The Man Behind the Iron Mask (6 page)

This last remark was in reference to a story in the same connection which had been published earlier that year in the same periodical.

An English surgeon named Nelaton who used to go regularly to the Procope Coffee House, recounted on numerous occasions that during the time he was chief apprentice in a surgeon's shop at the Saint-Antoine gate, he was sent to bleed a prisoner in the Bastille. The governor took him to a room where there was a man who complained a great deal of pain in his head which was enveloped in a towel knotted behind his neck. He recognized from the man's accent that he was English.

The man responsible for this story was Poullain de Saint-Foix, a former cavalry officer who had established a literary reputation for himself with a string of fashionable plays. He was a much better duellist than he was a writer, but since he threatened to cut off the ears of anyone who criticized his work, his reputation was equally good in both.

Much later, in his
Essais Historiques sur Paris
, Saint-Fox offered two more pieces of information about the Iron Mask not previously published. The first referred to Palteau's report that, when the mysterious prisoner died, drugs were put into the coffin. ‘These drugs were unnecessary,' Saint-Foix remarked, ‘if the story is true that the day after the burial someone got the gravedigger to disinter the body so he could see it, and in place of the head they found a large stone.' Where he got this story from he didn't say, and no one dared to ask. Nor did he feel obliged to give the origin of his second revelation:

It is quite certain that Madame Le Bret, mother of the late M. Le Bret, the First President and Intendant of Provence, used to choose the finest linen and the most beautiful lace in Paris at the request of Madame de Saint-Mars, her close friend, and send it to her on Sainte-Marguerite Island for this prisoner, which confirms the account given by M. de Voltaire.

Still in 1769, however, the year Fréron published Palteau's letter, a book appeared in Liège which established beyond reasonable doubt the foundation in fact of all the wild rumours and reports. The book was
Traité des différentes sortes de preuves qui servent établir la verité de l'histoire
and the author was Henri Griffet, a Jesuit who had been chaplain of the Bastille from 1745 until the Jesuit Order was banned from France in 1764. He was a man of impressive intelligence and learning even for a Jesuit, a teacher of humanities at the top Jesuit school in Paris when only seventeen and for some time Preacher in Ordinary to the King. He had already published a number of works on theology and history before his treatise appeared. The evidence he brought to light was documentary, drawn from a manuscript record of unquestionable validity which still exists and may be consulted today in the Bibliothéque de l'Arsenal in Paris: a personal journal of prison business kept by Etienne Du Junca, King's Lieutenant and second in command at the Bastille from 1690 to 1706.

‘Of all that has been said or written about this man in the mask,' Griffet wrote, ‘nothing can be compared for certitude to the authority of this journal. It is an authentic piece of evidence; a man on the spot, an eye-witness, who reports what he has seen in a journal written entirely in his own hand where he noted down each day what was happening under his own eyes'. Du Junca dated all his entries and in the course of 1698 included the following memorandum:

On Thursday 18 September at three o'clock in the afternoon M. de Saint-Mars, governor of the Château de la Bastille, arrived to take up his appointment coming from his governorship of the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and Honorat, having with him in his litter a longtime prisoner of his he had with him in Pignerol, whom he always keeps masked and whose name is not spoken. As soon as he got down from the litter, the prisoner was put into the First Room of the Basinière Tower to await nightfall, then at 9 p.m. he was moved by myself and M. de Rosarges, one of the sergeants brought by the governor, to the Third Room of the Bertaudière Tower which I had furnished some days before his arrival following instructions received from M. de Saint-Mars. The prisoner will be served and looked after by M. de Rosarges. The governor has charge of his upkeep.

No further news of the prisoner was given by Du Junca until five years later when he made the following entry:

On the same day, Monday 19 November 1703, the unknown prisoner in the mask of black velvet who was brought here by the governor, M. de Saint-Mars, when he came from the island of Sainte-Marguerite, and has been in his charge for a long time, died at ten o'clock in the evening without suffering any serious illness, having felt just a little sick after mass the day before. Surprised by death he did not receive the sacraments, but M. Giraut, the chaplain, had heard his confession the day before and exhorted him a little before he died. This prisoner unknown, who had been in prison for such a long time, was buried on Tuesday 20 November at 4 p.m. in the cemetery of the parish church of Saint-Paul. On the mortuary register he was given a name of as little account as the names of M. de Rosarges, major, and M. Reil, surgeon, who witnessed the register.

In the margin of this note, Du Junca then added a postscriptum: ‘I have since learned that on the register he was called M. de Marchiel and that 40 livres were paid for his burial.'

Griffet produced corroboration for Du Junca's account by quoting another document: the prisoner's burial certificate. ‘On the 19th, Marchioly, aged forty-five years or thereabouts, died in the Bastille and his body was buried in the cemetery of the parish church of Saint-Paul on the 20th of this month in the presence of M. Rosage, major of the Bastille, and M. Reghle, surgeon-major of the Bastille, whose signatures follow. Rosarges. Reilhe.' Prison staff and parish priests were evidently not chosen for their prowess in orthography – ‘Rosage, Rosarges; Reil, Reghle, Reilhe; Marchiel, Marchioly' – but, as Griffet pointed out, the name given to the prisoner for the burial register was pure invention anyway. It was standard practice to conceal the identity of even well-known prisoners in public records, so one may be quite sure that a false name and age were given for a prisoner so secret as to be a mystery even to the governor's second in command.

Du Junca never saw the prisoner's face, but he saw the mask he wore well enough to know that it was made not of iron but of black velvet. Nor did he notice anything exceptional in the form of the mask; no spring mechanism to move the jaw, presumably no jaw-piece at all, just a normal loo-mask which covered the brow, cheeks and nose. ‘It is unlikely,' Griffet concluded, ‘that he had to keep on his mask when he ate alone in his room, in the presence of Rosarges or the governor, who knew him perfectly. He was therefore obliged to wear it only when he crossed the courtyard of the Bastille to go to mass, so that he was not recognized by the guards, or when some official, who was not a party to the secret, had to be allowed into the room.'

Finally Griffet offered testimony gathered while he was himself employed in the Bastille. In 1745, when he was appointed prison chaplain, the governor was René de Launey, who had been a member of the prison staff since 1710. From him Griffet passed on more information, not previously published.

Memory of the masked prisoner was still strong among the officers, soldiers and servants of the Bastille when M. de Launey, who has long been governor, arrived there to take up a post on the general staff of the garrison, and those who had seen him in his mask, when he went by in the courtyard to go to mass, said that there had been an order after his death to burn everything that had been in his personal use, like linen, clothes, mattress, blankets, etc., that even the walls of the room where he had lodged were scraped and white-washed and that the floor-tiles were pulled up and new ones laid, so much was it feared that he might have found a means to hide some note or sign, the discovery of which could have revealed his name.

After Griffet's authoritative contribution nothing new, except the snippets of hearsay offered by Saint-Foix, was added to the evidence until 1780 when Jean-Pierre Papon published his
Voyage Littéraire de Provence
. Papon was a member of the Oratorian order and for many years the director of their library in Marseilles. His book was part of a much larger work, his
Histoire Générale de Provence
, which was published over a period of almost a decade with the last volume in 1786. In the course of his travels through Provence it was only natural that he should visit the island of Sainte-Marguerite in the Bay of Cannes and ask questions about ‘the famous prisoner in the iron mask whose name perhaps will never be known.'

‘On 2 February 1778, I had the curiosity to enter the room of this unfortunate prisoner. It was lit by only one window on the northern side, piercing a very thick wall and closed by three iron grilles placed at an equal distance apart. This window gives onto the sea.' Though Papon did not make the point himself, it was clearly impossible for Blainvilliers to have spied on the prisoner through this window, as Palteau had claimed. Apart from Lagrange-Chancel, Papon was the first investigator ever to visit the island, and the rest of his contribution came from people he met who claimed to have got their information from witnesses who were living when the mysterious prisoner was there. From them he learned how strict the security precautions surrounding the prisoner had been.

One day as M. de Saint-Mars was in conversation with him, keeping outside the room in a kind of corridor so that he could see at a distance anyone who approached, the son of one of his friends arrived and headed towards the place where he heard the noise. When the governor saw the young man, he closed the door of the room immediately, ran quickly to meet him and in a state of agitation asked him if he had overheard anything. As soon as he was assured that he had not, he sent him off that same day and wrote to his friend to say that this adventure had come so close to costing his son dearly that he was sending him home to avoid any further accident.

No one interviewed by Papon knew the story of the fisherman and the silver plate related by Voltaire. He was told that ‘two sentries were posted at the two extremities of the fort facing the sea and they had orders to shoot on boats which approached within a certain distance,' which made Voltaire's story unlikely. There was, however, a new story to tell in place of the old.

I found in the citadel an officer of the Free Company who was seventy-nine years old. He told me that his father, who had served in the same company, had told him several times that one day a ‘frater' – that is to say a barber – saw something white floating on the water under the window of the prisoner. He went to get it and took it to M. de Saint-Mars. It was a very fine shirt, carelessly rumpled up, and the prisoner had written upon it from one end to the other. When M. de Saint-Mars had smoothed it out and read a few lines, he asked the ‘frater' in great consternation if he had been curious enough to read what it said. The ‘frater' protested that he had read nothing, but two days later he was found dead in his bed. It was a story that the officer had heard told so many times by his father and by the chaplain of the fort at that time that he regarded it as incontestable.

Papon had one more tale to tell.

The following story seems to me equally certain, after all the evidence which I collected on the spot and in the monastery of Lérins
⁶
where the tradition is preserved. Someone of the opposite sex was sought to serve the prisoner and a woman of the village of Mougins
⁷
came to offer herself in the belief that this would be a way to make the fortune of her children. But she was told that she would have to renounce seeing them and anyone else in the world and she refused to be locked up with a prisoner, the knowledge of whom cost so dearly … The person who served the prisoner died on Sainte-Marguerite. The father of the officer of whom I was just speaking, who had been used as a trusted agent by Saint-Mars for certain matters, often told his son that he had gone to the prison at midnight to get the corpse and had carried it on his shoulders to the burial spot. He thought it was the prisoner himself who was dead; it was, as I have just said, the person who served him, and that was why a woman was sought to replace him.

Nine years after the publication of Papon's book, the Bastille fell to the people and from those who had read the various accounts of the masked prisoner published to that date, including the extracts from Du Junca's journal reproduced by Griffet, the sensational stories of finding a skeleton in an iron mask abandoned in some forgotten dungeon drew not the slightest attention. Their interest was riveted on the story that something else had
not
been found. In the great prison register, two hundred and fifty folio-sized pages in a locked portfolio of morocco leather, page 120 was missing, and that was the very page on which, according to the date recorded by Du Junca, the registration of the prisoner should have appeared. An official committee, set up to collect and examine all the papers of the Bastille, published their findings in instalments during 1789 and 1790. The best they were able to produce for the missing page was a separate record made in 1775 by the then major of the Bastille, a man called Godillon Chevalier, whose information could have been taken entirely from Griffet's book. Chevalier was quoted as saying that the original page had not been removed in any attempted cover-up. On the contrary, the page was missing precisely because of a government attempt to elucidate the affair. It had been in the prison files until 1775 when an official inquiry had been ordered into the existence and identity of the mysterious prisoner. The page had then become part of a special government dossier in which all records relative to the prisoner were gathered together. What had become of the dossier, however, no one knew, nor unfortunately could anyone find out.

NOTES

1
.   
Marquis d'Argens
: Jean Baptiste de Boyer, 1704–1771. French writer who had a position of influence at the Prussian Court where Voltaire stayed from 1750 to 1753 while writing his
Si cle de Louis XIV.