The Man Behind the Iron Mask (21 page)

The new prison took all of eight months to complete, and stories of what had been seen and heard by visitors to the island and workers on the building site soon dispelled what reservations remained among the local peopole about the importance of the mysterious prisoner. On 8 January 1688 Saint-Mars was finally able to report to Louvois that the work was finished and the prisoner installed.

I am proud to inform you that my prisoner, who continues in his usual poor health, has been put into one of the two new prisons which you instructed me to have built. They are large, handsome and well-lit, and as for their excellence as prisons I do not think there could be any safer and sounder in Europe. This is especially so with regard to the danger of prisoners communicating orally with someone nearby or far off, and that could never be said for any of the places where I had charge of M. Fouquet after his arrest. With relatively few precautions one can even have prisoners taking walks about the island without fear that they might escape or pass messages. I take the liberty, my lord, to inform you in detail of the excellence of this place in the eventuality that you may have prisoners you wish to keep in complete security but with a reasonable degree of freedom. Throughout the province, some say that my prisoner is M. de Beaufort and others that he is the son of the late Cromwell.
⁶
Here attached is a short note of expenses incurred on his account for last year. I do not give any details so that those who deal with it will not be able to probe into things they are not supposed to know.

The year before this, when Saint-Mars received notification of his appointment to Sainte-Marguerite, the order was that he should take more than one prisoner with him. At that time Louvois wrote:

It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the King sees fit to grant you the governorship of the islands of Sainte-Marguerite. Prepare yourself to make the transfer as soon as you are ordered to do so. It is His Majesty's intention that as soon as you receive your warrant you make a tour of inspection of those islands to see what needs to be done for the safe and proper accommodation of the prisoners in your charge.

However this letter, dated 8 January 1687, was crossed by a letter from Saint-Mars, dated 5 January, in which he informed the minister of the death of one of his prisoners. The letter itself no longer exists, but a letter from Louvois, dated 13 January, in which he acknowledges its receipt, does. The correspondence thereafter, as we have seen, makes mention of only one prisoner.

At Exiles, therefore, Saint-Mars had two prisoners: the masked prisoner, who went on from there to Sainte-Marguerite and the Bastille, and another who died a few days before he received news of his transfer. The death of this second prisoner had been expected. On 3 November 1686, Louvois wrote to Saint-Mars: ‘It is all right to let one of your two prisoners, the one who has dropsy, make his confession, but only when you are sure that death is imminent'. That these two were the only prisoners Saint-Mars had at Exiles is apparent in the way the minister frames his instructions. It is also made evident by a letter from Saint-Mars to Louvois on 11 March 1682. ‘You advise me, my lord, how important it is that my two prisoners have contact with no one. Ever since you gave me that command, I have guarded the two prisoners in my charge as severely and strictly as formerly I guarded MM Fouquet and Lauzun.'

Exiles today is an abandoned frontier fortress, built on a spur of rock in the middle of a mountain-valley which was French when the fortress was built, but is now Italian. With a river on one side and a road on the other, it rises in ramps and ramparts through tier upon tier of salient wall and buttress, irregular in shape, but geometric in line, monolithic, bare and solid. In the time of Saint-Mars it was a very different construction: an assortment of separate buildings walled in under a crumbling old castle, not much bigger than a large house, which had been built, battered by war and rebuilt in bits and pieces through the centuries, around a single round tower thought to date from Roman times. Some years after the departure of Saint-Mars it was pulled down and replaced by the present fortress, which was the ‘latest word' in French fortification design. The valley it commands, narrow between steep slopes of fir trees and bare stone, is the main link between Briançon and Turin. The frontier with France is only four miles away to the north, but there the mountains are impassable, with peaks more than ten thousand feet high. The road crosses the border to the south-west, sixteen miles up the valley, and not until Susa, nine miles down the valley, is it joined by a road which crosses the border from the north. There is a railway line today as well as the road, but it is buried in a tunnel along the side of the valley and, without a map, one would not know that it was there. The valley has changed little since the time Saint-Mars and his prisoner were there, except that the snowstorms, which made the winters so long and dreadful for them, have established the fame of nearby ski-stations like Sestrière and Serre Chevalier.

Plans of the vanished castle show that it was rectangular in shape with round towers at its corners, each of different height and girth. The two largest towers were at the western end with the biggest of these, the Roman Tower, overlooking the river; the other dominated the drawbridge at the entrance to the castle itself. The road from here passed through the outbuildings and led to the main gate which pierced the wall above the less precipitous northern slope overlooking the main road. The full width of the western end of the castle, including the towers, was taken up by the castellan's quarters and separated from the rest of the building by open stepways and landings which led down to the door and the drawbridge. East of the entrance-hall along the northern wall were the kitchens, store-rooms and servants' quarters, giving onto a long open courtyard under the southern wall. In the time of Saint-Mars, the prison guard as well as the household servants lived here and the prisoners were kept in the old Roman Tower, sealed off behind the castellan's private quarters, which were occupied by Saint-Mars and his family.

The shape of the prison cells was semicircular, half the available area of each floor of the tower being taken up by a spiral staircase and landings. The radius of this semicircle was only about ten feet and the cramped space was further reduced by a thickening of the wall around the window embrasure which, though a good six feet square, was closed off from the room by a line of bars. The actual windows were three feet wide armed with another row of bars. In the masked prisoner's room the window looked south across the river to the valley's gloomy north-facing slope, to evergreens on all-grey rock or featureless unmelting snow. The turbulent, twisting, white-water river was too far below to be visible or even audible to the prisoner; and the only sign of life to reach him at his window was the sight of an occasional traveller on the distant mountain track which led to Pragelas in the next valley, or the sound of an occasional passer-by below on the castle road which skirted the foot of the tower.

‘The prisoners can hear people talking as they go by on the road below their tower,' Saint-Mars informed Louvois, ‘but they themselves could not make themselves heard if they wanted to. They can see people on the mountainside in front of their windows but they cannot themselves be seen because of the gratings which seal off their rooms. Night and day I keep two sentries of my company posted at a reasonable distance on either side of the tower where they can see the prisoners' window. They are commissioned to watch that no one speaks to the prisoners, that they do not shout through the windows and that passers-by who linger on the road and the slopes of the mountain are made to move on. Since my room is connected to the tower and has no other view than on to the road, I hear and see everything, including the sentries, who are consequently kept on the alert.

‘As for the interior of the tower, I have arranged it in such a way that the priest who says mass for them cannot see them because of a screen which I have erected to cover their double doors. The servants who bring the food leave what is necessary for the prisoners on a table, and my lieutenant carries it into them from there. No one talks to them except me and, when I am there, my officer, their confessor the Abbé Vignon, and a physician who is from Pragelas, fifteen miles away. As for their linen and other necessities, I take the same precautions as I did for my prisoners in the past.'

Louvois made it clear to Saint-Mars that he did not want more than one of the prison officers to have any contact with the prisoners and it seems safe to assume that the man so entrusted was Laprade. This senior lieutenant, who had been with Saint-Mars for eight years at Pignerol, was to stay with him, as second-in-command, all through the time at Exiles and for the first five years at Sainte-Marguerite, before being transferred to a command of his own. As an extra security measure, it seems he was given a room in the Roman Tower above the prisoners. The other lieutenant was Boisjoly, who had been with Saint-Mars only since his departure from Pignerol. Corbé and his younger brother, as well as Rosarges, L'Ecuyer and possibly Ru, were also members of the prison guard and garrison, which amounted all told to forty-five men. The Abbé Vignon said mass for the prisoners on one of the landings outside their rooms and heard their confessions when they were allowed to make them, which was only once a year. Both prisoners were often in poor health and the physician from Pragelas must have visited them many times, especially when the one with dropsy became so gravely ill. However, nothing about that physician, not even his name, is known.

In all the time he was governor of Exiles, Saint-Mars had only two prisoners and these were the same two that he had brought with him from Pignerol. At Exiles they needed no name to designate them because they were the only ones confined there, but at Pignerol, where there were several prisoners, they had to have a name of some sort to differentiate them from the rest. In official dispatches exchanged during the short period before and after their transfer to Exiles, they were referred to by a special code-name. It is interesting to note that, according to Palteau, the masked prisoner was known to the prison staff of Sainte-Marguerite as ‘Tower', and that might well have been a shortened form of this original code-name which appears in the following letters from Louvois.

2 March 1682. Since it is important that the prisoners at Exiles, who at Pignerol were called ‘the prisoners of the Lower Tower', have no contact with anyone, the King has ordered me to command you to have them guarded with such strictness and care that you can answer to His Majesty for their being unable to speak with anyone, not only from outside but even from among the garrison of Exiles.

9 June 1681. At the King's behest I am sending you the letters confirming your appointment to the governorship of Exiles. It is His Majesty's intention that you have the two prisoners of the Lower Tower leave the citadel of Pignerol in a litter as soon as the place at Exiles, which you consider suitable for their safe confinement, is ready to receive them, and that you have them conducted there under the escort of your company, whose marching orders are attached. And immediately following the departure of the said prisoners, the intention of His Majesty is that you go to the said Exiles to take up the governorship and make your future residence there.

12 May 1681. I am asking M. Du Chaunoy to go with you to Exiles to inspect the buildings and report on the rearrangements necessary to accommodate the two prisoners of the Lower Tower who are, I believe, the only ones His Majesty intends to transfer to Exiles. Send me a memo of all the prisoners in your charge noting beside each name what you know of the reasons for their arrest. With regard to the two of the Lower Tower, you have only to write that name without adding anything else.

Tracing back through what evidence there is from the death of the masked prisoner in 1703 to this letter of 1681, the ground is firm. Official documents and reliable witnesses establish beyond question that the mysterious prisoner, popularly known as the Man in the Iron Mask, did exist. From 1698 to 1703 he was in the Bastille, where he certainly wore a mask, albeit a mask of black velvet and not of iron. Before that from 1687 to 1698 he was on Sainte-Marguerite, where he was referred to as the ‘longtime prisoner'. Before that from 1681 to 1687 he was at Exiles, where he had a fellow detainee, and before that he was at Pignerol, where in 1681 he and his companions were referred to as ‘the prisoners of the Lower Tower'. Now as it happens the prisoners who were at Pignerol in 1681 are all known. There were six of them, though in fact only four were officially declared to be prisoners. To all appearances the two undeclared prisoners had been liberated in 1680. Who these two secret prisoners were is known. One of them was the Iron Mask.

NOTES

1
.   
Comte de Pontchartrain
: 1643–1727, was Minister of State from 1689 to 1714.

2
.   
Marquis de Barbezieux
: 1668–1701, was the son of Louvois.

3
.   Marquis de Seignelay: 1651–1690, Secretary of State, 1669–1690, was the son of Colbert.

4
.   livre: French money of account which subdivided into 20 sous. At this period the official rate for the louis, a coin of fine gold weighing
6.69 grams, was 10 livres, and for the écu, a coin of fine silver
weighing 27.14 grams, was 3 livres. These figures are taken from an article by Jean Belaubre in the catalogue to the exhibition devoted to Colbert at the Hôtel de la Monnaie in Paris in 1983.

5
.   écu: French silver coin; 13 écus were equivalent to 39 livres.

6
.   son of the late Cromwell: Richard who succeeded Oliver as Lord Protector. After his abdication in 1659 he lived in France under an
assumed name, then after 1680 in seclusion in England until his
death in 1712.

7

TWO PRISONERS OF CONSEQUENCE