The Man Behind the Iron Mask

The Man Behind The

IRON MASK

For Isabelle from whose tower I first saw the island of the Iron Mask

The Man Behind The

IRON MASK

JOHN NOONE

This book was first published in 1988 by Sutton Publishing Limited

This new edition first published in 2003

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© John Noone, 1988, 2003, 2013

The right of John Noone to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN
978 0 7524 9529 3

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1   The Prince in the Iron Mask

2   The Masked Prisoner

3   Faces Behind the Mask

4   More Faces

5   And Even More

6   The Man in the Velvet Mask

7   Two Prisoners of Consequence

8   The Prisoners of Pignerol

9   Dunkirk Connections

10  And Interconnections

11  Eustache Dauger Unmasked

12  The Many Faces of Eustache Dauger

13  The Valet in the Face-Saving Mask

Postscript

General Chronology of Events Mentioned in the Text

Detailed Chronology of Events Relative to the Life of the Iron Mask in Prison

Family Tree of Henri IV showing The Royal Houses of France and England in the seventeenth century

Maps

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I
would like to express my thanks to the librarians and custodians of the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels and of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, to Linda Bull, Librarian at the British Council in Brussels, to Gérard Tisserand, Curator of the Langres Museum, to Grégoire Bahry, Curator of the Armenian Museum of France, to Gerard Noone and the late Raoul Verdière.

The amendments made to the first revised edition were the consequence of comments and corrections from the late Pierre Bonvallet and the late Stanislas Brugnon, from Bernard Caire and from Jean-Christian Petitfils. For their friendship and help, I would like to record my gratitude.

1

THE PRINCE IN THE IRON MASK

L
ost in subterranean darkness, in cavernous galleries and labyrinthine passageways, a door of massive wood, reinforced with iron, scrapes open on rusted hinges and reveals a vaulted dungeon, dank and bare, where sits the skeleton of a prisoner hung with chains, the bones strung together by rags of clothing, the skull enclosed in an iron mask. Imprisoned in the time of Louis XIV
¹
, an iron helmet locked onto his head to hide his face, discovered in the time of Louis XVI,
²
and the melancholy features behind the anonymity of the mask reduced to the anonymity behind the face - to the grimacing bare bone skull.

The scenario is pure fantasy, but in the summer of 1789 when the Paris mob swarmed into the Bastille,
³
slaughtered the guards and liberated the prisoners, there were people ready to believe it. In the popular imagination, the Bastille was the symbol of tyranny and since the mob had met with little resistance from the guards and had found only seven prisoners to release, some sensational invention was needed to satisfy public expectation. The mouldering bones bore witness to the monstrous inhumanity of the despotic rulers of France, of a king's crime against his brother, a queen's crime against her son. What did it matter to the ardent revolutionary that a skeleton in an iron mask had not really been found at all? The Man in the Iron Mask was real enough, his existence had been proved and his identity established long before. For a hundred years he had been the skeleton in the cupboard of the French Royal House and, with the overthrow of their tyranny, the truth could finally be told.

It was Voltaire,
⁴
scourge of despotism, champion of the underdog, forebear of revolution, who had uncovered the infamy. His bones, refused honourable burial at the time of his death eleven years before, were also found by propagandists of the Revolution, in fact and not in the Bastille, and were transferred in glory to a hero's monument in the Pantheon.
⁵
His courage in print had been so great that to escape secret agents and hired thugs he had been obliged to live most of his life as a refugee outside of France; yet he, even he, had not dared to publish the entire truth. The account he had given had been spread over various books and the underlying secret revealed only by innuendo. As early as 1738 he had written to his friend the Abbé Dubos, permanent secretary of the French Academy: ‘I am well enough informed about the affair of the Man in the Iron Mask who died in the Bastille. I have spoken to people who served him.' From May 1717 until April 1718 he had himself been a prisoner in the Bastille and presumably had persuaded members of the prison staff to talk, but he had spoken also to people in government, to relatives, friends and associates of ministers and officials who had been directly involved with the prisoner.

His first remarks appeared in his
Si cle de Louis XIV
published in Berlin in 1751. After a reference to the death of Cardinal Mazarin,
⁶
which took place in March 1661, he continued:

Some months after the death of that minister, an event without parallel occurred, and what is no less strange is that all historians are unaware of it. An unknown prisoner, of height above the ordinary, young and of an extremely handsome and noble appearance, was conveyed with the utmost secrecy to the castle on the island of Sainte-Marguerite
⁷
in the sea off Provence. On the way there this prisoner wore a mask, the chin-piece of which had steel springs to allow him to eat with it on, and the order was to kill him if he took it off. He stayed on the island until 1690 when a trusted officer named Saint-Mars,
⁸
the governor of Pignerol,
⁹
was made governor of the Bastille and went to Sainte-Marguerite to get him and conduct him to the Bastille, still wearing the mask … This unknown man died in 1703 and was buried at night in the parish church of Saint-Paul. What is doubly astonishing is that when he was conveyed to Sainte-Marguerite, no man of consequence in Europe disappeared.

A second enlarged edition of the
Si cle de Louis XIV
was published the following year and a supplement added the year after that. In the 1752 edition, Voltaire provided more information: ‘M. de Chamillart
¹⁰
was the last government minister to possess this strange secret. His son-in-law, the second Maréchal de La Feuillade, told me that when his father-in-law lay dying, he begged him on his knees to tell him who this man was, who was only ever known under the name of the Man in the Iron Mask. Chamillart replied that it was a state secret and that he had taken an oath never to reveal it.' In the 1753 supplement, Voltaire followed this up with a simple deduction designed to prod his reader towards his own solution of the mystery: ‘One has only to ponder the fact that no man of any consequence disappeared at the time, and it is clear that it was a prisoner of the greatest importance whose destiny had always been a secret.'

Finally, in his
Questions sur l'Encyclopédie
published in 1770, Voltaire went as far as he dared, leading his readers on with yet another carefully directed deduction and a further piece of pointed evidence: ‘It is clear that if he was not allowed to walk in the courtyard of the Bastille or talk to his physician except in a mask, it was for fear that some too striking resemblance would be recognized in his features … As for his age, he himself told the apothecary of the Bastille a few days before his death that he thought he was about sixty years old.' All the information necessary to solve the puzzle was there. The Iron Mask was someone of the highest importance, whose very existence had always been a secret, whose face bore a close resemblance to a well-known person and whose age in 1703 was about sixty years old. In the light of this evidence, a closer consideration of the second factor - the reason for the mask – was enough to bring the reader to the truth which Voltaire had been afraid to publish.

The masked prisoner had been made noticeable by the very means used to render him anonymous. The authorities who forced him to wear the mask must have been aware of this. Clearly, in their estimation he nevertheless attracted less attention with the mask on his face than he would have done without it. The face of the Iron Mask is thus revealed precisely because such pains were taken to hide it. The only face universally recognizable in France at that time was the face of the King, known not only to the many who had actually seen him, whether at court, in procession or on campaign, but to anyone anywhere in the country. No other face, no matter how famous the name of its owner - were he a prince of the blood or a field-marshal, a provincial governor or a president of the Parlement - was known beyond the narrow circle of his own immediate influence. But the profile of the King, engraved as it was on the coins of the realm, was stamped indelibly upon the consciousness of the people.
¹¹
Since the King's face was the only one that was universally known, the only reasonable explanation for covering the prisoner's face from everyone was that he bore such a close resemblance to the King that anyone seeing him would have recognized the likeness and would have supposed that the prisoner was the King; or would have realized the very secret the King wished to hide: that the prisoner was his own flesh and blood, his living image - his identical twin-brother.

The nightmare world of the doomed prince is easy to imagine. His mask was made of riveted iron, padded inside with silk and, being designed especially for him, was a perfect fit. It covered his head like a helmet and locked around his neck. The key was kept by the prison governor and he alone was authorized to use it. To unlock the mask without the key was impossible, and any attempt to wrench or break it off ran the risk of dislocating the wearer's neck or fracturing his skull. It was heavy to wear but not otherwise uncomfortable, and could if necessary be left on the prisoner's head for months at a time. Steel hinges on a spring in the jaw allowed enough movement of the chin-piece for him to eat with it on and, when he lay flat on his bed, the weight was supported well enough to enable him to sleep. The only practical reason for removing the mask at all was to allow his beard and hair to be cut. The prison governor did this personally every month or so, and in between times allowed him the use of a pair of highly polished tweezers with which he could pluck out the odd hairs that discomforted him. No one but the governor ever saw him without the mask. He wore it continuously for more than forty years, wore it even when he was sick and needed to be attended by a physician, was wearing it when he died, and was still wearing it a century later when the face he shared in twinship with Louis XIV had become the face they shared in common with all mankind.

In August 1789, one month after the fall of the Bastille, the identity of the Iron Mask, as insinuated by Voltaire, was finally divulged by Frédéric-Melchior Grimm, a German expatriate journalist living in Paris, who wrote commentaries upon the French intellectual scene for foreign patrons. The secret, he gave his readers to believe, had been closely guarded within the French royal family since the time of Louis XIV, confided as an obligation in conscience with the power of the crown to successive rulers of France. His informant was Jean de La Borde, one-time chief valet of Louis XV.
¹²
La Borde often questioned his master on the secret of the Iron Mask and Louis XV had told him that he himself had been made to wait until the day he reached his majority before being allowed into the secret, recalling that on that day his friends had pressed around him begging to be told, and that he had replied: ‘You cannot know it.' To La Borde he had said the same thing, adding: ‘I feel sorry for the man, but his detention did wrong to no one except him and averted great misfortune.'