The Man Behind the Iron Mask (37 page)

These papers are three letters dated 19 July, one to Captain de Vauroy, the arresting officer, another to his superior, the governor of Dunkirk, and the other to Saint-Mars, all from Louvois, and two warrants dated 26 July, one for Dauger's arrest addressed to Vauroy and the other for Dauger's imprisonment addressed to Saint-Mars, both signed by the King and Michel Le Tellier, who was the father of Louvois and shared with him the post of Minister of War. It was normal procedure for all dispatches and documents to be recorded in a register which was confidential to the ministry of origin, and for all royal warrants to be recorded again in a Register of the King's Orders, which was seen by all ministers and countersigned by at least one. The letters to Vauroy and the governor of Dunkirk were not recorded in the Ministry Register, and though the letter to Saint-Mars was recorded, the name Eustache Dauger, given in the letter, was omitted. The royal warrants were recorded in the Ministry Register, though there again Eustache Dauger's name was omitted, but in the Register of the King's Orders they were not recorded at all.

In all likelihood, Duvivier argues, the arrest of Eustache was concealed from Colbert and the reason for this was that he was a Cavoye. Presumably Colbert discovered the truth only because Lauzun, who also was a Colbert man, made a secret passage to Fouquet's room and discovered Eustache there. Presumably too, it was Lauzun who, acting for Colbert, persuaded Eustache with promises of freedom and reward, to do the deed. At that date, the only human companionship Eustache had known in ten years of imprisonment had been with Fouquet, and yet he killed him. Whatever the motive, it was a monstrous act and could only have been carried out by a cold-blooded killer, who was already an expert in the use of poison. The man who was the Iron Mask, Duvivier concludes, was that kind of man.

In 1680 all Paris was talking of poison. A special tribunal, the Chambre Ardente, had been set up the year before to deal with a wave of suspected poisonings. In the course of the interrogations it had been revealed that an underworld traffic in poisons, in which people of the highest rank were implicated, had been in business for more than fifteen years. Duvivier, speculating that in the transcripts of this tribunal he might find some mention of Dauger, searched the government archives. Unfortunately the records are incomplete. Minutes were kept of 865 interrogations, but the King ordered a cover-up in the midst of the proceedings, dismissed the tribunal before its job was done and personally burned all documents which incriminated anyone intimately connected with himself. Duvivier nonetheless found something. In June 1679, during the final interrogation of a man called Belot, one of the King's bodyguards, convicted as a poisoner and sentenced to be broken that day on the wheel, the name Auger was mentioned. The magistrate asked Belot about his relations with ‘Auger, the surgeon, who lived in the cour de Saint-Eloi', and if it was ‘from Auger that he got the opium and other drugs he needed.' Belot replied that he knew Auger, but had not received any drugs from him. He said that Auger's mistress lived in the rue Soly above another convicted prisoner, La Cheron, who had been sentenced to the stake, and was the friend of yet another convicted prisoner, Duval, who was sentenced to the wheel. In the second phase of the interrogation, Belot was put to the torture and among other questions was asked ‘what he knew about Auger and what business they had together.' In his agony he swore he knew nothing, and Auger's name was not mentioned again.

At first sight, any possible link between Dauger, as the poisoner of Fouquet, and Auger, the surgeon suspected of trafficking in poison, appears slight. When Belot was questioned about Auger, Dauger had been in prison for ten years and there seems no reason to believe that Belot was talking about someone he had not seen for so long. Nevertheless, as Duvivier demonstrates, he was not talking about a relationship of yesterday. He was referring to a time when Auger's mistress was living above La Cheron in the rue Soly, and yet when La Cheron was arrested in 1679 she was no longer living at that address. Duvivier also finds something of significance in the address Belot gives for Auger. La Cour de Saint-Eloi was the name of a villa in the village of Picpus on the outskirts of Paris and in the late 1660s this villa belonged to the Marquise de Brinvilliers, the most notorious poisoner of them all, brought to justice and executed three years before the tribunal was even set up. She had poisoned her father in 1666, killing him slowly over a period of eight months, having first tested the effects of her poisons upon sick people she visited in hospital. In 1670 she had gone on to poison her two brothers. If it was the late 1660s that Belot was talking about, then in addition to a possible link between Auger and Dauger, there was a definite link between Madame de Brinvilliers and Auger. Duvivier then squared his argument with evidence of a third link, one between Madame de Brinvilliers and Dauger. They were apparently related: a cousin of the Cavoye family was married to a cousin of Madame de Brinvilliers. At the time of her arrest Madame de Brinvilliers was carrying a written confession of all her crimes, including a list of sexual sins in which she specified an adulterous relationship with an unmarried cousin. The description is vague to say the least, but it would fit Dauger.

In February 1680, the interrogations of the poisoners had taken such a turn that it was necessary to enlarge the competence of the tribunal to deal with cases of sacrilege and profanation, witchcraft and devil-worship. In October, the Abbé Guiborg, sacristan of the church of Saint-Marcel, was questioned about a black mass he had said at the Palais Royal and in his reply he claimed that he had been engaged to do it by a surgeon. He did not know the name of this surgeon, but described him as ‘a tall well-made young man', who had his practice in the Saint-Victor district and his home ‘with his brother in the suburb of Saint-Germain in a big street opposite the great gate of the Charity Hospital.' In the following month a sorcerer named Le Sage was also asked about this particular mass. Although no record exists of what he said, La Reynie, the chief of police who conducted the interrogation, wrote to Louvois on 16 November to say that the mass had been said for ‘the late Madame and against Monsieur.' The date of the mass was not reported, but it is possible to fix it with some certainty. By ‘the late Madame' was meant Henrietta of England, the first wife of the King's brother, and since she had died in June 1670 the mass had certainly taken place before that. What is more, the authorities clearly assumed that Le Sage knew all about the mass, though they were aware that he had been arrested in March 1668 and not set at liberty again until two years after Madame's death. It may be safely assumed that the authorities would not have questioned him unless the mass had taken place before March 1668 when he was in a position to know about it, and it is known as a matter of fact that Eustache Dauger was still at large at that time.

In Duvivier's view, of course, the unnamed surgeon who acted as go-between for Madame and Guiborg was the surgeon known to Belot as Auger and the prisoner known to us as Dauger. As evidence for this he turned once more to the address provided by the witness. The Charity Hospital was in the rue des Saints-Pères, and from early in 1668 Eustache Dauger had lived with his brother Louis in the rue de Bourbon which was a new street giving onto the rue des Saints-Pères. Neither the house-front nor the street-end was ‘opposite' the gate of the hospital, it is true, but at that time the suburb of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was still predominantly open land with half-built streets and new mansions speading into the countryside. It is perfectly possible that a view from the house could have given the impression that it was ‘opposite' the hospital. In support of Duvivier's argument, it is also worth pointing out that most of the known companions of Eustache Dauger were part of the intimate circle of friends surrounding Monsieur and Madame: Guiche, Madame de Monaco, Manicamp, Foix, Mancini and, one might add, Lorraine. Monsieur had homosexual affairs with at least three of them: Guiche, Mancini and Lorraine; while Madame had a passionate heterosexual relationship with Guiche and a furtive homosexual liaison with Madame de Monaco.

When Le Sage was arrested in March 1668, it was with a partner in crime, the Abbé Mariette of the church of Saint-Severin, and they were brought to trial together at the Châtelet court on a charge of sorcery and sacrilege. Specifically they were accused of consecrating petitions and aphrodisiacs during holy mass, of making ritual conjurations and magical concoctions by the light of the moon, but both denied that they had done anything so serious. They said that a number of wealthy ladies had come to them, hoping by magic charms to increase their natural charms, and that they had exploited these women for money, giving them simple blessings or harmless powders. Among their clientèle had been several ladies of the court who had hoped with supernatural aid to win the King away from his then mistress, Louise de La Vallière, and according to Mariette these had included the Comtesse de Soissons, the Duchesse de Vivonne an the Marquise de Montespan. To allow the names of such illustrious ladies to be linked to such wretched proceedings, especially since the last-named appeared to have been successful in her endeavour, was a responsibility no judge would dare to assume, and as it was the presiding judges had even more pertinent reasons for curtailing the trial and hushing it up. The president of the Châtelet court was, by his wife, Mariette's first cousin. He refused to delve any further into the matter or to make any pronouncement on Mariette and referred the case to the Tournelle court with the recommendation that Le Sage be condemned to the galleys.

Mariette's cousin was not the only judge with a personal interest in the case. The president of the Tournelle court was, by a strange coincidence, the father of the Duchesse de Vivonne who, as it happens was married to the brother of the Marquise de Montespan. In the new interrogations, Mariette did not mention the names of these two distinguished ladies again, and it was presumably because he did not that he drew such a mild sentence: banishment for nine years, altered to confinement in the asylum of Saint-Lazare, from which as things turned out he was allowed to escape that same year. Unfortunately for Le Sage, the provisory sentence that he should spend the rest of his life as a galley-slave was upheld, but as later events proved he too had powerful friends behind the scenes. In May 1673, he was released from his galley at Genoa. On whose authority, no one could ever find out, not even La Reynie, who rearrested him in 1679 and ordered an investigation.

This cover-up of 1668 is all the more significant when one knows that the Comtesse de Soissons was later exposed as a poisoner and had to flee the country, and that both the Marquise de Montespan and the Duchesse de Vivonne were later proved to be Satanists. To preserve the love of the King, Madame de Montespan lay naked on an altar with a chalice on her belly while the Abbé Guiborg performed the rites of a black mass between her open legs, slitting a baby's throat and mixing its blood with his semen. Madame de Vivonne did the same more than once in the hope of winning the King from Madame de Montespan and, when that proved ineffective, pledged her soul to the devil in a written contract. It was to hide such abominations that the King suppressed the tribunal in 1682 and burned all the incriminating documents. The truth only remains on record because, unknown to him, La Reynie kept private notes of some of the interrogations. It is difficult to establish exactly when it was that Madame de Montespan and Madame de Vivonne abandoned themselves to the horrors of the black mass. However, the fact remains that they were already involved with Le Sage before March 1668 and he was already involved with the Abbé Guiborg, who at that time was engaged by the mysterious surgeon to perform a black mass for Madame.

The final links in Duvivier's chain of argument reach all the way back to the Roissy affair in 1659, the host of that notorious party being the Duc de Vivonne, brother of Madame de Montespan and husband of Madame de Vivonne. One might include here also the extra link that in 1673, at the time of Le Sage's mysterious liberation at Genoa, Vivonne was Captain-General of the Galleys and acting Admiral of the Fleet. The Château de Roissy originally belonged to Madame de Vivonne's father, the president of the Tournelle court in 1668, and it came to Vivonne in the dowry of his wife. In Duvivier's view it was here, in the home of that woman who later sold her soul to the devil, that all Eustache Dauger's problems originated. The house was evil and in that fateful Holy Week he too became evil. Whatever it was that horrified people about the party, ‘the profanation of Good Friday was the least of the impieties committed', and Duvivier would have us believe that it was something much more serious than the baptism of a pig. The rôle played by Eustache in the party is not known, but that he took a key part in whatever crime was committed is demonstrated by the fact that the title of ‘Roissy' was thereafter attached to his name. Significantly too the only other person who was unable to be rid of that title was the Abbé Le Camus, who later in life, as a prince of the Church, was called by his enemies the ‘Cardinal of Roissy'. Le Camus had not even stayed for the party and yet people assumed, for all his denials, that he had been there. From this, one might assume that, whatever the crime was, it required the participation of a priest, something which is unnecessary for the sacrament of baptism.

The priest who was there, Duvivier suggests, was very likely the parish priest of Roissy, and he was most certainly a sorcerer and a Satanist. The Abbé de Choisy, who was a contemporary of Dauger and the rest, included the following story about this priest in his
Mémoires pour servir l'Historie de Louis XIV
:

One of my friends, a Gascon, named Maniban de Ram … told me one day that the parish priest of Roissy had shown him visions in a glass: a young lady he knew in Toulouse who was weeping because he was far away. I laughed at his credulity, but he offered to let me witness it for myself, and I kept him to his word. He arranged a dinner-party at which the parish priest was to be the big attraction, and he invited some ladies who were curious. I arrived a quarter of an hour before dinner was served. I was announced and in I went. The sorcerer stiffened at the sight of me, I don't know why, and said in a whisper to Maniban that he would do nothing so long as I was there. No amount of persuasion could change his mind. Maniban was finally obliged to tell me so and, not wishing to disappoint the ladies by depriving them of their entertainment, I left. The next day they assured me that they had seen the devil or something like.