The Man Behind the Iron Mask (46 page)

Voltaire, like Saint-Mars, had a direct hand in the creation of the myth of the Iron Mask, but like all great myths it arose from circumstances and evolved by processes which were accidental, from semblance and coincidence, by rumour and tradition. Saint-Mars was not responsible for the original conjectures about marshals and presidents, just as the eventual confusions with Fillibert and Besmaux's wife were not of Voltaire's making. Consciously and deliberately they nourished the myth's growth: Saint-Mars gave it life, Voltaire gave it form, and in due time Dumas gave it immortality; but the story of the masked prisoner grew with a momentum of its own, accumulating and assimilating whatever stories it touched: Louvois at Pignerol removing his hat in the presence of Fouquet; Madame Le Bret in Paris buying lace and fine linen for Madame de Saint-Mars; Salves on Sainte-Marguerite trying to pass messages on shirts and plates. Possibly some dim memory of Fillibert disembarking from a galley at Marseilles, masked and under guard, led to the tradition still popular today that the Iron Mask was imprisoned for a time in the Château d'If; and no doubt a vague recollection of special precautions taken at the Bastille, when some prisoner was thought to have died of cholera or plague, led to the tradition that, when the Iron Mask died, the order was given to burn everything in his cell and scrape the walls and floor, for fear that he had left some message or sign.

In the mystery of the Iron Mask there is finally more irony than iron: he was a nonentity who became famous precisely because he was a nonentity; but though one can explain how the myth developed, one cannot explain it away. Even the best attempts to disentangle the truth and uncover the prisoner's identity have only added to the lore of the mystery. From Griffet to Brugnon, from Soulavie to Pagnol, the fact-finding as much as the fiction-making has served the same process which Saint-Mars, Voltaire and Dumas served. No solution is finally satisfying because the mystery is itself a resolution, an image formed in the collective thought-patterns of Europe in the eighteenth century and still charged with meaning today. The prisoner is no one, a man without a face or identity, type of the unknown political prisoner, victim and nonentity; but out of thirty years of his life have come three hundred years of living myth: he is anyone and everyone, a man with many faces and many identities, archetypal projection of lost liberty and void identity, of failed potential and fouled fortune. When all that there is to say about the Iron Mask has been said, when the evidence for the actual prisoner has been presented and the errors, deceptions, inventions and confusions which went to make his image have been exposed, the iconic transfiguration wrought by the mask rests nonetheless unchanged, the mystery and fascination of his iron face unimpaired.

In April 1786, a section of the underground quarries of Paris were consecrated to serve as a catacomb, and the transport began of all the bones in the cemetries and charnel-houses of Paris. The graves of Saint-Paul were emptied along with the rest, and for fifteen months cart-loads of jumbled skeletons were poured down chutes into the subterranean passageways. There went the remains of the masked prisoner, and with them the remains of Saint-Mars and Louvois, of Avedick, Molière, Cavoye and six million others, sundered and sorted by thigh-bone and skull into six thousand cubic metres of stacked bones. The myth and the mystery of the Iron Mask is as much this simple fact as the simple fiction that three years later his skeleton was found still masked and chained in some abandoned dungeon in the depths of the Bastille.

NOTES

1
.   Nor is this end of the problem. The name ‘Eustache Danger' is misleading because it appears to be, like any ordinary name today, composed of a first name ‘Eustache' with a family name ‘Danger'. and that, indeed, is the way most writers on the Iron Mask, including myself, have used it. In the context of all that has been written on the subject, it is convenient to do so, but it is incorrect, as Stanislas Brugnon made clear at the Cannes Symposium in 1987. In all the government dispatches where he is mentioned, the prisoner is referred to as ‘Eustache' or as ‘Eustache Danger' but never as ‘Danger'. In the 17th century first names were not known and used as they are today. People were referred to by their family names or the names of their titled estates. Thus ‘Eustache', we may be sure, was not a first name but a family name, and ‘Danger', originally ‘d'Angers' (=coming from the town of Angers), was a defining suffix to distinguish one family or person called Eustache from another. In the case of the prisoner, it is possible that the suffix had been added to his name to distinguish him from another valet called Eustache.

2
.   These figures are taken from the regular payment-orders made to Saint-Mars by the Royal Treasury, the original documents of which may be consulted today in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

3
.   
his invention
: In 17th century Provence it was generally believed that a man whose life had been destroyed by ill fortune had been cursed or ‘masked' (Provençal =
enmasqué
) by a witch (Provençal =
uno masco
). It is not impossible, therefore, that members of the prison staff who came from Provence described the prisoner as masked (in the sense of being cursed) long before he was masked (in the sense of having his face hidden), and that it was from hearing him so decsribed that Saint-Mars got his idea of using an actual mask.

4
.   
the prisoners who were then at Pignerol
: There were four state prisoners at Pignerol in March 1694, but of them only Matthioli and his valet remained of the original four left there by Saint-Mars when he moved to Exiles in 1681. Dubreuil was liberated soon after the Treaty of Regensburg in August 1684, and the Dominican monk died in January 1694. The two new prisoners were Breton, imprisoned there in November 1682, and Herse, moved there from the Bastille in August 1687. Little is known of Breton except that Louvois described his crime as nothing more than ‘a knavery' and that he died still a prisoner on Sainte-Marguerite in August 1700. Herse was a tailor's apprentice who was arrested and imprisoned at the age of fifteen for declaring that he was ready to assassinate the King if he could find someone willing to pay him for doing so. Official correspondence shows that in 1689 he tried to commit suicide and in 1692 to escape. No more is known of him except that he was still a prisoner on Sainte-Marguerite in 1701. As for Matthioli, he died in May 1694 soon after his arrival on Sainte-Marguerite. His unfortunate valet, who lived out his life under the prison-name ‘Rousseau', died on the island in December 1699.

5
.   The grammatical sequence in French, more obvious than in English, leaves no doubt that
you can
governs
bring
as much as it governs
make
.

6
.   
mask of steel
: There is no reason to believe that Saint-Mars went to the trouble and expense of having a steel mask made. No doubt he simply made use of some old vizored helmet he found in the Château d'Exiles. The château had been the home of the Lesduiguières family for 87 years, from 1595 until 1682 when Saint-Mars received his command, and one may be sure that amongst the furniture which the Lesduiguières left behind were bits and pieces of display armour commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries to furnish the halls of great houses.

7
.   
Iron Mask
: the first published use of the name was made in 1750 by Charles de Fieux de Mouhy in a sensational novel which though called
Le Masque de fer
had nothing to do with the masked prisoner guarded by Saint-Mars. The preface to Mouhy's book is not without interest however. To give some pretence of verisimilitude to the extravagant story he was to relate, he gave examples of four more Iron Mask stories, all fictions presented as fact:

The Turks tell the story that one of their emperors, wishing to be sure upon his throne, had his eldest son locked up in the Seven Towers, and fearing that the gentleness and majesty manifest in the features of that prince might seduce his guards and fill them with compassion, he covered his face with an iron mask made in such a way that it was impossible even for the most skilled craftsman to break or open it. There is also a tradition that in the time of Cromwell, a Scots prince was sent to the islands of the archipelago, and in order that he would not be recognized the method just described was employed. In the time of Dom Pedre, the cruel King of Spain, a father used the same device on one of his sons who had dishonoured him by a shameful act. At Stockholm they say that a prince named Jean Theull, who was jealous of his wife, made use of this method to achieve his ends: the day after his marriage, he put a sleeping-powder into his wife's drink, and while she was asleep he enclosed her face in an iron mask made almost like a helmet: when his unfortunate princess awoke he made her believe that the misfortune which had happened to her was a punishment from Heaven for having gloried too much in her own beauty and inspired love in men other than himself.

POSTSCRIPT

T
hat the myth of the Iron Mask is still capable of new growth, with proliferations as fantastic as ever flourished before, will be apparent to any visitor to Cannes who troubles to take the narrow street which climbs steeply from the bus-station beside the port to the Tower of Mont Chevalier, on the hilltop above the old town. At an abrupt right-angle bend half-way up this street, one comes upon another tower not immediately recognizable as such because it is attached to an apartment building of the same height. This tower is of white stone, recently restored, and has an arched gateway, closed by an iron-strapped door, giving on to the street. Above the arch there is a barred window and below this window, fixed to the keystone of the arch, is a mask-like head of iron, larger than life-size. A marble plaque on the wall of the apartment building reads as follows:

Tower of the Mask. 12th century. Watchtower of the Citadel, defended against the sieges of the Berbers by the valiant militia of Le Suquet. The Iron Mask escaped from the island of Sainte-Marguerite to take refuge here (the prisoner of the Bastille being nothing more than an unfortunate substitute). In the course of circumstances which remain mysterious he died here after a long period of meditation and prayer, having forgiven his persecutors. Dimitte et Dimittemini. (Forgive and you will be forgiven. Luke vi 37.) Passer-by halt your step and meditate upon the sufferings of this tormented man whose ghost on certain nights haunts this place.

On the tower itself there is another plaque which reads: ‘The historical discoveries made in this tower as well as its restoration are due to Comte Michel de Lacour, 10 rue Mont Chevalier, Résidence de la Citadelle, Cannes.' The address given is that of the apartment building where the late Count used to live on the top floor with direct access to the tower through a sliding bookshelf in his living-room. The eight-foot tall white marble statues which crown the tower, a Venus inspired by Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
and a Neptune copied from Giambologna's Neptune-fountain in Bologna, were placed there by the Count himself, who had them made in Italy for that special purpose.

The tower has been in the possession of the Count's family for many years, as has also a splendid oil-painting, handsomely displayed in the entrance to the apartment, which represents the Iron Mask in the manner of a portrait. In this picture the celebrated prisoner is shown in front of a barred window, wearing a red velvet robe with white lace at wrist and throat, his head covered by a cowl of black velvet which hangs to the shoulder in a fringe of tassels and black lace. The cowl is altogether unusual in design; as well as openings for the eyes it has an opening below the nose to expose the mouth and chin. To anyone familiar with portraits of Louis XIV, the small eyes and full lips, the thin moustache and double chin, are immediately recognizable. The painting is unsigned, but according to the Count is the work of Nicolas de Largillière or of Hyacinthe Rigaud, both famous portrait-painters of the time of Louis XIV.

The story of the Count's ‘historical discoveries' appeared in the national press in January 1978. The facts as reported by the Count, excluding any deductions he made or anyone else might make from them, are as follows. In spring 1977 he embarked upon major restoration work of the tower, and in the course of this his workers discovered an underground chamber containing the skeleton of a man, incomplete but including the skull, along with a gentleman's highheeled silk shoe of the time of Louis XIV, fragments of black lace and velvet, part of a walking-stick with a silver pommel and a book of meditation published in 1675.

The Count took the fragments of velvet and lace to a dressmaker who, having pieced them together, made a copy of the original article of clothing, which turned out to be a cowl identical to the one worn by the Iron Mask in the oil-painting. The Count then had a study made of the skull, and a comparison made between the findings of that study and the waxwork of Louis XIV's head which the sculptor Antoine Benoist modelled from life. The scientists who made the comparison found enough characteristics in common to uphold the thesis that the owner of the skull and the subject of the waxwork were identical twins.

Soon after he had disturbed the bones, the Count became ill and his neighbours came to him with stories of strange noises heard and strange lights seen in the tower at night. The Count returned the bones to the chamber and had it sealed up again, while one of his neighbours brought a priest to exorcise the place. The Count recovered, but the nocturnal manifestations continued.

Until the Count's death in 1994, the silk shoe, the silver pommel and the book of meditation were all displayed in his living-room, as was the copy of the mask-like cowl. But the fragments of velvet and lace which remained of the original cowl, like the skull and bones, could no longer be seen; having made the copy of the cowl, the dressmaker threw the original fragments away.