7
When Saint-Mars was given command of the state prison in the citadel of Pignerol in January 1665 he had only one prisoner: Nicolas Fouquet. Then aged fifty, the former Superintendent General of Finance had been arrested and imprisoned in September 1661, tried for embezzlement of state funds and conspiracy to rebellion, found guilty and sentenced in December 1664 to imprisonment for life. The troop of musketeers which made the arrest was led by d’Artagnan, more famous from fiction than in fact, and his second-in-command was Saint-Mars who stayed with Fouquet thereafter until the trial was over as permanent escort in his successive prisons, Angers, Vincennes, Moret and the Bastille. The fate of Fouquet shaped the fortune of Saint-Mars: he became the prison-governor of Pignerol because, after more than three years under his guard, Fouquet had become his prisoner.
The actual sentence delivered by Fouquet’s judges, in a majority vote of fourteen to ten, had been for his banishment and the confiscation of all his property. The ten out-voted judges would have condemned him to death by strangulation and there is little doubt that the King would have preferred that. As it was, he decided that the sentence given was too mild and he changed it immediately to perpetual imprisonment. Fouquet was certainly guilty of embezzlement, but in the general corruption of the times that made him no different from anyone else in government or finance. His crime was rather a matter of style; he invented the Louis XIV style before Louis XIV had any style at all. He was everything the young King wished to be and the jealousy and resentment this engendered in the monarch could be appeased by nothing less than the superintendent’s complete destruction.
Fouquet came to power in the minority of Louis XIV when the Queen Mother was Regent and Cardinal Mazarin ruled France as her Prime Minister. Under His Eminence, the superintendent became super-eminent. Mazarin, the Italian peasant, was disliked by everyone except the Queen. Fouquet, French to his fingertips, was popular to the point of adulation. Mazarin envied and distrusted him but, knowing next to nothing about state finance himself, could not survive without him. Fouquet was a financial wizard, a master of improvisation, who created wealth around him with dazzling facility and breathtaking negligence. He was the supreme provider: preserver of the crown, protector of the court, patron of the arts. His friends were scholars, lawyers, doctors, writers and artists. His intellectual and artistic discrimination was masterful; his social and material sense majestic. When he built a house for himself at Vaux-le-Vicomte he created a work of art which set the style in Europe for over a hundred years. He was charming and generous, gifted and accomplished, civilized and worldly, but like many brilliant men he lacked deep psychological insight and judgement; he lacked the seriousness and caution of good minds less sure of themselves, and did not appreciate the danger he ran by alienating them.
On 17 August 1661, he invited the King and six thousand guests to a party at Vaux. By that time his downfall was already planned, but the King was so mortified to find himself the guest of a subject so much more of a king than himself that he very nearly had him arrested on the spot. The guests were overwhelmed by the magnificence of their host, the splendour of the house, the marvel of the garden, the prodigality and refinement of the entertainment: curtains of water from a thousand jets; cascades, canals and cataracts of water in carved stone; chamber music among flowers and trees; realistically sculpted statues and geometrically sculpted shrubbery; forests of round-topped orange trees in tubs; pavilions of striped silk; gondolas with gilded prows; a lottery with horses and jewels for prizes; dancing, gaming and water jousts; a ballet by Molière; fireworks by Torelli; and the house a mirage of light, its gold encrusted rooms ablaze with candelabra like burning trees, with coloured marble and mirrors, with Savoyard carpets and Genoan velvet, with lacquer, rock-crystal and brocade, porcelain, paintings and tapestries. There were a hundred tables laid with silver and Venetian lace and the King’s own table was set with massive gold. In the grand salon the King received a portrait of himself painted by Le Brun and saw on the dome above his head work in progress for a painting which depicted Fouquet’s apotheosis in the symbol of the sun, also by Le Brun. The squirrel, Fouquet’s emblem, was emblazoned everywhere, and with it his motto Quo non ascendet: ‘Whither might one not ascend’. Mazarin, on his death-bed just five months before, had warned the King to get rid of Fouquet and had recommended Colbert to him as the best man to help him do it. Colbert’s emblem was a snake.
On 5 September 1661 the King was twenty-three, and as a birthday present to himself he had Fouquet arrested. The snake arranged the rest: fixed the judges and faked the evidence. If Fouquet had been condemned to death, the King was heard to say later to his mistress Louise de La Vallière, he would have let him die. At one time Fouquet had even tried to seduce Madame de La Vallière with a large sum of money; the maids-0f-honour at court were always prepared to give information and favours for the money he offered, but Madame de La Vallière had remained faithful to the King. ‘I only want justice,’ the King told his ministers, ‘and I am careful about what I say because, when it is a question of a man’s life, I don’t want to say too much.’
Fouquet’s life was spared, but by that time the King had taken everything else. Versailles was begun with the spoils of Vaux. The King took its treasures and appropriated its makers. The tapestry factory, set up near Vaux, was moved to Paris and became the Gobelins. Paintings, sculptures, a thousand orange-trees, porcelain, glass and plate, all went to Versailles and with them Le Vau, the architect, Le Nôtre, the gardener, and Le Brun, the decorator. The King’s own library was begun with thirteen thousand volumes which he took from Fouquet, who in prison and on trial for his life was refused all books and counsel, was refused even paper and pen, and yet contrived to write five volumes of defence, using chicken bones and soot, upon his own shirts. When years later the Sun King finally emerged, tricked out in all his glory, the gross affectation of his posturing was saved from the ridiculous only by the subtle glimmer that still remained of that light which he had stolen from the Superintendent Sun.
When the Bastille was taken on 14 July 1789, and rumours were put about of bones and messages found mouldering in abandoned dungeons, the first published report that the remains of the Iron Mask had been discovered gave it out that he was Fouquet. One week after the Bastille fell, a broadsheet appeared with the banner headlines: ‘The Skeleton of the Iron Mask found by the Nation this 22 July 1789’. The dramatic discovery was depicted as it happened and described by someone who had been on the spot. ‘It was necessary to gain possession of this fortress to know at last the identity of that famous person whom we found as a skeleton, eight days after the capture, with chains on his neck, feet and hands and an iron mask at his side. We made the round of the cell and there we found an inscription which said that he was called Superintendent Fouquet and that he had been taken from the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and brought with an iron mask to the fort of the Bastille during the reign of Louis XIV. He died in the reign of Louis XV and was found in the reign of Louis XVI, on 22 July 1789’.
Further proof should have been unnecessary but three weeks later was forthcoming anyway. On 13 August, an article in the magazine Loisirs d’un patriote fran ais revealed yet another remarkable discovery. ‘Here is a fact which, to tell the truth, is only supported by a simple card which a man curious to see the Bastille picked up by chance with some other papers; but this card, giving as it does the complete answer to problems which up until now could never be solved, is a major piece of evidence. The card bears the number 64–389–000 – a figure which is unintelligible – and the following note: “Fouquet arriving from the islands of Sainte-Marguerite with an iron mask.” After which three Xs. And underneath “Kersadion”.’ Who Kersadion was, no one has ever been able to find out. Nor is it known what became of the card. Like the skeleton and the inscription found earlier, it seems to have disappeared as miraculously as it appeared.
It is of course unlikely that anyone was at all surprised to learn that these sensational claims were totally without foundation. The official version of Fouquet’s death had been ignored by sensation-mongers before, but the facts of the matter could easily be established. On 6 April 1680, La Gazette had carried the following announcement: ‘We are informed from Pignerol that M. Fouquet has died of apoplexy.’ This brief notice apart, the great man’s death in prison where he had been sent fifteen years before passed almost unremarked. His family, it was said, received the body and some time in the following year decided to move it to Paris so that it could be buried in the family vault. If the Nation had any doubts about that, the mortuary register of the Church of the Visitation in the Convent of the Dames de Sainte Marie in the rue Saint-Antoine in Paris could always be consulted: ‘On 23 March 1681 was buried in our church, in the chapel of Saint Francis de Sales, M. Nicolas Fouquet, who was elevated to all the degrees of honour in the magistrature, councillor of Parlement, rapporteur of the Council of State, Procurer General, Superintendent of Finance and Minister of State.’
Dead and buried, as Fouquet demonstrably was, more than twenty years before the masked prisoner was known to have died, no one proposing the superintendent’s name for the Iron Mask could hope to be taken seriously. In 1836, however, forty-seven years after the pretence that Fouquet’s skeleton had been discovered in the Bastille, it was revealed that the official record certifying where his remains really were was also a pretence. In that year a search was made in the burial vaults of the same convent for the body of a former Archbishop of Bourges. His coffin proved difficult to locate and was eventually discovered in the vault of the Fouquet family. An inventory of all the coffins was then made and their epitaphs carefully recorded. No sign of any coffin for Nicolas Fouquet could be found. The entry in the mortuary register of the convent was evidently incorrect, but there was no known record of Fouquet’s burial in any other place. Paul Lacroix, in his book L’Homme au Masque de fer published in 1837, was the first to point out the full significance of this: that the obvious reason for a pretended burial was to give credibility to a pretended death. Investigation had shown him that in fact Fouquet’s death was far from certain; apart from anything else, there was no death certificate.
Doubts about Fouquet’s death had been raised before, but only with regard to the circumstances. It was Voltaire, in his Si cle de Louis XIV published in 1751, who had first focused attention on the uncertainty: ‘Fouquet was imprisoned in the fortress of Pignerol and all historians are in agreement that he died there in 1680, but Gourville asserts in his Mémoires that he was liberated from prison sometime before his death. The Comtesse de Vaux, his daughter-in-law, had already given me endorsement of this fact, although his family believe the contrary. Thus while his least act, when he was in power, attracted attention, no one really knows where this unfortunate man died.’ Hérauld de Gourville, who had been a colleague and close friend of Fouquet at the time of his arrest, made only a glancing reference to his release from prison, as though he assumed it was common knowledge. He offered no details on the matter, but Robert Challes, another contemporary, not mentioned by Voltaire, went much further.
Challes, who was one of Colbert’s secretaries, maintained in his Mémoires that Fouquet was pardoned at the intercession of the Dauphin’s wife and left prison as soon as the news of his release arrived, refusing to stay there a moment longer. ‘He set off that very evening, but by some strange turn of fate he met his death at Chalon-sur-Saône. For supper that evening he had eaten a veal-breast stew. Indeed he had eaten a good deal of it and either his stomach could not digest it all or the joy of his recall, which until then he had kept pent up inside, could no longer contain itself without bursting. At two o’clock in the morning he called out and an hour later in great tranquillity he died. The astonishing thing is that there was no post-mortem examination and so it is still not known whether he died of natural causes or was poisoned.’
Chalon-sur-Saône was all of three hundred miles away from Pignerol by difficult mountain roads, but according to Challes, Fouquet was not at Pignerol at all, he was at Lyon. There is not a grain of evidence to support this version of things, but for Paul Lacroix the fact that Fouquet was reported to have died both as a prisoner at Pignerol and as a free man somewhere else confirmed suspicions raised by the false burial registration. The contradictory reports, it seemed to him, were a consequence of some inconsistency or inadequacy in the official explanation of Fouquet’s death in 1680. There had been no burial in 1681, he decided, because there had been no death in 1680. Fouquet had lived on as a secret prisoner, masked to hide his identity, and had been the mysterious prisoner in the mask who had gone with Saint-Mars to the Bastille and had died there in 1703. Certainly what descriptions there are of the Iron Mask’s appearance and behaviour could all be applied to Fouquet, including even the swollen legs described by Blainvilliers. One might be disposed to argue that Fouquet was too old to be the Iron Mask, since in 1703 he would have been eighty-nine years old, but it is a fact that his family made old bones; his own mother lived to be ninety-one.
‘You know, I suppose, of M. Fouquet’s death from apoplexy just when he had received permission to go and take the waters at Bourbon.’ So Bussy-Rabutin wrote in a letter to a friend, echoing the general belief that Fouquet was about to be liberated when he died. The authorities had been planning his release for some time and the suggestion that they had suddenly changed their minds and faked his death in order to keep him secretly in prison, sealed off from the world for ever, is not on the face of it very likely. Lacroix, however, saw a connection between the mysterious origins of the Iron Mask as a secret prisoner at Pignerol and the first cautious steps of Madame de Maintenon1 as the King’s favourite at Versailles. It was the discovery of Fouquet’s attempt upon the virtue of Madame de La Vallière which had earned him imprisonment instead of banishment in 1664, Lacroix suggests, and it was the revelation of his attempt upon the virtue of Madame de Maintenon which made him the Man in the Iron Mask in 1680.
The King’s mistress in 1680 was Madame de Montespan in name, Madame de Fontanges in bed and Madame de Maintenon in everything else. Madame de Montespan, it is said, sought to clear the field for herself by poisoning Madame de Fontages and slandering Madame de Maintenon. For twenty years Madame de Maintenon had been a widow and for eight years before that she had been married to a man who was paralysed. In 1680 her reputation was pure beyond reproach, but only, so Madame de Montespan said, because she had successfully covered up her scandalous goings-on as a frustrated young wife and a merry young widow. Her husband had been an impoverished poet, and both before and after his death she had received gifts of money from powerful friends, among whom had been Fouquet.
When Fouquet was arrested in 1661, a box of love-letters was discovered among his papers and a great many ladies at court were embarrassed to find themselves in print, exposed as his one-time mistresses, paid for services rendered as concubines, agents or spies. The actual letters no longer exist, but the alleged texts were published. Two of them, which in the original publication were thought to be by Madame de La Baulme, were later attributed to Madame de Maintenon. It was Jean Louis Carra who was responsible for this attribution in a book he wrote on the Bastille in 1789. The texts he gave are as follows:
Letter One: ‘I do not know you well enough to love you and perhaps when I get to know you I will like you less. I have always fled from vice and naturally I flee from sin, but I assure you that I hate poverty more. I have received your 10,000 écus and, if you wish to bring me 10,000 more in the next two days, I will see what I must do.’
Letter Two: ‘Until now I was so convinced of my strength that I would have defied the whole world. But I assure you that the last meeting I had with you left me spellbound. I found in your conversation a thousand enchantments which I had not expected, indeed, if I ever see you alone, I do not know what will happen.’
Whether or not these two letters were written by Madame de Maintenon, and indeed Carra had no grounds for his attribution, Lacroix would have us believe that her past relationship with Fouquet was a source of embarrassment for her and of humiliation for the King. It was moreover a repetition of the same painful experience which the King had suffered twenty years before with Madame de La Vallière. Whatever he saw as gold had been touched by the Superintendent Sun: such was his neurosis. The repetition of the nightmare took him by surprise. With Madame de La Vallière forgotten behind the walls of a convent, he had been prepared to forgive Fouquet, but when his plans for Fouquet’s release were already under way, he heard the gossip about Madame de Maintenon, as told by Madame de Montespan, and his old anguish, with all his fear and hatred of Fouquet, returned. Thus the death of Fouquet was invented to avoid the necessity of liberating him, and the mask became a necessity to hide the deception.
On 2 May 1679, less than a year before Fouquet’s supposed death and less than two and a half years before Saint-Mars moved to Exiles with two prisoners, one of whom was the Iron Mask, the state prison at Pignerol received a new prisoner who, to judge from one contemporary report, was actually wearing a mask when he was brought in. According to this account, which was published in July 1687, just eight years after the prisoner’s arrest, the man in question was ‘the secretary of the Duke of Mantua’ and he had been kidnapped in Savoy. The French ambassador in Turin had invited him out for a day’s hunting and had led him into a trap. A couple of miles outside the city he had been ‘surrounded by ten or twelve horsemen who siezed him, disguised him, masked him and took him off to Pignerol’. The information was given in a letter from Italy which appeared in a periodical of history and current affairs printed in Leyden. At the time of its publication, Saint-Mars had just moved the Iron Mask from Exiles to Sainte-Marguerite and the author of the letter, showing himself to be remarkably well-informed, went on to give the very latest developments. ‘At Pignerol he was too close to Italy and, although he was carefully guarded, it was feared that the walls might talk. He was therefore taken from there and sent to the islands of Sainte-Marguerite where he is at present under guard of M. de Saint-Marc (sic) who is the governor there.’
In Spring 1687, when Saint-Mars and his mysterious prisoner moved to Sainte-Marguerite, everyone in the region was talking about it. On 3 May, the Abbè Mauvans, who had visited the island before their arrival and had heard eye-witness accounts of their journey through Grasse, wrote to tell a friend in Aix-en-Provence all about it. M. de Mazauges, who had visited the island with him, wrote the same news to a friend in Paris, a certain M. de Villermont, who replied on 20 August: ‘I have been assured that the prisoner, whom you told me about recently as being taken to the islands of Sainte-Marguerite in such an extraordinary manner, is an Italian named Count Matthioli, formerly the secretary of the Duke of Mantua, whom he betrayed by disclosing secret information to the Spanish.’
Matthioli’s name was variously spelt in official French correspondence, but most commonly appeared as ‘Marthioly’ which, when pronounced with a strong Southern French accent sounds more like ‘Markhioly’. There seems little doubt that the name ‘Marchioly’, which appeared on the burial certificate of the Iron Mask in 1703, was a simple mis-spelling of the same name. Evidently the parish priest of Saint-Paul, who made the certificate, had been told by Rosarges, who was from the south of France, that the prisoner’s name was ‘Markhioly’, by which he meant ‘Matthioli’. To a man like Du Junca the name meant nothing, but to anyone acquainted with French interests and involvements in Northern Italy it would have been instantly recognizable as Count Ercole Antonio Matthioli, one-time secretary of state and supernumerary senator of the Duke of Mantua, who had disappeared from the city of Turin more than twenty-four years before.
After all, it seems, there is not, and never was, any real mystery about the identity of the famous masked prisoner. The information was always there in public records and popular publications for anyone to read, but not until 1770 was this realized. In that year a certain Baron de Heiss wrote to the authors of the Journal Encyclopédique quoting from the account published in Holland in 1687, and further evidence was quickly added. In 1788, Louis Dutens in his Correspondence interceptée reported that Louis XV was asked by his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, to reveal the identity of the Iron Mask and he replied ‘that he believed it was a minister of an Italian prince’. In 1801 Pierre Roux de Fazillac produced government documents to support this belief and in 1822 it was confirmed with the publication of the Mémoirs of Madame de Campan, who had been first lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI.
Soon after Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, Madame de Campan reports, he began to go through the papers of his grandfather, Louis XV. He promised to tell his wife anything he discovered relative to the Iron Mask, though it was his opinion ‘from what he had heard said on the matter, that this Iron Mask had become a subject of such inexhaustible conjecture only because the work of a celebrated writer had excited interest in the detention of a state prisoner who had some peculiar tastes and habits’.2 When eventually he had examined all the documents, he announced to his wife, in the presence of Madame de Campan, ‘that he had found nothing in the secret papers analogous to the existence of this prisoner and that he had therefore questioned M. de Maurepas about it’. The Comte de Maurepas, who was seventy-three years old at that time, had come to office as Secretary of State under Louis XV, just fifteen years after the Iron Mask’s death, and his reply was ‘that the prisoner was a subject of the Duke of Mantua who because of his disposition to intrigue was a very dangerous character. He was lured to the frontier, arrested there and kept a prisoner first at Pignerol and then in the Bastille.’ As for the mask, Madame de Campan concludes, it is altogether possible ‘that the captive Italian sometimes showed himself on a terrace of his prison with his face so covered’, since that was just one of ‘the peculiar tastes and habits’ of Italians in general; it was ‘formerly the custom in Italy for men and women to wear a mask of black velvet when they exposed themselves to the sun.’
In December, 1677, when the French first made contact with Matthioli, he was living quietly in Verona with his wife and two children, a brilliant and ambitious man thwarted just two years before in what had been a promising career. He was bitterly disappointed and disillusioned, but at the age of thirty-seven not altogether prepared to give up the hope of re-establishing himself. The Duke of Mantua was living in Venice, a profiligate who at the age of twenty-five was addicted to the giddy masquerade of Venetian high society, his only interest apart from dissipation and depravity being his need to find enough money to pay his debts. Government of his subjects he had left to his mother who stayed on in the ducal palace at Mantua, sharing her power and her bed with a monk called Bulgarini.
As a young man lecturing in law at the University of Bologna, Matthioli had been picked out by the old Duke of Mantua to become his Secretary of State. The Duke had died soon after and, since at that time his son and heir had been only thirteen years of age, government control had passed into the hands of the dowager Duchess. Matthioli’s influence over the young Duke had been strong and so he had been kept on as a supernumerary member of the senate, a position which carried with it the title of count, and his future rise to eminence had seemed assured. When the young Duke had come of age, however, he had proved himself a wastrel, ready to leave the reins of government in anybody’s hands so long as he was supplied with money enough to finance his debauches. A struggle for power had ensued and Bulgarini, backed by the Duchess, had forced Matthioli out.
The French viewed this situation with interest. The Duke of Mantua was also the Marquis of Monferrato and the French had their eyes on Casale, the capital of Monferrato, which was a fortified town on the River Po to the east of Turin. They were as eager to acquire Casale as an outpost as they had been to acquire Pignerol as a frontier-post. Between these two citadels, Turin, the capital of Savoy, could be kept under virtual siege, and the south-east corner of France would project its defences deep into Italy with a bastion to threaten Milan and Genoa. The Duke of Mantua was kept so short of money by Bulgarini and was in consequence so harrassed by creditors that an offer to buy Casale for a large sum of ready cash was sure to tempt him. Secrecy was, however, essential if French occupation of the town was to be managed peacefully. There would be an uproar the moment the sale was realized; not only the Savoyards, but the Spanish, who controlled Lombardy, would be certain to object in the strongest terms. In the opinion of the French ambassador to Venice, the Abbé d’Estrades, the best way to approach the young Duke was to go through Bulgarini’s rival, Matthioli, who was sure to be delighted to have an opportunity to reassert himself in Mantuan affairs.
A journalist, named Giuliani, who was a secret agent for the French, made contact with Matthioli in Verona and sounded him out. As expected he was interested, and a meeting was arranged with d’Estrades, who flattered and encouraged him. By the middle of January 1678, Matthioli was negotiating the French offer with the Duke of Mantua and had even exchanged polite letters with Louis XIV himself. The Duke wanted a million livres for Casale, but the French were only prepared to put up 300,000. Matthioli finally fixed a meeting between d’Estrades and the Duke at a masked ball in Venice during Carnival when, as d’Estrades informed the King, ‘everyone, even the Doge, the oldest senators, the cardinals and the papal nuntio, must go about in masks.’ They met in a small square and there, at midnight, masked amidst the masked crowd, they discussed the deal for over an hour. D’Estrades refused to raise the offer and the Duke, hard pressed for money, eventually accepted.
Matthioli, whose discretion, it was thought, could be relied upon, was commissioned to represent the Duke in drawing up a final agreement and for this he was invited to Paris. When the time came for him to leave he excused himself, saying that he was ill. The Duke, who wanted his money as quickly as possible, urged him to go and finally, with the promise that when the deal was done he would make him his prime minister, persuaded him to go. In October Matthioli and Giuliani left for Switzerland and from there slipped into France. On 8 December the contract was ready and Matthioli signed in the Duke’s name. The money was to be paid in silver, half when the Duke gave his ratification and half when the French troops took possession. Matthioli’s good offices were much appreciated by the French, and before returning to Italy, he was invited to a secret audience with the king at which he received from the King’s own hand two hundred golden louis for himself, a large diamond from the royal collection and promises of preferment for his family.
In January, secret preparations for the occupation of Casale were begun. Nicolas Catinat, who was then a brigadier-general, was appointed governor-to-be and, using the name Richemont as a cover, went to stay with Saint-Mars in Pignerol. The troops who were to serve as garrison were kept at Briançon until the end of February, then sent to Pignerol to join him. Meanwhile the Abbé d’Estrades had been transferred to Turin to be at the centre of things when Casale changed hands and a special envoy, Baron d’Asfeld, was sent to Venice for a meeting at which he was to receive from Matthioli the contract of sale ratified by the Duke. The French were, however, apprehensive. In mid-February Louis XIV had been informed by the Duchess-Regent of Savoy that she knew all about the secret agreement. He had chosen to go ahead with the plan anyway, but not without misgivings. On 9 March, the day before his rendezvous with Matthioli in Venice, Baron d’Asfeld, travelling through Lombardy, was arrested by order of the Spanish governor of Milan. The secret, it then emerged, was known to everyone.
Matthioli was suspected of treachery, but it was difficult to prove. Catinat was commissioned to take d’Asfeld’s place and another meeting with Matthioli was arranged, this time in Casale itself. Catinat went there accompanied by Saint-Mars, both furnished with false identity papers, but Matthioli did not turn up and they too were arrested. Fortunately for them their true identities were not realized and, after interrogation by the governor of the town, they were released. By the beginning of April, d’Estrades was convinced of Matthioli’s double-dealing, but it was not until the end of April that this was confirmed from Paris. Matthioli had shown the secret agreement to the Duchess of Savoy on 31 December, just three weeks after he had signed it in Paris. His intention had been to scuttle the sale before it could be ratified, and when he had seen that his disclosure had not produced the desired effect, he had gone to the Spanish in Milan. Meanwhile, alarmed by the sudden uproar, the Duke of Mantua had been embarrassed into a public denial of any plan to sell Casale and the Spanish had come up with an offer to buy the town for 600,000 francs.3
It makes little sense that, having committed himself to engineer the sale, Matthioli should have wished to sabotage it. What he hoped to gain out of the situation he created is not at all clear. It is, however, certain that the Duchess of Savoy reacted to the information he gave her in a way no one would have anticipated, and so the situation which resulted was not the one he had intended to create. Since the French occupation of Casale was directed primarily against Savoy, it did not occur to him that the Duchess would report her discovery back to France, and as it was he never imagined that she had done so. Perhaps what he expected was that the Duchess herself would make a bid for Casale with a better offer than France, as the Spanish eventually did; or that she would set up an alliance of powers against the sale, in which he would be able to play a key rôle and so establish himself as the strong man of Mantua. Whatever his original expectations and intentions might have been, his greatest mistake was his failure to appreciate that the French were fully informed of his duplicity. They pretended ignorance and he believed them, telling them that the agreement had been ratified as promised. D’Estrades, ordered to get the signed agreement out of him with the least possible trouble, came quickly to the conclusion that kidnapping the man was the only sure way. On 2 May he lured Matthioli into a trap and had him smuggled into Pignerol prison that same day.
The signed agreement, as things turned out, could not be found and so the occupation of Casale could not be made, but the plan was postponed, not abandoned. Two years later, on 8 July 1681, the Duke of Mantua signed the necessary papers and on 30 September the French troops took possession. What had happened to Matthioli in the meantime was something about which no one with any power or influence seemed to care. Shortly before his disappearance he had been in hiding from the Duke of Mantua, who had hired assassins to hunt him down. When d’Estrades had contacted him in Turin, he had been carrying ‘two pistols in his pockets and two more, with a dagger as well, in his belt.’ Presumably his family and friends supposed that he had been assassinated and did not dare to enquire further. In April 1679 Louis XIV had specified ‘that no one should know what becomes of this man’ and in August 1681 he had reassured the Duke of Mantua that Matthioli would never be released without his consent.
Matthioli’s fate was not a secret for long, however. In 1682 the full story was published in a fifty-eight page pamphlet entitled La Prudenza trionfante di Casale, written in Italian and printed in Cologne. The account was accurate and named everyone involved, even Giuliani. About Matthioli’s disappearance there was moreover no mystery. The writer of the pamphlet was as well-informed on that as he was on everything else: Matthioli had been kidnapped by the French, he said, and imprisoned in Pignerol. Just three years after Matthioli’s disappearance, therefore, everyone knew what had happened to him and why. Five years after that, when Saint-Mars was transferred to Sainte-Marguerite, it was assumed that the secret prisoner he brought with him was Matthioli. Saint-Mars denied it, of course, with jokes that the mystery-man was the Duc de Beaufort or Richard Cromwell, but no one of any sense believed him.
Two of the most celebrated writers on the Iron Mask, Marius Topin, whose book appeared in 1869, and Franz Funck-Brentano, writing in 1894, were altogether convinced that Matthioli was the prisoner in the mask who died in the Bastille in 1703. In their interpretations they sought to debunk the old mystifications, but overreached themselves in their determination to explain away all the mysteries. Like other Matthiolists, the best explanation they could find for the mask was the one first offered by Madame de Campan. Matthioli wore a mask not because he was made to but because he chose to. No one knew him in France, of course, and so there was no question of anyone recognizing his face, but to conceal his identity was not the purpose of the mask. His baggage had been seized by the French when they kidnapped him and it is known from official correspondence that Saint-Mars took these bags with him when he left Pignerol for Exiles. A mask, Topin declares, ‘would certainly have formed part of his personal effects’. There was nothing mysterious about it. He had one because he was an Italian and he wore it because for him it was the natural thing to do. It would be difficult to better the comment made on this by Théodore Jung writing four years after Topin: ‘It is altogether as if one were to say “Since this gentleman is Spanish, he must be carrying castanets”.’
For all Matthiolists, the single most striking piece of evidence in the case lies in the fact that the Iron Mask was buried under Matthioli’s name. Topin established that, at the time of the masked prisoner’s death, the Duke of Mantua happened to be visiting Paris as a guest of Louis XIV; he then argued that Louis XIV authorized the use of the prisoner’s true name on the burial register in order to let the Duke know that the man, whose reappearance he feared, was dead. One wonders why the Duke would have trusted a record in which false names were always used, when a word in private from the King himself would have sufficed. ‘Far from corroborating the system which sees in Matthioli the man in the mask’, Jules Loiseleur wrote two years before Topin’s book appeared, ‘the entry on a public register of a name so close to his is, on the contrary, one of the most decisive arguments against that system.’
Though at the end of the last century most investigators were prepared to accept that the Iron Mask was Matthioli, and though that is the most common explanation of the mystery given in works of general reference even today, no investigator of the twentieth century has ever found the case convincing. On the contrary, it is now argued that public knowledge of Matthioli’s imprisonment in Pignerol was deliberately used by the French authorities to provide a cover for the identity of the real secret prisoner. In this way the curiosity of people who were intelligent and informed could be satisfied before their investigations brought them too close to the truth. Without pressing that argument, however, it is worth remarking that the sedan-chair in which the prisoner was boxed up for the journey to Sainte-Marguerite was carried by eight porters brought especially from Turin, and it is hardly likely that Saint-Mars would have chosen Italian porters if his secret prisoner had been an Italian.
NOTES
1. Madame de Maintenon: Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, 1635–1712. Displaced Madame de Montespan in the affections of Louis XIV in the late 1670s and became Louis XIV’s wife by morganatic marriage in 1684.
2. A reference to Voltaire.
3. francs: at the beginning of the seventeenth century the franc was a coin of fine silver weighing 23 grams. Under Louis XIII it became a money of account.