The Man Behind the Iron Mask (43 page)

Saint-Mars knew differently. The secret prisoner was ‘only a valet'. His importance lay not in anything he was, but in something he knew. No doubt it struck Saint-Mars as ironical that, while his two other prisoners were served by valets, he personally was obliged to fetch and carry for this man who was ‘only a valet'. But apart from occasional bouts of illness, Danger gave no trouble. Unlike the prisoners of rank, he was meek and acquiescent. Indeed he was so obedient and sensible that in February 1672 Saint-Mars thought he could trust him enough to put him with Lauzun as valet and spy. Louvois did not approve of the idea, but Saint-Mars saw little sense in trying to persuade valets to serve in his prison when one of his prisoners was actually a valet and eventually in January 1675 he won the minister's approval to have Danger act valet to Fouquet. Seven years later in the isolation of Exiles, he must have pondered with amazement the strange turn of fate which had transformed him from the commander of the state prison of Pignerol, the celebrated keeper of Fouquet and Lauzun, into the governor of a run-down fortress in the middle of nowhere, the gaoler of two wretched valets.

The name Saint-Mars was the sword-name of Benigne d'Auvergne, assumed by him when as a boy of fourteen he was enrolled as an army cadet. Both his parents died when he was a child and he was raised by an uncle, Gilles de Biot de Blainvilliers, who packed him off to the army at the age of twelve. In 1650, when he was twenty-four, he was given a place in the First Company of the King's Musketeers and, though he was thirty-four before he was promoted corporal and thirty-eight before he was made sergeant, he could flatter himself that to achieve rank at all in the Musketeers, where every man was a gentleman, was a mark of some distinction for a man with neither birth nor money behind him. It was as a sergeant that, in December 1664, he was appointed governor of the State Prison of Pignerol and he was recommended for that post by the commander of his company, d'Artagnan, who recognized in him all the qualities necessary for a gaoler. He was the perfect subordinate, ready to carry out the orders of his superiors no matter how arbitrary, and to the letter, without question, hesitation or scruple. He was moreover a man who knew his place in society and the place of others, the rights and duties of class and office: an ideal warden for prisoners of rank. As it happened, the honours and responsibilities of his new post brought out the worst in him as well as the best; he was vain, ambitious, ruthless and rapacious, but his masters quickly came to believe that he could be kept in line and firmly handled so long as they valued his services and proved it with hard cash.

Soon after his arrival in Pignerol, he became friendly with a certain Damorezan who was the military commissioner there and a trusted agent of Louvois. Damorezan had married the daughter of an apothecary named Collot who had two other daughters, as beautiful by all accounts as they were stupid. Saint-Mars married one and a secretary of Louvois, named Dufresnoy, married the other. After this union in triplicate of the Collot sisters with Louvois men, Damorezan, Dufresnoy and Saint-Mars, it was not altogether a surprise when one of the sisters went on to union with Louvois himself. In 1670, Madame Dufresnoy became the mistress of her husband's master and, since her husband was accommodating, everyone in the family, including Saint-Mars, could reap the benefit. Four years later, Louvois had the woman of his bed created Lady of the Queen's Bed, which for all the smothered laughter it produced at court, gave her immense standing and influence. She was flattered on all sides and responded, according to La Fare, ‘with all the insolence that can be derived from beauty and prosperity when combined with low birth and limited intelligence.'

The 24th of August 1669 was a providential day for Saint-Mars: he received not only the custody of Eustache Danger, but also possession of the Château de Palteau. An uncle, Cantien Garrot, died that day and left him both the château and the governorship of Sens. Fortune chose to make Saint-Mars a man of substance, but a wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. Within ten years of his appointment to Pignerol, he had exploited every possible channel for advancement and had made himself not only rich but noble. As well as being governor of Pignerol prison and a sergeant in the Musketeers, he had half a dozen lucrative positions as non-resident governor of towns and forts elsewhere in France and was captain of his own Free Company. It was to be expected that on top of his regular salary and frequent bonuses he would, like all other gaolers, make money out of the allowances supplied for his prisoners, but he quite surpassed all precedent in the field. With prisoners of rank, where the allowance for food alone was in the region of 7,000 livres a year, there was a great deal of money to be made, but no sum however petty was too small for Saint-Mars to pass up, and he stole from all his prisoners, even those with a minimum allowance. What the authorities objected to was not this, however, but his continual attempts to gain even more from the government by claiming false expenses. Louvois indulged his greed with enormous gifts of money and even so was obliged to admonish him repeatedly for cheating on his day-to-day accounts. By 1673, he had enough property to apply for and receive letters of nobility.

The driving force behind Saint-Mars was not a need to make money, however. No doubt at the beginning a fear of poverty played some part in his voracious appetite, but the desire to enjoy the wealth he amassed played no part at all. Throughout his life he never spent more than a few days in the magnificent house he owned at Palteau, nor on any of the other estates he managed to acquire. He lived out his life in prisons, a virtual prisoner himself, and preferred to finish his days in the Bastille rather than in Palteau. What impelled him to make money, and to go on making money when he was already rich, was the desperate and deluded belief that a man of substance is a man of standing; his striving for wealth became an obsession as a direct consequence of his frustrated need for prestige. ‘My lord,' he wrote to Louvois on 27 February 1672, ‘I take the liberty to inform you that what could make me live here in health would be a little honour. I have been a sergeant for so long that I am the doyen of the lot … If you don't have the kindness, my lord, to remind His Majesty of my seniority, I will die what I am.' To quieten him, Louvois sent a bonus of 6,000 livres by return post, but money was not enough and on 18 December 1675 Saint-Mars repeated the same plea: ‘I beg you in grace, my lord, to accord me some mark of honour or else allow me to go and break my head in the army.' Again Louvois put him off with a large sum of money, but in the following year a promotion was finally agreed. To be elevated to the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Musketeers was certainly an honour, but, when the recipient had been made to wait until the age of fifty, it must have seemed too little and too late. Honour was a good deal more difficult to acquire than money and unhappily for Saint-Mars there were honours of rank and status which no amount of money could buy.

Saint-Mars, the self-made man, was far and away the most influential member of his family, as is proved by the fact that so many of his relatives turned to him for a job. When he took up the post at Pignerol, he brought with him two cousins, both former musketeers, to serve as his lieutenants, one of whom was Blainvilliers, the son of his guardian. Later when he had established himself he found positions in the prison guard for two of his nephews, sons of his sister Marguerite, who had married a man of little means by the name of Eloi de Formanoir de Corbé. He stayed at Pignerol for sixteen years during which time his wife bore him two sons.

In the eyes of his own family and the lowly creatures he employed, Saint-Mars was all that he wished to be, a member of the wealthy and powerful élite, but, in the eyes of the élite, he was an upstart. The governor-general of the city of Pignerol, himself a marquis, resented the fact that such a low-born, low-grade officer was not answerable to him, and so refused to accept him in society. The snub hurt Saint-Mars where he felt it most, his inflated self-esteem, but taking the stand that at Pignerol he was no-one's subordinate served to give him standing of a kind anyway; and as things turned out, for his last three years at Pignerol he was in his element. The French acquisition of Casale, with all the complications which that entailed, brought him into close relationship with men of mark like d'Estrades and Catinat, and the opening of the prison to the families and friends of Fouquet and Lauzun brought him into regular contact with visitors of quality. At his request, Louvois even authorized him to play host to these visitors and have them dine with Fouquet and Lauzun at his own table in the company of Madame de Saint-Mars. To all appearances he had made the grade, had become a man of position and influence, accepted by people of birth and breeding, and he enjoyed the rôle immensely.

In retrospect, those were palmy days. Exiles by contrast was a grim, isolated spot where he felt neglected, thwarted and depressed. Technically, in his new job, he was the governor of a fort not a prison, but the fort was too far behind the frontier and the times to have any military significance. Without prisoners of rank to give him importance, without friends of rank to give him reassurance, he lacked direction and purpose. He did not like anything about the Exiles job, except the money, and his health as well as his spirits suffered. Dufresnoy, the accommodating husband, thrived meanwhile, but not Damorezan. Like Saint-Mars, he had been swindling the government for every penny he could get, and in 1683 a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of embezzlement. Fortunately for him, Louvois tipped him off in time and he was able to take refuge with Saint-Mars before escaping to Turin. After the achievement and promise of Pignerol, Exiles was a wretched and humiliating anticlimax. Anyone else in such a spot, aged almost sixty as Saint-Mars then was, would have recognized that he had been put out to grass, but Saint-Mars pestered his superiors for a better post and even sent his wife to Paris to petition Louvois on his behalf.

The transfer to Sainte-Marguerite was a merciful reprieve, and Saint-Mars exploited it at once and to the full. From the moment he arrived on the island to carry out his preliminary inspection, he sought to make up the ground he had lost at Exiles by impressing everyone with a show of his importance. The secrecy and security surrounding Danger had once intrigued and excited the people of Pignerol. Their curiosity had been aroused by circumstances beyond the control of Saint-Mars, but he had enjoyed the attention it brought him, the aura of mystery and significance he acquired as the secret prisoner's keeper. On Sainte-Marguerite that situation was repeated, but this time because Saint-Mars deliberately aroused that curiosity, spreading stories about his prisoner's importance before anyone had any reason to know that the man even existed. Tourists like the Abbé Mauvans, stopping off at the island while the prisoner was still actually at Exiles, heard all about the ‘unknown prisoner' who was to be ‘transported with such great precaution' and who would get ‘a pistol-ball in the head' if ever he tried ‘to speak out his name'. They also heard about the new prison which was being built for him ‘connected to the governor's lodging' so that the governor himself would ‘be almost his only gaoler and guard'.

As implied in this version of things, the important thing about the prisoner was his identity and, since the authorities were prepared to kill him if he attempted to reveal his name, there was every reason to believe that his identity was one which even ordinary people could be expected to know. Such an impression of the prisoner's importance was altogether false. In the first place it was not true that there was an order to kill him if he should try to reveal his name. The only government order with any resemblance to this pretence was given at the time of the prisoner's arrival at Pignerol when Louvois warned Saint-Mars that he must ‘threaten to kill him' if ever he tried to speak about anything other than the bare necessities of life; as it was the prisoner had gone on to reveal his secret to Fouquet, La Rivière and Lauzun without suffering any such dire consequence. Moreover, the name Eustache Danger would have meant nothing to anyone anyway, except perhaps Lauzun, and it was not even certain that seven years after his last meeting with him Lauzun would have remembered the name of a mere valet. Even before moving to Sainte-Marguerite with his prisoner, Saint-Mars had the people of the region agog with expectation, convinced that his prisoner was someone of such fame and consequence that the authorities would stop at nothing to conceal his identity; and in May, when finally he arrived with his prisoner, he staged a show sensational enough to satisfy those expectations.

To transport Danger from Exiles, the most discreet form of conveyance would have been a litter, as demonstrated by its success for the journey to Exiles, but Saint-Mars wanted something else. ‘I think the most secure mode of transport for conducting him to the islands would be a sedan-chair covered in oilcloth,' he wrote to Louvois. ‘It will be less troublesome than a litter which can often get broken.' Outside of major cities, the use of sedan-chairs was in effect, albeit not in principle, restricted to people of only the highest rank, but Louvois, having no reason to suspect that Saint-Mars would be anything but discreet, did not object. In all probability he assumed that it was his intention to escape notice by avoiding main roads and towns and there was no doubt that a sedan-chair would have been more manageable than a litter on small roads or cross-country. In the event, however, Saint-Mars chose to go by main roads and through main towns, stopping two days in Briançon and long enough in Grasse for the prisoner's appearance to make such an impression that tales of ‘the guise under which he was seen' were reported to the Abbé Mauvans. If in the region of Cannes any doubts had remained that the fort of Sainte-Marguerite was to receive a prisoner of the highest importance, they were dispelled the moment the prisoner arrived in Grasse, carried in a sedan-chair by two teams of porters who, so far as anyone could discover, had carried him all the way from Pignerol. Far from trying to pass with his prisoner unnoticed, as presumably Louvois supposed he would, Saint-Mars had done everything to draw attention to him and give the impression that he was both famous and noble.