The Man Behind the Iron Mask (35 page)

Having got thus far on a simple play of ingenuity and plausibility, Barnes chose to make unnecessary difficulties for himself, and ran his theory into dull and clumsy improbabilities. The priest's false identity was invented by Charles, but Louis XIV collaborated in setting it up. At the request of Charles, Louis had his minister Lionne write to his ambassador Croissy and deliberately deceive him into the belief not only that Pregnani was a celebrated astrologer from the French court, but also that he was a secret agent for the government. Why Louis XIV should have wished to mislead his own ambassador and jeopardize the security of his own secret service is difficult to imagine and the puzzle is made no easier by a further claim from Barnes that Louis XIV did not know who Pregnani really was or why Charles wanted to have him in England. Barnes did have Louis XIV realize the stupidity of this action, but not until three months had passed. Meanwhile, Croissy made the understandable assumption that Pregnani was as informed as he was on Louis XIV's secret intentions and so took him entirely into his confidence. The poor priest thus ended up knowing more than was good for him, which was the reason why Lionne demanded his return to France and why, when eventually Croissy got around to sending him there, he disappeared. Vauroy was waiting for him when he stepped off the boat in Dunkirk and whisked him straight off to Pignerol under the name of Eustache Dauger.

It would have been a good deal less complicated and more convincing if Barnes had argued that to bring Pregnani into existence Charles only needed the collaboration of Madame and the cooperation of Monmouth. In that case, he might have proposed that Louis XIV was just as much deceived as everyone else, that he made the mistake of engaging the man as his agent without probing his background and later, when he realized that the Pregnani identity was a complete fabrication, had the man arrested as a double agent. The priest's knowledge of the secret negotiations between England and France was a good enough reason for his imprisonment; and the need to keep his imprisonment secret, not only from Charles but also from the Society of Jesus, was a good enough reason for hiding his identity as completely as possible.

Of all the theories which trace the Iron Mask to the undercurrents of English politics in 1669 this one is certainly the best, and yet unhappily it must be rejected together with the rest. Pregnani did not disappear altogether in July 1669, nor indeed did he appear for the first time in the preceding January. Primi Visconti, the Venetian ambassador to Paris, who was himself something of a fortune-teller, knew Pregnani well enough to mention him in his
Mémoires sur la cour de Louis XIV.
According to him Pregnani did come from Naples, but only in as much as he was a Neapolitan by birth. Before his arrival at the French court, he had been at the Bavarian court and, on the recommendation of the Electress Adelaide, Louis XIV had given him a living at Beaubec near Dieppe in Normandy. He was indeed a Theatine priest, Visconti says, but altogether dissolute and in fact defrocked. What happened to him when he left England, Visconti does not explain, but it seems reasonable to assume that he stopped off at Beaubec on his way to Paris and this accounted for his delay in delivering Croissy's letter to Lionne. After that, with his reputation at the French court ruined by the Newmarket fiasco, he no doubt moved on, hoping to win patronage in some less hostile corner of Europe. What is certain is that he ended up in Rome where, Visconti says, ‘he died, putrified by shameful diseases, in spite of numerous horoscopes which were found on his table according to which he predicted for himself that he would one day be Pope.'

11

EUSTACHE DAUGER UNMASKED

O
n 18 February 1639, was baptized Eustache, born on 30 August 1637, son of François Dauger, Master of Cavouet, Captain of the Musketeers of Monseigneur the Cardinal de Richelieu, and of Marie de Sérignan, living in rue des Bons Enfants.' So reads the baptismal certificate of Eustache Dauger as it appeared in the parish register of the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris. The actual document no longer exists, but this extract was recorded in 1864 by Augustin Jal in his
Dictionaire critique de biographie et d'histoire
. In the orthographical disorder of the seventeenth century the name ‘Dauger' could take on various other forms: ‘Daugier', ‘Doger', ‘Dogier', ‘d'Auger', ‘d'Augier', ‘d'Oger', ‘d'Ogier', ‘Auger', ‘Augier', ‘Oger', ‘Ogier'. Members of the same family, brothers and sisters as well as cousins, employed and accepted different spellings, but later documents reveal that Eustache himself preferred the form ‘Dauger', as it appeared in his baptismal certificate. The name ‘Cavouet' could also appear as ‘Cavois' and ‘Cavoie', but the only well-known member of the family, Eustache's younger brother Louis, who was a lifelong friend of Louis XIV, came to be known under the form ‘Cavoye', and so established that spelling over any other.

The family Dauger claimed descent from Oger the Dane, or more properly Hogier the Ardennois, whose chivalrous exploits as one of the twelve peers of Charlemagne were glorified in French medieval romance. In ancient playing cards Hogier was portrayed as the Knave of Spades; being the bad luck card and called in French the ‘Valet de Pique', this would make a fitting ancestral portrait for the unfortunate man who lived out his life as the Iron Mask and who, though a prisoner of evident consequence, was described at the time of his arrest as ‘only a valet'. In the destiny of Eustache Dauger de Cavoye there was, it seems, as much irony as iron; by a curious turn of fate his grandfather Adrien Dauger de Cavoye was known in his lifetime as ‘Iron Arm'.

François, son of Adrien and father of Eustache, was a soldier of fortune, a swashbuckling character who came to Paris as a young man with nothing to his name except a reputation as a duellist. He had the good luck to be nominated Captain of the Cardinal's Guard in 1630 and the glory to die a hero's death in the King's wars at Bapaume in 1641. His wife bore him eleven children, nine of whom survived childhood. The eldest was only fifteen when François died; Eustache was four, and there were four children younger than he was. But even with so many small children to raise, Madame de Cavoye's situation was not desperate. She was lady-in-waiting to the Queen, Anne of Austria, and was favoured not only by her but also by Louis XIII and Richelieu. In March 1639 the King had granted her husband a monopoly on sedan-chairs, then recently introduced from England, and since the fashion for that mode of transport had caught on quickly, especially in Paris, it amounted to a significant revenue. As her children grew up, she was always able to afford the enormous sums of money necessary to furnish the boys with commissions and the girls with dowries.

There were six boys of whom Eustache was the third, but by the time he was seventeen both his older brothers had, like their father, been killed in action, and so he had become head of the family. At that stage he was already an ensign in the French guards, and four years later, when the war with Spain ended, he was a second-lieutenant. His comrades-in-arms were members of the most powerful families in the kingdom, heirs to the oldest names, the richest estates and the highest positions at court, while his field commander, the Comte de Guiche, who was one year younger than he was and his close friend, was the dazzling star of this young set: a romantic daredevil, handsome, wilful and debauched.

In April 1659, Eustache and Guiche were invited by the Duc de Vivonne to spend the Easter weekend with a small group of friends at the Château de Roissy-en-Brie. Another guest, Bertrand de Manicamp, travelled down with them from Paris and when they arrived on the evening of Maundy Thursday two other guests were already there: Mazarin's nephew and heir, Philippe Mancini, and a young priest called Etienne Le Camus, who was one of the King's chaplains. Seeing Guiche and his cronies arrive, Le Camus decided not to stay, retired at once to his room and left early the next morning. To take his place, Vivonne then invited Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, who though much older than the other guests could be relied upon to enjoy and enliven the party. How Eustache fitted into the group as a whole is not known. At least four of the company, Vivonne, Guiche, Mancini and Bussy-Rabutin, were intellectuals; at least three of them, Guiche, Mancini and Manicamp, were homosexuals; and at least two of them, Guiche and Bussy-Rabutin, were rakehell hooligans.

Bussy-Rabutin arrived at the gallop on Good Friday morning which, being the day of sorrow and desolation in the Church, of obligatory fasting and abstinence, was not on the face of it a very appropriate day to start a party. The company moreover was well aware of its religious duties and prepared to go to great pains to observe them, eating nothing until dinner-time and then making do with fish. Being men of wit, however, they saw no reason why they should not spend the whole day drinking and, ingenious as they were, the fish served up for dinner was actually pork, the precaution being taken beforehand of baptizing a pig and naming it ‘Carp', thus making it ‘born again' as fish. The party continued until Easter Sunday, and what exactly happened in that time is not known. Hearsay reports hinted at things too shocking to print and Madame de Motteville, who like Eustache's mother was lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, maintained that ‘the profanation of Good Friday was the least of the impieties committed.' They did things, she said, which were ‘unworthy not only of Christians but of sensible people'.

Unfortunately, the only detailed account of the events was given by Bussy-Rabutin who had every reason to tone them down. According to him, it was just an elegant debauch with nothing more to it than a little cynical fine wit and irreverent good fun. To build up an appetite for their Good Friday ‘fish', everyone except Bussy-Rabutin spent the afternoon hunting, and Guiche accompanied by Manicamp managed to chase and bring to bay an old gentleman whom they saw riding by on the road to Paris. When their quarry explained that he was Cardinal Mazarin's attorney, Guiche thought it excellent sport and dragged him by the scruff of his horse's neck back to the house. Here he was made to down several bumpers of wine before being dumped back in the saddle and sent reeling on his way. Dinner was a riotous affair with everyone drunk, defaming women and the world in extempore verse sung to the tune of pascal hymns, and they were three hours at table before staggering off to bed. The next day, Holy Saturday, began with Bussy-Rabutin and Vivonne going to wake Guiche and finding Manicamp in bed with him; it continued with a morning-after change of air in the park, an afternoon-after exchange of witty persiflage in the house, and ended with a late-night dinner even wilder than the night before. The day after that, Easter Sunday, the party broke up.

In all probability it was a word from the old attorney which set Cardinal Mazarin about their ears. The King ordered an enquiry, but Mazarin chose to go ahead and make an example of his nephew Mancini. He disinherited him and in May sent the captain of his guard to arrest him and take him to the prison of Brisach in Alsace. Word got about that the party had been a veritable orgy of obscenity, blasphemy, violence and depravity. There were rumours of horrifying crimes. A man had been killed and his thigh eaten. The Holy Eucharist had been desecrated. Things had happened too terrible to talk about. In June, Bussy-Rabutin received a letter under the King's seal commanding him to retire to his family seat in Burgundy; Vivonne was ordered to stay in Roissy; Guiche and Manicamp were banished to distant estates; and even Le Camus was deprived of his post and sent off to the provinces to do penance. Presumably Eustache was punished along with the others, but in effect there is no record of his disgrace beyond the fact that to distinguish him from his brothers he was commonly referred to thereafter as the ‘Cavoye of Roissy'. No doubt his mother's feelings on the matter were similar to Cardinal Mazarin's. She was certainly concerned to preserve the good name of her family and did continue on excellent terms with both the minister and with the Queen Mother. In July Mazarin wrote to assure her that ‘no one has told me the least thing that could harm you in my mind', and in the following January the Queen Mother wrote to her personally inviting her to the South of France for the King's wedding.

The disgrace was only temporary and none of the offenders had his future blighted by it, not even Mancini, who on the death of Mazarin in 1661 received as legacy the Duchy of Nevers which his uncle had bought in July 1659, even while he was languishing in Brisach. Eustache was allowed to become a full lieutenant in 1662, so by that time certaintly he was no longer under a cloud. Just three years after that, however, he was involved in a much more serious affair, described officially as an ‘unfortunate incident which happened to him at Saint-Germain', as a result of which his career appears to have been wrecked. On this occasion he had only one companion with him, the young Duc de Foix, and the sole account of what happened appears in a private letter written by Foix's friend the Duc d'Enghien on 19 June 1665. Enghien, son of the Prince de Condé, wrote regular letters full of court gossip to the Queen of Poland, to whom he was related by marriage and by whom he had been designated heir to the throne of Poland.

A rather disagreeable incident happened recently involving M. de Foix. As he was leaving the old castle of Saint-Germain, he met a drunken page who struck him with his stick as he went by M. de Foix cursed him, to which the page retorted and, it is even said, jabbed at his hand. M. de Foix lost his temper, drew his sword and gave the page five or six blow with the flat of it. A man named Cavoye also drew his sword and struck him too. The page, stung by the thrashing, hit back with his stick and even tried to throw it at Cavoye, who stabbed at him and killed him. The place where the business occurred makes it rather awkward. The King has ordered an enquiry and in the meantime has forbidden either of them to appear before him. I do not know if there will be any unpleasant consequences.