The Man Behind the Iron Mask (14 page)

The plan, so far as it can be made out, was to ambush the King's carriage on the open road when he travelled north in April 1673 to follow his army in the spring offensive against Holland. Oldendorf was in contact with government agents from Holland, Spain and Austria and had with him in Brussels a band of ten men from Holland, Ireland and Lorraine. In Jung's view, however, Oldendorf was no ordinary terrorist: he was one of the masterminds of an international organization which for more than a decade conspired to overthrow Louis XIV and his regime. Their sinister stratagems lay behind the attempted insurrections of Roux de Marcilly in 1669 and of La Tréaumont and Rohan in 1674, and behind the secret infiltration of the French court by the most vicious and degraded criminals of the underworld. Jung also held them responsible for a wave of assassinations which included the deaths of Monsieur's first wife, Henrietta of England, in 1670, of Foreign Minister Lionne in 1671 and of the Duke of Savoy in 1675.
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The organization, Jung would have us believe, had cells in all the capitals of western Europe and numbered among its leaders and supporters Catholics as well as Protestants, royalists as well as republicans, statesmen and bankers as well as exiles, gangsters and adventurers.

Louvois got wind of a plot against the person of the King sometime in 1672, and by October of that year his agents had the suspects under surveillance in Brussels. In March 1673, Versailles was put under heavy guard, the governors of the cities where the King was expected to pass on his journey north were ordered to tighten security, and police traps were set up on all the main arteries. The suspects vanished from Brussels on 27 March, but on the night of 28 March four horsemen crossing a ford over the River Somme near Péronne were ambushed. Only one was captured, the man who called himself Louis Oldendorf. He was moved to the Bastille on 1 April and there he was interrogated by Louvois himself. French agents in Brussels seized a box of papers belonging to the suspects and sent it to Paris. More travellers were arrested on the roads from the Spanish Netherlands and some of these like Oldendorf were taken to the Bastille. There was no attempt upon the King's life, but no trial either. What happened to the arrested men, including Oldendorf, is not known.

Jung would have us believe that Louvois had all the evidence he needed to execute the conspirators but preferred to keep them alive as secret prisoners because Oldendorf possessed information which compromised a number of important people within the French court. Louvois later used this information as a means of insinuating his agents into the international organization and of blackmailing his personal enemies and political opponents. According to Jung, Oldendorf was kept in the Bastille for a year and then transferred to Pignerol where he arrived on 7 April 1674. It is true that a prisoner was moved from the Bastille to Pignerol at that time, but it was not Oldendorf.
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Jung's book is one of the best-informed of all the books on the Iron Mask: his search for the truth ‘still buried in the dust of contemporary records' was a major contribution to the subject; but ironically, paradoxically, the conclusion he drew from his discoveries is totally lacking in any supportive evidence.

That the Iron Mask was at the centre of an international conspiracy against Louis XIV was also proposed by Camille Bartoli, whose book
J'ai découvert l'inconcevable secret du Masque de fer
was published as recently as 1978. According to him, the conspirators were members of the Secret Order of the Temple, a clandestine organization which, he says, replaced the Order of the Knights Templar when it was destroyed by Philippe IV
³
of France at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Bartoli gives a dramatic description of how he learned the ‘inconceivable secret' from a mysterious stranger who in 1976 was staying at the Hotel Negresco in Nice, an elderly and distinguished-looking man who claimed to be himself a member of the Secret Order and who revealed the ‘inconceivable secret' to him on condition that he publish it.

His revelation was that the Secret Templars of the seventeenth century were seeking, as were the Templar Knights before them, to impose their ‘Great Design' upon the world, a political and religious system to unify all nations and sects; and as a first step towards this, they believed it was necessary to restore the throne of France to the legitimate Frankish Kings. The original rulers of the Franks were the Merovingians who were kings by right of birth, and the Carolingians who followed them were descended from a junior branch of the same family. However, the rulers of France thereafter, the Kings of the Capetian, Valois and Bourbon dynasties, were all descended from a usurper, Hugues Capet,
⁴
and so were not legitimate. The crown of France belonged by divine right to the descendants of Charles de Lorraine,
⁵
who was the true heir when Capet usurped the throne at the end of the tenth century.

One of these descendants, the crusader Godefroi de Bouillon,
⁶
was the first King of Jerusalem, and it was in Jerusalem soon after his death that the Order of the Knights Templar was founded by a group of French knights. Sanctioned and supported by the Papacy, the Templars gradually developed into an international organization of great political and economic significance and two hundred years later were powerful enough to attempt to impose their Great Design. With ruthless and unprincipled cunning, however, the incumbent false King, Philippe IV, outmanoeuvered them. He installed a French pope at Avignon and got him to suppress the Order as heretical and immoral. Through the persecutions which followed, the organization lived on undercover, Bartoli claims, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century had regained sufficient strength, albeit secret, to attempt the Great Design again. The assassination of Louis XIV's grandfather, Henri IV, the repeated conspiracies against Louis XIV's minority, were all the work of the Secret Order of the Templars.

Finally in 1661, Bartoli explains, when Louis XIV took the reins of government into his own hands, he came to realize the conspiracy which menaced him and in 1664 managed to discover the identity of the ‘Great Monarch' who was to replace him on the throne. The man in question, descended from Charlemagne and heir to the Merovingian kings, was Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise: one of the leading figures at court, former Archbishop of Reims, fifty years old and without heir. Though it would not have been difficult for Louis XIV to eliminate the man, it was altogether impossible for him to eliminate the threat he represented. Were he to have killed him, the divine inheritance would have passed to another member of the Lorraine family and the Secret Templars, believing Louis XIV guilty of regicide, would have had no qualms about assassinating him. The only way out of the danger for Louis XIV was to neutralize the Secret Templars by making the Great Monarch his prisoner and holding him hostage. It was certain that so long as the Duc de Guise was alive, the Secret Templars would give their allegiance to no one else, and so long as he was a prisoner they would do nothing to endanger his life. In that same year therefore, the Duc de Guise was kidnapped and, while it was given out that he had died, the Secret Templars were allowed to know that he was imprisoned in Pignerol and would be killed the moment any attempt was made to release him.

This, according to Bartoli, was how it was that the Duc de Guise became the prisoner known later as the Iron Mask. He was not, however, the masked prisoner who died in the Bastille in 1703. In fact, he died in 1694 at the age of eighty while he was on Sainte-Marguerite and another prisoner, a simple valet, was then made to wear the mask in his stead so that the Great Monarch should appear to be still alive and the Secret Templars would continue to remain in check. Since the masked valet was not replaced by another prisoner when he died in 1703, one must assume that the danger posed by the Secret Templars was at that time less acute, but a couple of years later Louis XIV was informed that his crime against the Great Monarch had been published for all posterity, written in some esoteric form and incorporated into one of the buildings of Nice. His advisers were of the opinion that the building was the castle, and so in 1706 French troops stormed into Nice and, against the counsel of all military experts, reduced the castle to rubble.

The information given to Louis XIV about the existence of such a message was correct, Bartoli tells us, but the advice as to its whereabouts was wrong. Thus it was that the ‘inconceivable secret' of the Iron Mask escaped destruction, and hence it is that it may be seen in Nice today, represented in arcane emblematic form on the medallions which decorate the vaulting of the sacristy and oratory of the monastery of Cimiez, unchanged since they were painted in 1686: a winged dragon and the moon; a bee in the flame of a candle; a pearl in a scallop-shell; a hand holding a lance; a mirror leaning against a tree; a snake touching its head with its tail; etc. – although you would need to read Bartoli's book and be enlightened on the appropriate meanings of these enigmas, as conceived by the mysterious stranger from the Negresco Hotel, in order to appreciate the secret in all its inconceivability.

Not only has the mystery of the Iron Mask been revealed by adepts of the secret art, it has also been solved by addicts of the art of secrecy. In 1893 Etienne Bazeries, in collaboration with Emile Burgaud, brought out a book entitled
Le Masque de fer. Révélation de la correspondence chiffrée de Louis XIV
in which he employed his talents as a cryptographer to establish yet another theory. His book was the consequence of a discovery he had made two years previously when he had been asked to decipher eight coded letters printed at the end of the
Mémoires
of Nicolas Catinat, a Marshal of France in the time of Louis XIV. One of these letters led him to the conclusion that the Iron Mask was a certain general by the name of Vivien de Bulonde.

In the summer of 1691, when the French were at war with the Savoyards in Piedmont, Catinat assigned to Bulonde the task of capturing the town of Cuneo. Bulonde made his assault on 23 June and, being repulsed, laid siege. He had been told to expect reinforcements, but when news came in of the approach of an Austrian army, he panicked and fled, abandoning his artillery, munitions and wounded. This action compromised the whole campaign; when report of it reached Paris, Louvois is said to have run ‘weeping and in desperation' to the King. In July, Bulonde was arrested and sent to Pignerol. It was in a coded letter from Louvois to Catinat, where Bulonde's arrest was ordered, that Bazeries made his discovery: ‘It is not necessary for me to tell you with what displeasure His Majesty has learned of M. de Bulonde's gross negligence in deciding, against your orders and for no good reason, to lift the siege of Cuneo. Knowing the consequences better than anyone, His Majesty is aware how great a set-back it will be for us not to have taken this stronghold, which will now have to be taken during the winter. It is His Majesty's wish that M. de Bulonde be arrested, conducted to the citadel of Pignerol and held there under guard, that at night he be kept locked up in a room of that same citadel and in the day be given liberty to walk upon the ramparts with …'

The next word, represented by the number of
330
, Bazeries for some reason could not decipher. The interpretation most likely to occur would be ‘with a soldier' or ‘with a guard', but after consideration Bazeries decided it must mean ‘with a mask': Bulonde was to be allowed to walk along the walls of the citadel wearing a mask. In fact the French language makes this interpretation unlikely because the usual meaning of the word ‘masque' in the context of such a sentence would produce an altogether different meaning: not ‘with a mask' but ‘accompanied by a masked man'. Bazeries, however, had made up his mind and set to work to find corroboration.

This he turned up eventually in a second letter, written six years after the first, not in code this time, and from the Minister of War to the Iron Mask's gaoler on Sainte-Marguerite. There the following injunction appeared: ‘You have no other conduct to follow with regard to those who are confided to your charge than to continue to watch over their surety without saying anything to anyone about the past acts of your longtime prisoner.' Bazeries, examining the original manuscript of this letter, noticed an error crossed out after the words ‘about the' and claimed that he could distinguish the word ‘gal' under the crossing-out. Since ‘gal' was the commonly accepted abbreviation for ‘general', it seemed to Bazeries very evident that the minister had forgotten himself for a moment and had referred to the mysterious prisoner by his true title. Bulonde was the only general to have been imprisoned at Pignerol, and all the prisoners at Pignerol were moved to Sainte-Marguerite in 1694. Conclusion: the Iron Mask was Bulonde.

From an unintelligible cipher and an illegible crossing-out, Bazeries felt confident that he had unlocked the state secret kept hidden for more than two hundred years. What he did not seem to appreciate was the fact that Bulonde's disgrace and arrest had never been a secret from anyone. The affair was reported in
La Gazette
on 2 September 1691, and one did not need to be a cryptographer to read that. In fact Bulonde was never a prisoner in the state prison of Pignerol; he was merely confined within the citadel under the guard of the garrison commander, and indeed was only kept there for a few months, the order for his release being issued in November of that same year. Though further evidence against Bulonde's candidature is unnecessary, it has been produced nonetheless: his signature on business receipts dated 1699 and 1705, and a record of his death in 1709.

One of the most remarkable theories ever proposed for the Iron Mask's identity was one which first appeared in a pamphlet published in 1883 by a writer who, as though lacking the strength of his convictions, sought to hide his own identity under the pseudonym ‘Ubalde'. It was his belief that the Iron Mask was Jean Baptiste Poquelin, the master spirit of French theatre, known to the world as Molière. Unhappily for Ubalde, most people who read the pamphlet decided he was a crackpot, were more interested in identifying him than in his identification of the Iron Mask, and lost interest when they discovered that he was just an obscure music teacher by the name of Anatole Loquin. Nonetheless he persisted with further variations on his original theme in 1893 and 1898, culminating with a book in 1900 which contained the definitive version and bore the title
Un secret d'état sous Louis XIV, le Prisonnier Masqué de la Bastille, son histoire authentique
. Though he published the book under his own name, he sought to cover himself again, spending the entire first half of the volume reproducing material from Jung and refuting propositions by other writers. As it is, the theory itself, when finally he worked up the courage to launch himself upon it, is a good deal less wild and woolly than he was ever given credit for.