The Man Behind the Iron Mask (22 page)

W
hen Saint-Mars was given command of the state prison in the citadel of Pignerol in January 1665 he had only one prisoner: Nicolas Fouquet. Then aged fifty, the former Superintendent General of Finance had been arrested and imprisoned in September 1661, tried for embezzlement of state funds and conspiracy to rebellion, found guilty and sentenced in December 1664 to imprisonment for life. The troop of musketeers which made the arrest was led by d'Artagnan, more famous from fiction than in fact, and his second-in-command was Saint-Mars who stayed with Fouquet thereafter until the trial was over as permanent escort in his successive prisons, Angers, Vincennes, Moret and the Bastille. The fate of Fouquet shaped the fortune of Saint-Mars: he became the prison-governor of Pignerol because, after more than three years under his guard, Fouquet had become his prisoner.

The actual sentence delivered by Fouquet's judges, in a majority vote of fourteen to ten, had been for his banishment and the confiscation of all his property. The ten out-voted judges would have condemned him to death by strangulation and there is little doubt that the King would have preferred that. As it was, he decided that the sentence given was too mild and he changed it immediately to perpetual imprisonment. Fouquet was certainly guilty of embezzlement, but in the general corruption of the times that made him no different from anyone else in government or finance. His crime was rather a matter of style; he invented the Louis XIV style before Louis XIV had any style at all. He was everything the young King wished to be and the jealousy and resentment this engendered in the monarch could be appeased by nothing less than the superintendent's complete destruction.

Fouquet came to power in the minority of Louis XIV when the Queen Mother was Regent and Cardinal Mazarin ruled France as her Prime Minister. Under His Eminence, the superintendent became super-eminent. Mazarin, the Italian peasant, was disliked by everyone except the Queen. Fouquet, French to his fingertips, was popular to the point of adulation. Mazarin envied and distrusted him but, knowing next to nothing about state finance himself, could not survive without him. Fouquet was a financial wizard, a master of improvisation, who created wealth around him with dazzling facility and breathtaking negligence. He was the supreme provider: preserver of the crown, protector of the court, patron of the arts. His friends were scholars, lawyers, doctors, writers and artists. His intellectual and artistic discrimination was masterful; his social and material sense majestic. When he built a house for himself at Vaux-le-Vicomte he created a work of art which set the style in Europe for over a hundred years. He was charming and generous, gifted and accomplished, civilized and worldly, but like many brilliant men he lacked deep psychological insight and judgement; he lacked the seriousness and caution of good minds less sure of themselves, and did not appreciate the danger he ran by alienating them.

On 17 August 1661, he invited the King and six thousand guests to a party at Vaux. By that time his downfall was already planned, but the King was so mortified to find himself the guest of a subject so much more of a king than himself that he very nearly had him arrested on the spot. The guests were overwhelmed by the magnificence of their host, the splendour of the house, the marvel of the garden, the prodigality and refinement of the entertainment: curtains of water from a thousand jets; cascades, canals and cataracts of water in carved stone; chamber music among flowers and trees; realistically sculpted statues and geometrically sculpted shrubbery; forests of round-topped orange trees in tubs; pavilions of striped silk; gondolas with gilded prows; a lottery with horses and jewels for prizes; dancing, gaming and water jousts; a ballet by Molière; fireworks by Torelli; and the house a mirage of light, its gold encrusted rooms ablaze with candelabra like burning trees, with coloured marble and mirrors, with Savoyard carpets and Genoan velvet, with lacquer, rock-crystal and brocade, porcelain, paintings and tapestries. There were a hundred tables laid with silver and Venetian lace and the King's own table was set with massive gold. In the grand salon the King received a portrait of himself painted by Le Brun and saw on the dome above his head work in progress for a painting which depicted Fouquet's apotheosis in the symbol of the sun, also by Le Brun. The squirrel, Fouquet's emblem, was emblazoned everywhere, and with it his motto
Quo non ascendet
: ‘Whither might one not ascend'. Mazarin, on his death-bed just five months before, had warned the King to get rid of Fouquet and had recommended Colbert to him as the best man to help him do it. Colbert's emblem was a snake.

On 5 September 1661 the King was twenty-three, and as a birthday present to himself he had Fouquet arrested. The snake arranged the rest: fixed the judges and faked the evidence. If Fouquet had been condemned to death, the King was heard to say later to his mistress Louise de La Vallière, he would have let him die. At one time Fouquet had even tried to seduce Madame de La Vallière with a large sum of money; the maids-0f-honour at court were always prepared to give information and favours for the money he offered, but Madame de La Vallière had remained faithful to the King. ‘I only want justice,' the King told his ministers, ‘and I am careful about what I say because, when it is a question of a man's life, I don't want to say too much.'

Fouquet's life was spared, but by that time the King had taken everything else. Versailles was begun with the spoils of Vaux. The King took its treasures and appropriated its makers. The tapestry factory, set up near Vaux, was moved to Paris and became the Gobelins. Paintings, sculptures, a thousand orange-trees, porcelain, glass and plate, all went to Versailles and with them Le Vau, the architect, Le Nôtre, the gardener, and Le Brun, the decorator. The King's own library was begun with thirteen thousand volumes which he took from Fouquet, who in prison and on trial for his life was refused all books and counsel, was refused even paper and pen, and yet contrived to write five volumes of defence, using chicken bones and soot, upon his own shirts. When years later the Sun King finally emerged, tricked out in all his glory, the gross affectation of his posturing was saved from the ridiculous only by the subtle glimmer that still remained of that light which he had stolen from the Superintendent Sun.

When the Bastille was taken on 14 July 1789, and rumours were put about of bones and messages found mouldering in abandoned dungeons, the first published report that the remains of the Iron Mask had been discovered gave it out that he was Fouquet. One week after the Bastille fell, a broadsheet appeared with the banner headlines: ‘The Skeleton of the Iron Mask found by the Nation this 22 July 1789'. The dramatic discovery was depicted as it happened and described by someone who had been on the spot. ‘It was necessary to gain possession of this fortress to know at last the identity of that famous person whom we found as a skeleton, eight days after the capture, with chains on his neck, feet and hands and an iron mask at his side. We made the round of the cell and there we found an inscription which said that he was called Superintendent Fouquet and that he had been taken from the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and brought with an iron mask to the fort of the Bastille during the reign of Louis XIV. He died in the reign of Louis XV and was found in the reign of Louis XVI, on 22 July 1789'.

Further proof should have been unnecessary but three weeks later was forthcoming anyway. On 13 August, an article in the magazine
Loisirs d'un patriote fran ais
revealed yet another remarkable discovery. ‘Here is a fact which, to tell the truth, is only supported by a simple card which a man curious to see the Bastille picked up by chance with some other papers; but this card, giving as it does the complete answer to problems which up until now could never be solved, is a major piece of evidence. The card bears the number 64–389–000 – a figure which is unintelligible – and the following note: “Fouquet arriving from the islands of Sainte-Marguerite with an iron mask.” After which three Xs. And underneath “Kersadion”.' Who Kersadion was, no one has ever been able to find out. Nor is it known what became of the card. Like the skeleton and the inscription found earlier, it seems to have disappeared as miraculously as it appeared.

It is of course unlikely that anyone was at all surprised to learn that these sensational claims were totally without foundation. The official version of Fouquet's death had been ignored by sensation-mongers before, but the facts of the matter could easily be established. On 6 April 1680,
La Gazette
had carried the following announcement: ‘We are informed from Pignerol that M. Fouquet has died of apoplexy.' This brief notice apart, the great man's death in prison where he had been sent fifteen years before passed almost unremarked. His family, it was said, received the body and some time in the following year decided to move it to Paris so that it could be buried in the family vault. If the Nation had any doubts about that, the mortuary register of the Church of the Visitation in the Convent of the Dames de Sainte Marie in the rue Saint-Antoine in Paris could always be consulted: ‘On 23 March 1681 was buried in our church, in the chapel of Saint Francis de Sales, M. Nicolas Fouquet, who was elevated to all the degrees of honour in the magistrature, councillor of Parlement, rapporteur of the Council of State, Procurer General, Superintendent of Finance and Minister of State.'

Dead and buried, as Fouquet demonstrably was, more than twenty years before the masked prisoner was known to have died, no one proposing the superintendent's name for the Iron Mask could hope to be taken seriously. In 1836, however, forty-seven years after the pretence that Fouquet's skeleton had been discovered in the Bastille, it was revealed that the official record certifying where his remains really were was also a pretence. In that year a search was made in the burial vaults of the same convent for the body of a former Archbishop of Bourges. His coffin proved difficult to locate and was eventually discovered in the vault of the Fouquet family. An inventory of all the coffins was then made and their epitaphs carefully recorded. No sign of any coffin for Nicolas Fouquet could be found. The entry in the mortuary register of the convent was evidently incorrect, but there was no known record of Fouquet's burial in any other place. Paul Lacroix, in his book
L'Homme au Masque de fer
published in 1837, was the first to point out the full significance of this: that the obvious reason for a pretended burial was to give credibility to a pretended death. Investigation had shown him that in fact Fouquet's death was far from certain; apart from anything else, there was no death certificate.

Doubts about Fouquet's death had been raised before, but only with regard to the circumstances. It was Voltaire, in his
Si cle de Louis XIV
published in 1751, who had first focused attention on the uncertainty: ‘Fouquet was imprisoned in the fortress of Pignerol and all historians are in agreement that he died there in 1680, but Gourville asserts in his
Mémoires
that he was liberated from prison sometime before his death. The Comtesse de Vaux, his daughter-in-law, had already given me endorsement of this fact, although his family believe the contrary. Thus while his least act, when he was in power, attracted attention, no one really knows where this unfortunate man died.' Hérauld de Gourville, who had been a colleague and close friend of Fouquet at the time of his arrest, made only a glancing reference to his release from prison, as though he assumed it was common knowledge. He offered no details on the matter, but Robert Challes, another contemporary, not mentioned by Voltaire, went much further.

Challes, who was one of Colbert's secretaries, maintained in his
Mémoires
that Fouquet was pardoned at the intercession of the Dauphin's wife and left prison as soon as the news of his release arrived, refusing to stay there a moment longer. ‘He set off that very evening, but by some strange turn of fate he met his death at Chalon-sur-Saône. For supper that evening he had eaten a veal-breast stew. Indeed he had eaten a good deal of it and either his stomach could not digest it all or the joy of his recall, which until then he had kept pent up inside, could no longer contain itself without bursting. At two o'clock in the morning he called out and an hour later in great tranquillity he died. The astonishing thing is that there was no post-mortem examination and so it is still not known whether he died of natural causes or was poisoned.'

Chalon-sur-Saône was all of three hundred miles away from Pignerol by difficult mountain roads, but according to Challes, Fouquet was not at Pignerol at all, he was at Lyon. There is not a grain of evidence to support this version of things, but for Paul Lacroix the fact that Fouquet was reported to have died both as a prisoner at Pignerol and as a free man somewhere else confirmed suspicions raised by the false burial registration. The contradictory reports, it seemed to him, were a consequence of some inconsistency or inadequacy in the official explanation of Fouquet's death in 1680. There had been no burial in 1681, he decided, because there had been no death in 1680. Fouquet had lived on as a secret prisoner, masked to hide his identity, and had been the mysterious prisoner in the mask who had gone with Saint-Mars to the Bastille and had died there in 1703. Certainly what descriptions there are of the Iron Mask's appearance and behaviour could all be applied to Fouquet, including even the swollen legs described by Blainvilliers. One might be disposed to argue that Fouquet was too old to be the Iron Mask, since in 1703 he would have been eighty-nine years old, but it is a fact that his family made old bones; his own mother lived to be ninety-one.

‘You know, I suppose, of M. Fouquet's death from apoplexy just when he had received permission to go and take the waters at Bourbon.' So Bussy-Rabutin wrote in a letter to a friend, echoing the general belief that Fouquet was about to be liberated when he died. The authorities had been planning his release for some time and the suggestion that they had suddenly changed their minds and faked his death in order to keep him secretly in prison, sealed off from the world for ever, is not on the face of it very likely. Lacroix, however, saw a connection between the mysterious origins of the Iron Mask as a secret prisoner at Pignerol and the first cautious steps of Madame de Maintenon
¹
as the King's favourite at Versailles. It was the discovery of Fouquet's attempt upon the virtue of Madame de La Vallière which had earned him imprisonment instead of banishment in 1664, Lacroix suggests, and it was the revelation of his attempt upon the virtue of Madame de Maintenon which made him the Man in the Iron Mask in 1680.