A Venetian mask, smaller than the mask of black velvet worn by the prisoner from Provence, but much closer to the original than the grisly steel visor clamped about his head by Alexandre Dumas in The Man in the Iron Mask. We know little else with any certainty. His personal gaoler, Saint-Mars, believed that ‘he would never ask to be set free’. The King hoped that he would ‘repent’, which suggests criticism, and that no one would ever learn ‘what he had done’, which could be taken in more than one way. He was tall, and fastidious in dress. He made a very passable valet for the imprisoned Duke of Lauzun, and played the guitar. After his death, his furniture was destroyed and the walls of his cell were scrubbed of all marks.
Part 1 of 3
AN arrival at the Bastille, September, 1698, has been the cause of more French discussion than any other event in the notable history of that fortress. It was Thursday, 18th of the month, and three of the afternoon. Armed men on horseback surrounded a closed litter, from which, when all was sure, descended a meagre, silent figure, Saint-Mars,* Louis XIV’s most trusted gaoler. He had come to the Bastille for the first time, having just received its command.
The entry of a new governor would naturally be of no small moment to the staff, whose future lay between his hands; but curiosity was immediately transferred from Saint-Mars to the prisoner who accompanied him. The prisoner’s face was hidden by a mask of black velvet,* a disguise in which no one had ever before been brought to the Bastille.
* Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars (?-1708). He was governor of the prison at Pignerol (Pinerolo) near Turin until 1681, when he was appointed commander of the nearby Exilles Fort, and then governor of Fort Royal on Île Sainte-Marguerite, neighbour of Île Saint-Honorat in the Sea of Provence near Cannes, from 1687. He held the post at the Bastille in Paris until his death in 1708.
* Official correspondence and eyewitness testimony spoke of a mask of black velvet; when the Bastille’s doctors examined the patient, they were grudgingly allowed to raise the lower part to examine his tongue. Then Voltaire stepped in with his historical study Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), in which he recorded the masked man’s journey to Fort Royal, and stated that “This prisoner, on the road, wore a mask, whose chin strap had steel springs [ressorts d’acier], which gave him the freedom to eat with the mask on his face”. A century later, in Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Man in the Iron Mask (1847-50), the velvet mask has become “a vizor of polished steel [une visière d’acier bruni], soldered to a helmet of the same nature, which altogether enveloped the whole of his head.”
Précis
In 1698, Louis XIV appointed his trusted lieutenant Saint-Mars as governor of the Bastille. Saint-Mars duly came from Fort Royal in Provence to Paris, bringing with him under close guard a prisoner remembered neither for his name nor his crime, both of which are a mystery to this day, but for the mask he always wore. (55 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Fort Royal on Île Sainte-Marguerite in the Sea of Provence. The masked prisoner was kept here before moving with his warden, Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars, to the Bastille in 1698. Tighe (pronounced ‘teeg’) Hopkins believed that our man was an Italian diplomat, Ercole Antonio Mattioli, who had caused a sensation across Europe when he tried to cash in on Louis XIV’s secret deal to buy the fort at Casale Monferrato from Charles IV, Duke of Mantua. Many have agreed with him, though the more romantic prefer the speculations of Voltaire, who in 1764 cast Saint-Mars’s ‘ancient prisoner’ as Louis XIV’s illegitimate son, and of Alexandre Dumas, who in 1847-50 made him Louis’s twin brother, taken to Fort Royal by d’Artagnan and clamped with a grisly iron mask.
The unhappy man was already a mystery,* before even he had set foot within the prison which was to be the third and last of his long captivity.* No one knew him, who he was or what he had done that Saint-Mars should have him in this extraordinary keeping. Together, Gaoler and Mask, they had traversed France from far Provence, travelling always in this secure fashion, by silent ways.*
At the chateau and domain of Palteau,* a property of Saint-Mars, a halt had been made; and the peasants of the estate who came out to meet their lord preserved and passed on as a tradition the memory of that strange visit. The mask, once seen, seems to have haunted the dullest fancy. In itself it was no way remarkable; a little black velvet mask: what affected the mind was the circumstance that the person who wore it was a prisoner. This was something entirely unwonted. The peasants observed that when the table was served the prisoner was always kept with his back to the window, they noted the pistols at the hand of the vigilant Saint-Mars, and the two beds ranged together in the sleeping-room.
* The historical records indicate that the masked prisoner in the Bastille must be one of two closely-guarded men. One was a scandal-plagued Italian diplomat named Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli (1640-?). In 1676, Mattioli had been employed by Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, to sell Casale Monferrato (near Turin) to Louis, but after receiving generous kickbacks from Louis he leaked the deal to Spain. Mattioli was snatched by Louis’s men on May 2nd, 1679, masked up, and taken to Pignerol under the name Lestang. The other candidate was a valet who had been given the alias Eustache Dauger on his arrival at Pignerol in August 1669, and whose identity was such a secret that Saint-Mars threatened to run him through if he spoke a word out of turn. Wild rumours spread about Dauger — he was a marshal of the army, or a parliamentary president, he was the Duc de Beaufort, he was Oliver Cromwell’s son — rumours Saint-Mars did nothing to discourage.
* Mattioli was moved from Pignerol to Île Sainte-Marguerite in Provence in 1694, and (if he was the man in the mask) then to the Bastille in 1698, making three prisons in all. Unlike Mattioli, Dauger went with Saint-Mars to the Fort at Exilles near Turin in 1681, and duly accompanied him to Provence in 1687, so if he was the man in the Bastille he had been at four prisons, not three.
* When Eustache Dauger was transported from the Fort at Exilles to Provence in 1687, he travelled in the same furtive manner; indeed, he almost suffocated in the carriage owing to the oil-cloths thrown over it.
* A country house belonging to Saint-Mars’s grand-nephew at Villeneuve-le-Roi, about 8½ miles south of the centre of Paris.
Précis
The journey to Paris was conducted in the utmost secrecy, but a brief halt at Villeneuve-le-Roi afforded the villagers a glimpse of Saint-Mars’s prisoner. His face was always turned away, but they did see that Saint-Mars kept two guns by him at all times, and that he did not leave his prisoner’s side even at night. (56 / 60 words)
Part Three
‘Valet pouring wine’, a study by François Lemoyne (1688-1737). Roux de Marsilly (?1623-1669) was a Huguenot who helped broker Charles II’s anti-French alliance with the future William III in Holland, even as Charles was secretly concluding The (Secret) Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV behind Parliament’s back. Marsilly was arrested by Louis’s men while on the Continent, and revoltingly executed in Paris for an alleged plot to assassinate King Louis. His valet, Martin, led the French Ambassador to believe he had explosive revelations to make about deals involving European leaders from Sweden to Switzerland, but clammed up later. Andrew Lang believed this was Dauger, the man in the mask — a man too valuable to be executed, too dangerous to be released, and too frightened to escape.
Five years later, after one day’s illness, November 19, 1703, this prisoner died in the Bastille.* His end was so rapid that he did not receive the solace of the sacrament; the chaplain ‘exhorted him a moment before he died.’ As dusk fell on the next afternoon the drawbridge was lowered, and a sorry funeral passed out, which took its way to the graveyard of the church of St Paul: behind a rude coffin, two turnkeys of the prison. A furtive, perfunctory burying, scarcely even decent;* into his hasty grave, probably by lantern-light, the turnkeys unknown lowered the unknown dead, and that was the end. On the church’s register was inscribed the name of Marchioly.* In the Bastille they had known him as the prisoner from Provence.
* Lieutenant Étienne du Junca, Saint-Mars’s second-in-command at the Bastille, kept a meticulous private journal (like his contemporary, Samuel Pepys) in which he recorded the passing of the masked prisoner. According to du Junca, ‘the unknown prisoner’ never removed his velvet mask and was wearing it when he died.
* For most of his captivity, the masked man was kept comfortable and treated with marked courtesy. But something changed in March 1701. The prisoner began to be shunted around the Bastille to make room for new arrivals, and even shared a cell with a wild nineteen-year-old servant boy. Perhaps King Louis, whose attention was now completely engrossed in his plan to make Europe’s powers acknowledge his grandson Philip as King of Spain, felt that whatever hold or value the man in the Bastille had once possessed was no longer of such concern. See The War of the Spanish Succession.
* Hopkins saw in this confirmation that Mattioli was the masked prisoner; the clerk’s spelling was always shaky (he misspelt his own superiors’ names) and Saint-Mars tended to write ‘Mattioli’ as Martioly anyway. However, there is a strong probability that Mattioli never left Fort Royal: a prisoner there who had his own personal valet died there in April 1694, and Mattioli was by then the only inmate with a manservant. It was, moreover, state policy to bury political prisoners under a pseudonym; Saint-Mars seems to have enjoyed dreaming them up, rather like Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist. Perhaps ‘Marchioly’ was another red herring — just as Eustache Dauber de Cavoye (1637-late 1680s) was the name of a poor wretch committed to the asylum of St Lazaire sometime in or before 1668, where he died some twelve years later.
Précis
Five years after he came to the Bastille, the masked prisoner died rather suddenly. He was buried with little ceremony in a nearby churchyard, with his gaolers for pall-bearers. Throughout his time at the Bastille his name had never been spoken — staff generally called him ‘the prisoner from Provence’ — but the name under which he was buried was ‘Marchioly’. (61 / 60 words)
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