advance to His Majesty’s Lieutenant of the Bastille to keep a room ready to accommodate this prisoner on your arrival.’
As governor of Sainte-Marguerite, Saint-Mars had charge of a number of prisoners but only the masked prisoner, called his ‘long-time prisoner’ by the minister and Du Junca, accompanied him to the Bastille. Earlier references by Barbezieux or Saint-Mars to his ‘long-time prisoner’ clearly concern the same man and so it is the masked prisoner who is referred to in an angry letter addressed to the prison governor by the minister on 17 November 1697. ‘With your letter of the 10th, I received the copy of the letter M. de Pontchartrain wrote to you concerning the prisoners who are in the islands of Sainte-Marguerite under orders from the King, signed by him or the late M. de Seignelay.3 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.’ This letter was written less than a year before the prisoner moved to the Bastille and came under the authority of Pontchartrain’s ministry, but the post of governor of the Bastille was not vacant until the following month, when François de Besmaux, the then governor, died, and at that stage there had been no talk of moving Saint-Mars. Barbezieux resented the Controller of Finance meddling in the affairs of the Ministry of War.
Saint-Mars was governor of Sainte-Marguerite island for eleven and a half years, from April 1687 until September 1698, and the fortress he commanded, including the prisons he built, still stands. It is not an impressive building, more like a fortified village than a castle, but facing the town of Cannes on the French Riviera, its situation is spectacular. It rises from an outcrop of rock on a long low island, thick with pines and eucalyptus trees, less than half a mile from the tip of the Pointe-de-la-Croisette, with the bay of la Napoule and the distant red-rock mountains of the Esterel on one side, the bay called Golfe Juan and the far off white-ice peaks of the Alps on the other. Six rectangular windows, identical, in line and evenly spaced, mark the eastern end of the wall which faces across the sea to Cannes. These are the only windows in that wall and they are always in darkness because their orientation is due north. They are the windows of the prison cells.
The coast has been altogether transformed in the three hundred years since Saint-Mars was there. Seen from the terrace of the fortress today, the bays either side are a continuous stretch of hotels, public buildings and apartment blocks, shops, restaurants, gardens and villas, the shoreline a chain of yacht harbours, beaches, parks and promenades; in his day the land was bare and deserted. Cannes was that section of modern Cannes which is called Le Suquet, just a small fishing village built on a hill a couple of miles west of the Pointe-de-la-Croisette and surrounded by marshland. The village had no harbour and the fishing boats were beached among reeds at the foot of the hill. On the Pointe-de-la-Croisette itself, where today the Palm Beach Casino stands, there was nothing but a bastion and the hills behind were wastes of scrub and moorland. It was a lost corner of France reached only from the north by hard travelling across the harsh and desolate mountains of the Pre-Alps or by sea along the coast from Marseilles, a perilous voyage since even the coastal waters were infested with pirates from North Africa. The Esterel, which was bandit country too dangerous to cross, blocked access from the west, and the border with Savoy was less than fifteen miles along the coast to the east.
South of Sainte-Marguerite, across a narrow strait, is the smaller island of Saint-Honorat, famous for its old monastery with its fortified tower. People today who wish to visit the tower and the fortress, to picnic in the woods and swim in the protected waters between the islands, have a choice of several boat services from various points along the coast. The fortress has become a student holiday centre, combining language classes with courses in sailing and skin-diving. The original garrison area has been taken over for that, but the prison building remains unchanged.
To reach the prison cells today one must pass, as one did three hundred years ago, by way of the adjoining building where Saint-Mars and his family used to live and which serves today as a small marine museum. The museum foyer was formerly the guardroom and access to the prison building can only be made from there. Through a narrow doorway one enters a high-vaulted passageway which leads to the right, a distance of forty feet or so, dimly lit by a single oval-shaped window high up in the arch of the wall on one’s left. There are two doors of heavy wood reinforced with iron in the facing wall, and it is the nearest of these doors, so tradition has it, which gives on to the prison of the Iron Mask. In the time of Saint-Mars, the passage, which is narrow, was severely cramped by the presence of two bulky screens built in front of the doors and by a simple altar which stood in front of the end wall on one’s right. The screens were of timber braced with iron and had solid doors bolted and padlocked. Under the oval window another larger doorway gives on to a second passageway, longer and less dim, which continues the first and contains the doors of four more cells. These doors too were once enclosed by screens.
The door to the Iron Mask’s prison cell is no different from the others. It is of massive wood studded and strapped with iron and has rings for a bolt. It pulls backwards into the passageway, giving access through the thickness of the wall, a depth of three feet, to another door of the same construction which pushes forward into the cell. When this inner door is open at right angles to the jamb, it lies flat against the wall of the cell, allowing an unimpeded view from the doorway of the entire room: twenty feet to the wall facing the door, fifteen feet to the wall on the left. The walls either side curve overhead in a smooth arc like the sides of a tunnel and in the wall at the end, four feet from the ground, is a large barred window, seven feet high by four feet wide. Beyond the window, the prison wall drops sheer, flush with the cliff, to rocks and waves more than a hundred feet below. However, the window affords no view of this; the wall it pierces is six feet thick and the opening is closed by three iron grilles set one behind the other, restricting the view to a narrow section of the distant mainland. On the left of the window is a fireplace and on the right a privy. The wall is roughly plastered and the floor is paved with brick.
Some idea of the security measures which surrounded the life of the masked prisoner in this room is provided by a report addressed to Barbezieux by Saint-Mars on 6 January 1696. Here also, nearly three years before the move to the Bastille, he was referred to as the ‘longtime prisoner’:
You ask me to tell you what arrangements are made when I am absent or sick for the day to day visits and precautions regarding the prisoners who are in my charge. My two lieutenants give the meals at set times in the way they have seen me give them and as I still very often do when I am feeling well. This is how it is done. The senior lieutenant takes the keys to the prison of my long-time prisoner with whom we begin. He opens the three doors and enters the room of the prisoner who duly hands him the dishes and plates which he himself has piled together. The lieutenant has only to go out of two doors to give them to one of my sergeants who puts them on a table two steps away , where the other lieutenant inspects everything going in or out of the prison and sees that there is nothing written on the dishes. Once he has been given all that is necessary, an inspection is made inside and under the bed, from there to the bars of the window and to the privy. A complete search of the room is made and very often a body-search as well. Then when he has been asked in a civil fashion if he needs anything else the doors are closed and the same thing is repeated with the other prisoners.
Their table-linen is changed twice a week, along with their shirts and the other linen they use, it being counted and carefully inspected both when it is collected and when it is returned. One can be badly caught out in the coming and going of laundry for the prisoners of consequence, some of whom I know have attempted to bribe the washerwomen. They, however, swore to me that they were unable to do what was asked of them because I had the linen soaked as soon as it came out of the rooms and because when it was clean and half-dry the washerwomen came to my apartment to iron and fold it in the presence of one of my lieutenants, who locked up the laundry baskets in a strong-box until they were to be handed over to the prisoners’ valets. One must be on one’s guard about the candles too. I have known some which, when broken or employed, were found to have paper in them in place of the wick. I used to send for them to Turin, to shops which were not suspect. Ribbons leaving the prisoners’ cells are also dangerous, because they may write on them as they do on their linen, without one realizing it. The late M. Fouquet used to make fine paper and I would let him write on it, then I would go at night and take it from a little plcket which he had sewn into the seat of his breeches and I would send it to your late father.
At this point the report has been so badly torn that the next five lines are impossible to read, but from what few legible words remain it seems that Saint-Mars is explaining how he ensures that the prisoners are unable to speak or shout to anyone. He then concludes:
As a final precaution, the prisoners are given surprise visits from time to time at irregular hours of the day and night and it is frequently discovered then that they have been writing messages on their dirty laundry. No one else could possibly read what they write, however, as you known from the pieces I have sent you.
One of the lieutenants referred to by Saint-Mars was no doubt Palteau’s father Corbé; and to bring the scene to life, one has only to remember Renneville’s description of him: crooked and unkempt, sly and malevolent. Saint-Mars had arrived on Sainte-Marguerite with two other lieutenants, Laprade and Boisjoly, but the former had been transferred in May 1692 and the latter had been retired in December 1693. Corbé replaced Boisjoly, receiving his promotion in January 1694. Among the sergeants referred to in the report, one was certainly the drunken Rosarges, brutal and slovenly with his bloated purple face, and another was possibly the huge hump-backed L’Ecuyer. One might add here that though Lamotte-Guérin succeeded Saint-Mars in the functions of governor and so became responsible for the state-prisoners on the island, he did not until that time have any duties connected with them. He came to the island in 1692 but not as a member of the prison-staff. The charge he performed, in the time the Iron Mask was there, was that of King’s Lieutenant, an administrative post in the fort.
Voltaire’s story of the silver plate found by the fisherman and Papon’s story of the shirt found by the barber come to mind when one reads that Saint-Mars was afraid his prisoners might try to get messages past the guard by writing on their plates and their linen. As it is, however, no actual report of these stories survives as proof. All that does exist is a mention, made earlier by Saint-Mars, that another prisoner, a Protestant minister named Pierre Salves, had been writing on his dishes, made of pewter not silver, and on his dirty laundry, but so far as one can make out he never threw any of these things out of the window. His intention was to communicate with the other prisoners if he could, and with the outside world, but only by means of the washerwomen. Saint-Mars had reason to be on his guard but not, so far as we know, because of anything attempted by his ‘longtime prisoner’.
In a letter to Saint-Mars on 13 August 1691, Barbezieux, who at that time had just succeeded to the Ministry of War following the death of his father, Louvois, gave instructions which clearly concern the same ‘longtime prisoner’: ‘Whenever you have something to tell me about the prisoner who has been in your charge for twenty years, I beg you to employ the same precautions that you used when you wrote to M. de Louvois.’ In 1691 Saint-Mars had been governor of Sainte-Marguerite for four years; before that he had been governor of Exiles for six years; and before that he had been at Pignerol for sixteen years. Barbezieux may have used the number twenty as a round figure to cover anything from eighteen to twenty-two years, but whatever year it was that the prisoner first came into the custody of Saint-Mars, the minister’s statement is in perfect accord with Du Junca’s note that the masked prisoner had been with Saint-Mars ever since Pignerol. Moreover, since Saint-Mars brought only one prisoner with him when he arrived from Exiles to take up his post at Sainte-Marguerite, the prisoner he brought was evidently that same ‘longtime prisoner’.
News of his appointment to Sainte-Marguerite reached Saint-Mars in the remote snow-covered mountains of Exiles in January 1687. In the six years that he had been there he had sought every possible opportunity to get away from the place, asking the minister for leave of absence to visit Turin or to take the waters at Aix-en-Savoie, and begging for a change of post. His prisoner and prison staff were to go with him to the island and all were no doubt as relieved as he was to know that it was the last winter they would have to spend in those bleak and desolate mountains. When Louvois wrote to tell Saint-Mars of his new appointment he wanted to be sure that the prisoner would be transported safely and that there would be a secure prison waiting for him on the island when he got there. He decided that before Saint-Mars moved his prisoner he should go to the island and make arrangements for his reception, but he was also concerned that proper precautions should be taken for the safeguard of the prisoner while Saint-Mars was away.
Eager to reassure the minister that he appreciated the importance of his prisoner’s security, Saint-Mars wrote back on 20 January:
The orders I will give for the surveillance of my prisoner will be strict even to the point of preventing as always any communication with my lieutenant, whom I have forbidden ever to speak to him and who obeys me to the letter, so I can answer to you, sir, for his complete surety. I think the most secure mode of transport for conducting him to the islands would be a sedan-chair covered in oil-cloth so that he will have sufficient air without anyone being able to see him or speak to him during the journey, not even the soldiers whom I will pick to be close to the sedan. It will be less troublesome than a litter which can often get broken.
Saint-Mars set off to make his tour of inspection at the end of January, and by the beginning of March had sent his report and recommendations to Louvois. There was only one prison cell in the island-fortress and for security reasons it was inadequate. A new prison had to be built and Saint-Mars proposed two separate cells sealed off from the rest of the fortress by an access through his own home. The other four cells were a later addition, commenced only after the original plan for two had been completed. On 16 March Louvois told him to go ahead: ‘Along with your letter of the 2nd of this month I received the enclosed memo and plan of what needs to be done to build the prison and lodging you require to ensure the security of your prisoner on the island of Sainte-Marguerite, amounting to 5,024 livres.4 I have instructed this to be paid to you from emergency funds so you can construct this building yourself in the way you want it done.’ The cost, which actually reached 6,926 livres before it was finished, might be thought considerable if undertaken solely for the accommodation of one prisoner and the fact that there were two cells, not one, may have led to the later assumption by Papon’s story of the woman from Mougins, that the prisoner had a servant living in the prison with him.
Saint-Mars put the builders to work and on 26 March set off back to Exiles, his only anxiety being that he would not be allowed to make the transfer to the island until the new prison building was finished. He had, however, assured the minister that he could manage to make the existing prison secure enough to accommodate the prisoner temporarily and soon after his return to Exiles he received the necessary authorisation for this. The existing prison cell was in fact occupied by a young delinquent who had tried to take money from his own father at pistol-point, but he was of no consequence to anyone except his family and Louvois said he could be moved out to make room for the prisoner from Exiles. On 18 April Saint-Mars set out for the island with his prisoner and on 3 May he wrote to Louvois to report his arrival:
I arrived here on 30th of last month having spent only twelve days on the road because my prisoner was ill, due he claimed to not having as much air as he would have wished. I can assure you, my lord, that no one in the world saw him and that the way in which I guarded and conducted him throughout the journey left everyone guessing as to who my prisoner could be … The prisoner’s bed was so old and delapidated, as was everything he had, the table-linen as much as the furniture, that it was not worth the trouble of bringing it here … and I got only thirteen écus5 for the lot … I was charged two hundred and three livres for eight porters to bring a sedan-chair from Turin and carry my prisoner here in it, the cost including the price of the chair, and I have paid.
The arrival of Saint-Mars and his mysterious prisoner caused quite a stir in the region. Rumours that a prisoner of great importance was to be brought to the island had been circulating for some time. A letter written on 3 May by a certain Abbé Mauvans to a certain M. de Seguiran in Aix-en-Provence gives some idea of the local talk. Mauvans’ letter is an account of a voyage he had made with some friends along the coast to Genoa. On 18 April, four days out from Saint Tropez, they had made a stop-over at Sainte-Marguerite:
In the afternoon the wind was not favourable and that decided us to put in at the islands which we had intended to see only on the voyage back. We made a landing on Sainte-Marguerite at five o’clock and M. de Mazauges and I climbed to the fortress to get permission to enter the Tower of Saint-Honorat. We obtained that from the first captain and then we made a tour of the island. They intend to make new fortifications there: we saw the preparations: work will begin as soon as M. de Saint-Marc (sic) arrives. He had left some time before to go and get that unknown prisoner who is being transported with such great precaution, and who has been made to understand that when he is sick of living he has only to speak out his name, because the order is to give him a pistol-ball in the head if he does that. We were told that the lodging to be built for this prisoner would be connected to the governor’s lodging, that only the governor would see him, that he would serve his meals and be almost his only gaoler and guard … I’ve just this minute learned from the military commissioner, himself newly arrived on the islands, that the state prisoner got there three days ago … Before I close my letter, I could give you particulars of the journey of this man and the guise under which he was seen in Grasse, but it is time to rejoin the company and continue our journey.
The new prison took all of eight months to complete, and stories of what had been seen and heard by visitors to the island and workers on the building site soon dispelled what reservations remained among the local peopole about the importance of the mysterious prisoner. On 8 January 1688 Saint-Mars was finally able to report to Louvois that the work was finished and the prisoner installed.
I am proud to inform you that my prisoner, who continues in his usual poor health, has been put into one of the two new prisons which you instructed me to have built. They are large, handsome and well-lit, and as for their excellence as prisons I do not think there could be any safer and sounder in Europe. This is especially so with regard to the danger of prisoners communicating orally with someone nearby or far off, and that could never be said for any of the places where I had charge of M. Fouquet after his arrest. With relatively few precautions one can even have prisoners taking walks about the island without fear that they might escape or pass messages. I take the liberty, my lord, to inform you in detail of the excellence of this place in the eventuality that you may have prisoners you wish to keep in complete security but with a reasonable degree of freedom. Throughout the province, some say that my prisoner is M. de Beaufort and others that he is the son of the late Cromwell.6 Here attached is a short note of expenses incurred on his account for last year. I do not give any details so that those who deal with it will not be able to probe into things they are not supposed to know.
The year before this, when Saint-Mars received notification of his appointment to Sainte-Marguerite, the order was that he should take more than one prisoner with him. At that time Louvois wrote:
It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the King sees fit to grant you the governorship of the islands of Sainte-Marguerite. Prepare yourself to make the transfer as soon as you are ordered to do so. It is His Majesty’s intention that as soon as you receive your warrant you make a tour of inspection of those islands to see what needs to be done for the safe and proper accommodation of the prisoners in your charge.
However this letter, dated 8 January 1687, was crossed by a letter from Saint-Mars, dated 5 January, in which he informed the minister of the death of one of his prisoners. The letter itself no longer exists, but a letter from Louvois, dated 13 January, in which he acknowledges its receipt, does. The correspondence thereafter, as we have seen, makes mention of only one prisoner.
At Exiles, therefore, Saint-Mars had two prisoners: the masked prisoner, who went on from there to Sainte-Marguerite and the Bastille, and another who died a few days before he received news of his transfer. The death of this second prisoner had been expected. On 3 November 1686, Louvois wrote to Saint-Mars: ‘It is all right to let one of your two prisoners, the one who has dropsy, make his confession, but only when you are sure that death is imminent’. That these two were the only prisoners Saint-Mars had at Exiles is apparent in the way the minister frames his instructions. It is also made evident by a letter from Saint-Mars to Louvois on 11 March 1682. ‘You advise me, my lord, how important it is that my two prisoners have contact with no one. Ever since you gave me that command, I have guarded the two prisoners in my charge as severely and strictly as formerly I guarded MM Fouquet and Lauzun.’
Exiles today is an abandoned frontier fortress, built on a spur of rock in the middle of a mountain-valley which was French when the fortress was built, but is now Italian. With a river on one side and a road on the other, it rises in ramps and ramparts through tier upon tier of salient wall and buttress, irregular in shape, but geometric in line, monolithic, bare and solid. In the time of Saint-Mars it was a very different construction: an assortment of separate buildings walled in under a crumbling old castle, not much bigger than a large house, which had been built, battered by war and rebuilt in bits and pieces through the centuries, around a single round tower thought to date from Roman times. Some years after the departure of Saint-Mars it was pulled down and replaced by the present fortress, which was the ‘latest word’ in French fortification design. The valley it commands, narrow between steep slopes of fir trees and bare stone, is the main link between Briançon and Turin. The frontier with France is only four miles away to the north, but there the mountains are impassable, with peaks more than ten thousand feet high. The road crosses the border to the south-west, sixteen miles up the valley, and not until Susa, nine miles down the valley, is it joined by a road which crosses the border from the north. There is a railway line today as well as the road, but it is buried in a tunnel along the side of the valley and, without a map, one would not know that it was there. The valley has changed little since the time Saint-Mars and his prisoner were there, except that the snowstorms, which made the winters so long and dreadful for them, have established the fame of nearby ski-stations like Sestrière and Serre Chevalier.
Plans of the vanished castle show that it was rectangular in shape with round towers at its corners, each of different height and girth. The two largest towers were at the western end with the biggest of these, the Roman Tower, overlooking the river; the other dominated the drawbridge at the entrance to the castle itself. The road from here passed through the outbuildings and led to the main gate which pierced the wall above the less precipitous northern slope overlooking the main road. The full width of the western end of the castle, including the towers, was taken up by the castellan’s quarters and separated from the rest of the building by open stepways and landings which led down to the door and the drawbridge. East of the entrance-hall along the northern wall were the kitchens, store-rooms and servants’ quarters, giving onto a long open courtyard under the southern wall. In the time of Saint-Mars, the prison guard as well as the household servants lived here and the prisoners were kept in the old Roman Tower, sealed off behind the castellan’s private quarters, which were occupied by Saint-Mars and his family.
The shape of the prison cells was semicircular, half the available area of each floor of the tower being taken up by a spiral staircase and landings. The radius of this semicircle was only about ten feet and the cramped space was further reduced by a thickening of the wall around the window embrasure which, though a good six feet square, was closed off from the room by a line of bars. The actual windows were three feet wide armed with another row of bars. In the masked prisoner’s room the window looked south across the river to the valley’s gloomy north-facing slope, to evergreens on all-grey rock or featureless unmelting snow. The turbulent, twisting, white-water river was too far below to be visible or even audible to the prisoner; and the only sign of life to reach him at his window was the sight of an occasional traveller on the distant mountain track which led to Pragelas in the next valley, or the sound of an occasional passer-by below on the castle road which skirted the foot of the tower.
‘The prisoners can hear people talking as they go by on the road below their tower,’ Saint-Mars informed Louvois, ‘but they themselves could not make themselves heard if they wanted to. They can see people on the mountainside in front of their windows but they cannot themselves be seen because of the gratings which seal off their rooms. Night and day I keep two sentries of my company posted at a reasonable distance on either side of the tower where they can see the prisoners’ window. They are commissioned to watch that no one speaks to the prisoners, that they do not shout through the windows and that passers-by who linger on the road and the slopes of the mountain are made to move on. Since my room is connected to the tower and has no other view than on to the road, I hear and see everything, including the sentries, who are consequently kept on the alert.
‘As for the interior of the tower, I have arranged it in such a way that the priest who says mass for them cannot see them because of a screen which I have erected to cover their double doors. The servants who bring the food leave what is necessary for the prisoners on a table, and my lieutenant carries it into them from there. No one talks to them except me and, when I am there, my officer, their confessor the Abbé Vignon, and a physician who is from Pragelas, fifteen miles away. As for their linen and other necessities, I take the same precautions as I did for my prisoners in the past.’
Louvois made it clear to Saint-Mars that he did not want more than one of the prison officers to have any contact with the prisoners and it seems safe to assume that the man so entrusted was Laprade. This senior lieutenant, who had been with Saint-Mars for eight years at Pignerol, was to stay with him, as second-in-command, all through the time at Exiles and for the first five years at Sainte-Marguerite, before being transferred to a command of his own. As an extra security measure, it seems he was given a room in the Roman Tower above the prisoners. The other lieutenant was Boisjoly, who had been with Saint-Mars only since his departure from Pignerol. Corbé and his younger brother, as well as Rosarges, L’Ecuyer and possibly Ru, were also members of the prison guard and garrison, which amounted all told to forty-five men. The Abbé Vignon said mass for the prisoners on one of the landings outside their rooms and heard their confessions when they were allowed to make them, which was only once a year. Both prisoners were often in poor health and the physician from Pragelas must have visited them many times, especially when the one with dropsy became so gravely ill. However, nothing about that physician, not even his name, is known.
In all the time he was governor of Exiles, Saint-Mars had only two prisoners and these were the same two that he had brought with him from Pignerol. At Exiles they needed no name to designate them because they were the only ones confined there, but at Pignerol, where there were several prisoners, they had to have a name of some sort to differentiate them from the rest. In official dispatches exchanged during the short period before and after their transfer to Exiles, they were referred to by a special code-name. It is interesting to note that, according to Palteau, the masked prisoner was known to the prison staff of Sainte-Marguerite as ‘Tower’, and that might well have been a shortened form of this original code-name which appears in the following letters from Louvois.
2 March 1682. Since it is important that the prisoners at Exiles, who at Pignerol were called ‘the prisoners of the Lower Tower’, have no contact with anyone, the King has ordered me to command you to have them guarded with such strictness and care that you can answer to His Majesty for their being unable to speak with anyone, not only from outside but even from among the garrison of Exiles.
9 June 1681. At the King’s behest I am sending you the letters confirming your appointment to the governorship of Exiles. It is His Majesty’s intention that you have the two prisoners of the Lower Tower leave the citadel of Pignerol in a litter as soon as the place at Exiles, which you consider suitable for their safe confinement, is ready to receive them, and that you have them conducted there under the escort of your company, whose marching orders are attached. And immediately following the departure of the said prisoners, the intention of His Majesty is that you go to the said Exiles to take up the governorship and make your future residence there.
12 May 1681. I am asking M. Du Chaunoy to go with you to Exiles to inspect the buildings and report on the rearrangements necessary to accommodate the two prisoners of the Lower Tower who are, I believe, the only ones His Majesty intends to transfer to Exiles. Send me a memo of all the prisoners in your charge noting beside each name what you know of the reasons for their arrest. With regard to the two of the Lower Tower, you have only to write that name without adding anything else.
Tracing back through what evidence there is from the death of the masked prisoner in 1703 to this letter of 1681, the ground is firm. Official documents and reliable witnesses establish beyond question that the mysterious prisoner, popularly known as the Man in the Iron Mask, did exist. From 1698 to 1703 he was in the Bastille, where he certainly wore a mask, albeit a mask of black velvet and not of iron. Before that from 1687 to 1698 he was on Sainte-Marguerite, where he was referred to as the ‘longtime prisoner’. Before that from 1681 to 1687 he was at Exiles, where he had a fellow detainee, and before that he was at Pignerol, where in 1681 he and his companions were referred to as ‘the prisoners of the Lower Tower’. Now as it happens the prisoners who were at Pignerol in 1681 are all known. There were six of them, though in fact only four were officially declared to be prisoners. To all appearances the two undeclared prisoners had been liberated in 1680. Who these two secret prisoners were is known. One of them was the Iron Mask.
NOTES
1. Comte de Pontchartrain: 1643–1727, was Minister of State from 1689 to 1714.
2. Marquis de Barbezieux: 1668–1701, was the son of Louvois.
3. Marquis de Seignelay: 1651–1690, Secretary of State, 1669–1690, was the son of Colbert.
4. livre: French money of account which subdivided into 20 sous. At this period the official rate for the louis, a coin of fine gold weighing 6.69 grams, was 10 livres, and for the écu, a coin of fine silver weighing 27.14 grams, was 3 livres. These figures are taken from an article by Jean Belaubre in the catalogue to the exhibition devoted to Colbert at the Hôtel de la Monnaie in Paris in 1983.
5. écu: French silver coin; 13 écus were equivalent to 39 livres.
6. son of the late Cromwell: Richard who succeeded Oliver as Lord Protector. After his abdication in 1659 he lived in France under an assumed name, then after 1680 in seclusion in England until his death in 1712.