The Man Behind the Iron Mask (18 page)

Since Saint-Mars brought only one prisoner with him from Sainte-Marguerite and since Ru had accompanied him and was therefore well aware which prisoner that was, it seems safe to assume that when Ru told his story to Renneville he believed that he was giving genuine information about the masked prisoner. But since the Iron Mask died in the Bastille and Reilhe signed his burial certificate, it seems equally safe to assume that when Reilhe told his story to Renneville he knew that he was giving false information about the masked prisoner. Renneville in any case was more interested in seeing the Jesuits unmasked than in lifting the mask from a prisoner. His accidental meeting with the prisoner had been so brief that he had not even noticed a mask. Where Ru got his information and why Reilhe gave his, are for us dimensions to a mystery of which Renneville was not even aware.

NOTES

1
.   These ‘assassinations' are usually regarded as natural deaths, though there was talk of assassination at the time.

2
.   It was a Dominican monk, as will emerge later.

3
.   
Philippe IV
: King of France, b. 1268, reigned 1285–1314.

4
.   
Hugues Capet
: King of France, b. 939, reigned 987–996.

5
.   
Charles, Duc de Lorraine
: d. 995?, was the son of Louis IV, King of France, who died in 954; the brother of Lothaire, King of France, who reigned 954–986; and the uncle of Louis V, King of France, who reigned 986–987.

6
.   
Godefroi de Bouillon
: 1061–1100, became Duc de Lorraine in 1089 and King of Jerusalem in 1099.

7
.   
Jansenism
: a Roman Catholic religious movement of unorthodox tendencies condemned by the Pope and suppressed by Louis XIV.

8
.   
Edict of Nantes
: promulgated in 1598 by Henri IV, granting religious freedom to Protestants; revoked by Louis XIV in 1685.

6

THE MAN IN THE VELVET MASK

‘M
de 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.