The Man Behind the Iron Mask (24 page)

Matthioli was suspected of treachery, but it was difficult to prove. Catinat was commissioned to take d'Asfeld's place and another meeting with Matthioli was arranged, this time in Casale itself. Catinat went there accompanied by Saint-Mars, both furnished with false identity papers, but Matthioli did not turn up and they too were arrested. Fortunately for them their true identities were not realized and, after interrogation by the governor of the town, they were released. By the beginning of April, d'Estrades was convinced of Matthioli's double-dealing, but it was not until the end of April that this was confirmed from Paris. Matthioli had shown the secret agreement to the Duchess of Savoy on 31 December, just three weeks after he had signed it in Paris. His intention had been to scuttle the sale before it could be ratified, and when he had seen that his disclosure had not produced the desired effect, he had gone to the Spanish in Milan. Meanwhile, alarmed by the sudden uproar, the Duke of Mantua had been embarrassed into a public denial of any plan to sell Casale and the Spanish had come up with an offer to buy the town for 600,000 francs.
³

It makes little sense that, having committed himself to engineer the sale, Matthioli should have wished to sabotage it. What he hoped to gain out of the situation he created is not at all clear. It is, however, certain that the Duchess of Savoy reacted to the information he gave her in a way no one would have anticipated, and so the situation which resulted was not the one he had intended to create. Since the French occupation of Casale was directed primarily against Savoy, it did not occur to him that the Duchess would report her discovery back to France, and as it was he never imagined that she had done so. Perhaps what he expected was that the Duchess herself would make a bid for Casale with a better offer than France, as the Spanish eventually did; or that she would set up an alliance of powers against the sale, in which he would be able to play a key rôle and so establish himself as the strong man of Mantua. Whatever his original expectations and intentions might have been, his greatest mistake was his failure to appreciate that the French were fully informed of his duplicity. They pretended ignorance and he believed them, telling them that the agreement had been ratified as promised. D'Estrades, ordered to get the signed agreement out of him with the least possible trouble, came quickly to the conclusion that kidnapping the man was the only sure way. On 2 May he lured Matthioli into a trap and had him smuggled into Pignerol prison that same day.

The signed agreement, as things turned out, could not be found and so the occupation of Casale could not be made, but the plan was postponed, not abandoned. Two years later, on 8 July 1681, the Duke of Mantua signed the necessary papers and on 30 September the French troops took possession. What had happened to Matthioli in the meantime was something about which no one with any power or influence seemed to care. Shortly before his disappearance he had been in hiding from the Duke of Mantua, who had hired assassins to hunt him down. When d'Estrades had contacted him in Turin, he had been carrying ‘two pistols in his pockets and two more, with a dagger as well, in his belt.' Presumably his family and friends supposed that he had been assassinated and did not dare to enquire further. In April 1679 Louis XIV had specified ‘that no one should know what becomes of this man' and in August 1681 he had reassured the Duke of Mantua that Matthioli would never be released without his consent.

Matthioli's fate was not a secret for long, however. In 1682 the full story was published in a fifty-eight page pamphlet entitled
La Prudenza trionfante di Casale
, written in Italian and printed in Cologne. The account was accurate and named everyone involved, even Giuliani. About Matthioli's disappearance there was moreover no mystery. The writer of the pamphlet was as well-informed on that as he was on everything else: Matthioli had been kidnapped by the French, he said, and imprisoned in Pignerol. Just three years after Matthioli's disappearance, therefore, everyone knew what had happened to him and why. Five years after that, when Saint-Mars was transferred to Sainte-Marguerite, it was assumed that the secret prisoner he brought with him was Matthioli. Saint-Mars denied it, of course, with jokes that the mystery-man was the Duc de Beaufort or Richard Cromwell, but no one of any sense believed him.

Two of the most celebrated writers on the Iron Mask, Marius Topin, whose book appeared in 1869, and Franz Funck-Brentano, writing in 1894, were altogether convinced that Matthioli was the prisoner in the mask who died in the Bastille in 1703. In their interpretations they sought to debunk the old mystifications, but overreached themselves in their determination to explain away all the mysteries. Like other Matthiolists, the best explanation they could find for the mask was the one first offered by Madame de Campan. Matthioli wore a mask not because he was made to but because he chose to. No one knew him in France, of course, and so there was no question of anyone recognizing his face, but to conceal his identity was not the purpose of the mask. His baggage had been seized by the French when they kidnapped him and it is known from official correspondence that Saint-Mars took these bags with him when he left Pignerol for Exiles. A mask, Topin declares, ‘would certainly have formed part of his personal effects'. There was nothing mysterious about it. He had one because he was an Italian and he wore it because for him it was the natural thing to do. It would be difficult to better the comment made on this by Théodore Jung writing four years after Topin: ‘It is altogether as if one were to say “Since this gentleman is Spanish, he must be carrying castanets”.'

For all Matthiolists, the single most striking piece of evidence in the case lies in the fact that the Iron Mask was buried under Matthioli's name. Topin established that, at the time of the masked prisoner's death, the Duke of Mantua happened to be visiting Paris as a guest of Louis XIV; he then argued that Louis XIV authorized the use of the prisoner's true name on the burial register in order to let the Duke know that the man, whose reappearance he feared, was dead. One wonders why the Duke would have trusted a record in which false names were always used, when a word in private from the King himself would have sufficed. ‘Far from corroborating the system which sees in Matthioli the man in the mask', Jules Loiseleur wrote two years before Topin's book appeared, ‘the entry on a public register of a name so close to his is, on the contrary, one of the most decisive arguments against that system.'

Though at the end of the last century most investigators were prepared to accept that the Iron Mask was Matthioli, and though that is the most common explanation of the mystery given in works of general reference even today, no investigator of the twentieth century has ever found the case convincing. On the contrary, it is now argued that public knowledge of Matthioli's imprisonment in Pignerol was deliberately used by the French authorities to provide a cover for the identity of the real secret prisoner. In this way the curiosity of people who were intelligent and informed could be satisfied before their investigations brought them too close to the truth. Without pressing that argument, however, it is worth remarking that the sedan-chair in which the prisoner was boxed up for the journey to Sainte-Marguerite was carried by eight porters brought especially from Turin, and it is hardly likely that Saint-Mars would have chosen Italian porters if his secret prisoner had been an Italian.

NOTES

1
.   
Madame de Maintenon
: Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, 1635–1712. Displaced Madame de Montespan in the affections of Louis XIV in the late 1670s and became Louis XIV's wife by morganatic marriage in 1684.

2
.   A reference to Voltaire.

3
.   
francs
: at the beginning of the seventeenth century the franc was a coin of fine silver weighing 23 grams. Under Louis XIII it became a money of account.

8

THE PRISONERS OF PIGNEROL

W
hat was in the seventeenth century the French Pignerol is today the Italian Pinerolo, a pleasant little town of 40,000 inhabitants situated on a hill in Piedmont twenty-three miles south-west of Turin. Here the valleys of the Chisone from the west, the Lemina from the north and the Pellice from the south emerge from the Alps on to the wide open plain of the Po. When the French army was in occupation, the town was girded all around by bastions and ravelins and guarded from the north by a citadel built in the style of the time like a three-tiered mountain of terraced masonry. On the topmost platform of the citadel stood the keep, a many-towered rectangular block which, though high, was dwarfed by one enormous tower more than twice the height of the rest. Of all these buildings and fortifications, however, nothing now remains. In 1696 the French destroyed them when they were obliged to abandon the town to the Savoyards. The prisons were in the keep and so vanished with the rest, just fifteen years after the Iron Mask's departure.

Plans and descriptions of the time make it clear that the long northern face of the keep was only a curtain-wall, and that a fortified gate gave access through this to an interior courtyard which was enclosed by buildings on its other three sides. Six towers, all different in size and structure, were incorporated into the exterior face of these buildings, one at each corner and two mid-façade on the south and west walls. All the buildings at the western end of the keep, including the great tower and two others, were occupied by the commander of the citadel and his officers. Some of the buildings on the south side were used as store-rooms and all the rest of the structure, including the remaining three towers, was taken up by the state prison. The tower at the north-east corner housed the prison chapel and the other two towers contained the prison cells. The prison guard were lodged in the interior section of the southern buildings, their rooms facing across the courtyard to the northern curtain-wall, while the prison governor had all the eastern end, excluding the towers, for himself. Both prison-towers had three floors with a prison room on each. The tower at the south-east corner, which was known as the Angle Tower, was reserved for prisoners of rank; the rooms were spacious and well-furnished with floors of wood and large windows which looked out at the mountains and on to the town. The other prison-tower, which was placed midway along the southern façade of the keep, was known as the Lower Tower and, so far as one can make out, the rooms there were much smaller than in the Angle Tower, with bare stone floors and small windows high up in the wall. Between the two prison-towers were the store-rooms of the citadel, and these included the main powder-magazine.

Fouquet left Paris under d'Artagnan's guard a couple of days before Christmas 1664 and after a hard journey by frozen roads through snow-bound mountains reached Pignerol three weeks later. Saint-Mars, already there, had found a valet to serve him and had prepared rooms on the third floor of the Angle Tower, the best in the prison, to accommodate him. From Vaux to Pignerol: zenith to nadir. The prison regime was strict, but he was not ill-treated. He could not leave his prison apartment, was denied pen and ink and forbidden all contact with the outside world; however, he lived in spacious rooms with a view upon the mountains, had the attention and companionship of a servant, received good food and wine, wood for the fire, clean clothes and linen, was allowed to hear mass on Sundays and Holy Days, to confess five times a year and to have one book at a time to read. So much more than a bare necessity for the life of his body and soul, so much less than the bleak minimum for the survival of his spirit.

One night six months after Fouquet's installation, the powder-magazine of the citadel was hit by lightening in a storm and blew up, destroying the surrounding buildings and causing a large part of the prison to collapse including the roof and floors of the Angle Tower. By a miracle he and his valet had been standing in the window-recess at the moment of the explosion, watching the mountains in the storm, and they were left perched in the thickness of the wall together unharmed when the ceiling came down under the weight of the roof and the floor gave way. Until the damage could be repaired they were moved to the fortress of La Pérouse nearby, and when workers began to clear the rubble, Saint-Mars discovered among the broken furniture a bunch of pens made from chicken bones, a bottle of ink made from soot and a bundle of white linen strips cut from shirts and covered in writing; all were hidden in the back of a chair. Fouquet's valet was taken from him and soon afterwards was reported dead. The cause of death is not now known, but it is not inconceivable that he would have lived longer if he had informed Saint-Mars of Fouquet's secret writings. Security precautions around Fouquet were increased, and when he returned to the Angle Tower a year later, all his white shirts and ribbons had been changed for black and instead of one valet he had two, presumably intended as spies as well as servants, to inform upon each other as much as upon their master.

The names of these two valets were Champagne and La Rivière. About their backgrounds nothing is known, but there is reason to believe that they were originally servants of Saint-Mars and they were young enough for Fouquet, then aged fifty-one, to think of them as boys. Whatever it was Saint-Mars offered in order to persuade them to take the job, they were almost certainly deceived, since in effect they became prisoners too, locked up with their master and never allowed out. One of them, probably Champagne, was sufficiently intelligent and amiable for Fouquet to start teaching him Latin and pharmacy. La Rivière was melancholy by nature and a chronic hypochondriac; he had a depressing effect upon Fouquet who, though fond of him, preferred the diligent and affectionate disposition of Champagne.

For the first four and a half years at Pignerol, Fouquet was the only prisoner Saint-Mars had; then on 19 July 1669 Louvois wrote telling him to prepare a cell for someone by the name of Eustache Dauger or Danger.
¹
Nine days after that the King wrote a letter under his private seal to Captain Alexandre de Vauroy, the garrison commander of Dunkirk, ordering him to arrest on sight a man named Eustache Dauger and take him immediately to Pignerol. Dauger's arrest was top secret: even the governor of Dunkirk was not allowed to know about it. To explain Vauroy's absence from Dunkirk, the governor was shown a cover-up dispatch from Louvois ordering Vauroy to hunt down officers of the Spanish army who supposedly had crossed the border from the Spanish Netherlands in pursuit of deserters.