The Man Behind the Iron Mask (19 page)

Corbé's full name was Guillaume de Formanoir de Corbé. As the nephew of Saint-Mars, he later inherited the Château de Palteau and it was his son, born in 1712, who supplied information on the masked prisoner in letters to Voltaire in 1763 and Fréron in 1768. Renneville says he was about fifty years old when he first saw him, and at that time he had been in the service of his uncle for about eighteen years. ‘From his appearance', Renneville declares, ‘it never occurred to me that it was the nephew of the governor I was speaking to.' Dressed as he was in a poor grey coat of short-napped cloth worn threadbare, a pair of shabby blue breeches frayed and patched at the knee, a rusty outmoded wig and a dilapidated hat stuck with an old black half-bare feather, he looked ‘more like a bumbailiff than an officer'. He was dirty and unshaven with a mouthful of rotten teeth and ‘at least two thirds of his face was mouth'. His forehead was narrow, his eyes small and black and his sharp-pointed nose looked ‘like a suppository'. That Renneville detested the man is obvious, but he claims that everyone detested him, his fellow gaolers as much as the prisoners. ‘He walked bent double with knock-kneed legs as contorted as those of a basset, but his spirit was even more deformed and crooked than his body'. Seconded by an illegitimate son called Jacques La France, who acted as his lackey, ‘one of the most vicious and villainous characters' in the Bastille. Corbé altogether surpassed his worst colleagues in the maltreatment and exploitation of the prisoners, more brazen in his thievery than Rosarges, more savage in his lechery than Giraut.

The chief turnkey, a man called L'Ecuyer, had also come to the Bastille from Sainte-Marguerite. He told Renneville that he had been with Saint-Mars for thirty-two years, a year longer than Rosarges, but had been passed over for promotion because he could not read or write. He was a heavily built, hump-backed, round-shouldered man whose head appeared to grow out of the middle of his chest. Apart from a few strands of greasy hair around the ears, this misplaced head was bald and had a dark red face ‘like the mask of a devil in an opera'. Dreadful though he appeared, however, ‘he still had some kind of fear of God', Renneville thought, and found him ‘the least vicious … and the most conscientious of the officers'.

Under L'Ecuyer there were three turnkeys, Boutonnier, Bourgouin and Ru, all of whom, Renneville says, were better than their masters. Boutonnier was a Jew from Paris and had been a button-maker before working at the Bastille. Renneville saw little of him but found him compassionate. Bourgouin was from Burgundy and had been a dragoon until Giraut, who knew his uncle, had got him the job of turnkey. He was, Renneville says, an honest man, friendly and kind: all the prisoners liked him, but he did not fit in such a place and did not keep his job for long. Antoine Ru was the least benign of the three, but, though he stole the prisoners' food and would do little for them unless he was bribed, he laughed a great deal and was far from being a wicked man. He had been with Saint-Mars on Sainte-Marguerite and was about fifty years old when Renneville first saw him. His head and face were a mass of tangled red hair, stiff with dirt, and he went around in nothing but a dirty shirt and drawers, stinking ‘worse than the filthiest goat'.

Both Ru and L'Ecuyer must have known something about the masked prisoner but probably little more than the fact of his existence, along with some general idea of the duration of his imprisonment. Normally the prisoners' meals were brought to the cells by the turnkeys, but from what Du Junca had to say about the masked prisoner it seems that in his case Rosarges was personally responsible. Presumably it was also Rosarges, and not Ru or L'Ecuyer, who had served at table for Saint-Mars and the masked prisoner during their stop-over at the Château de Palteau, reported by Corbé's son in his letter to Fréron.

One more member of the prison staff remains to be mentioned, a man who was not previously with Saint-Mars on Sainte-Marguerite, but who nonetheless must have had contact of some kind with the masked prisoner for it was he, with Rosarges, who signed the burial certificate. This was Abraham Reilhe, the surgeon of the Bastille. The title ‘surgeon' is today misleading. At that time, when the common treatment for most illnesses was to bleed the patient, the surgeon was simply the man called in to do it. Usually he was a barber by profession, though he might also administer purges on demand, pull teeth, lance boils or sear wounds, and if he had some knowledge of the butcher's trade might very well offer to perform amputations as well. Reilhe had been a barber in an infantry company prior to his job at the Bastille and Saint-Mars had hired him on the recommendation of Giraut shortly before Renneville's arrival. As a surgeon he was, according to Renneville, so ignorant and incompetent that he was responsible for the death of more than one prisoner. He was a little man, quick-witted and adaptable, acquisitive and ambitious, a sycophant and an opportunist. When he first came to the Bastille he had nothing to wear but an old army uniform and he was deferential to an extreme with everyone, but once he had settled in and established himself in the good opinion of his superiors, he took to wearing the governor's cast-off clothes, his old jerkins and wigs, and treating the prisoners with insolence and contempt.

Not only did Renneville give us a full portrait gallery of the men who guarded the masked prisoner, but also what is almost certainly a brief glimpse of the prisoner himself. When he entered the room where the prisoner from Sainte-Marguerite happened to be, he was bundled straight out again so he did not have time to see much at all. He did not notice that the prisoner's face was covered by a mask, but he did not see the prisoner's face anyway. ‘As soon as the officers saw me coming in,' he explains, ‘they made him turn his back towards me which stopped me seeing his face.' The prisoner turned so quickly that he glimpsed nothing more than the back of his head. ‘He was a man of average height,' he says, ‘but well built and his hair which he wore in a very thick pony-tail was black with not a single strand of white in it.' Jet black hair, thick and strong, is not what one would have expected. According to Palteau, who got his information from eye-witnesses, the prisoner's hair at this time was white. If Palteau's information was correct, Ru's identification was wrong; but it is unlikely that Ru could have been mistaken or deliberately untruthful about the prisoner Renneville saw, and the fact that the prisoner was made to turn around as soon as Renneville walked in does seem to bear him out.

The contradiction between Palteau and Renneville defies all resolution unless, as might easily have happened in that sudden and rapid glimpse. Renneville himself made a mistake. What he took to be a pony-tail of black hair might very well have been the knot and tail of two broad bands of black velvet which wrapped the prisoner's head and held his mask in place. If the prisoner was really the man Ru said he was, then he was certainly wearing a mask because, according to Du Junca, the prisoner from Provence was always kept masked. Renneville, however, had no reason to suppose that he had seen the back of a mask. In all the record of his eleven years in the Bastille, he never once mentions seeing or hearing of prisoners wearing masks. Presumably therefore it did not occur to him that the prisoner he glimpsed was wearing one.

Unfortunately Renneville's picture of the mysterious prisoner, obscure as it is amidst the vivid portraits of his gaolers, is blurred by yet another error. The date he gives for the encounter was sometime in 1705 and we know from Du Junca that the prisoner died in 1703. The mistake this time is certainly Renneville's. If his date is correct, then his informants were wrong and that is out of the question. Although it is only unlikely that Ru would have mistaken another man for the prisoner he travelled with from Sainte-Marguerite, it is altogether impossible that Reilhe could have mistaken another inmate for the man whose burial certificate he had signed. The only possible explanation is that Renneville, writing twelve years or more after the event, made a mistake in the date, or alternatively that ‘1705' was a printer's error, overlooked in the reading of the proofs. The first edition of Renneville's book has so many printer's errors that two and a half pages of major corrections had to be included at the end. Three words were accidentally omitted from the text just six lines before the mention of 1705 and there is yet another error in the catchword at the foot of the same page. So far as one can learn from Renneville's account, there were only two occasions between the time of his arrival in May 1702 and the death of the masked prisoner in November 1703 when he was taken from his cell to any room other than another cell. The first was 24 May 1702 when he had to be questioned by Saint-Mars, and the second was 13 May 1703 when he had to be questioned by Du Junca. It was on one or other of these two occasions that, by accident and without knowing it, he met the prisoner who was later known as the Man in the Iron Mask.

The lack of official records and communications referring to the masked prisoner in the time he was in the Bastille is no doubt due to the fact that, in matters of security, the minister responsible could deal with the governor in person without needing to put anything on paper. The Comte de Pontchartrain, who was the minister in charge, rarely visited the prison, but his deputy, M. Desgranges, did so regularly. As the father-in-law of the youngest son of Saint-Mars, he made social as well as official calls. In prisons far from Paris, however, even secret communications could only be made by correspondence, and before being at the Bastille Saint-Mars had always received directions from his superiors in writing, and had sent regular written reports to them. A great many of these dispatches have survived, especially those received by Saint-Mars, and there is a good deal of information to be had from them. By way of clarification it should be noted that the Bastille came under the control of the Ministry of Finance, but all the other state prisons in France were the concern of the Ministry of War. The last Minister of War with whom Saint-Mars had to deal was the Marquis de Barbezieux.
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On 19 July 1698 the governor received from him the following dispatch: ‘The King sees fit that you leave the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and come to the Bastille with your long-time prisoner, taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone. You can write in advance to His Majesty's Lieutenant of the Bastille to keep a room ready to accommodate this prisoner on your arrival.'

As governor of Sainte-Marguerite, Saint-Mars had charge of a number of prisoners but only the masked prisoner, called his ‘long-time prisoner' by the minister and Du Junca, accompanied him to the Bastille. Earlier references by Barbezieux or Saint-Mars to his ‘long-time prisoner' clearly concern the same man and so it is the masked prisoner who is referred to in an angry letter addressed to the prison governor by the minister on 17 November 1697. ‘With your letter of the 10th, I received the copy of the letter M. de Pontchartrain wrote to you concerning the prisoners who are in the islands of Sainte-Marguerite under orders from the King, signed by him or the late M. de Seignelay.
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You have no other conduct to follow with regard to those who are confided to your charge than to continue to watch over their surety without saying anything to anyone about the past acts of your longtime prisoner.' This letter was written less than a year before the prisoner moved to the Bastille and came under the authority of Pontchartrain's ministry, but the post of governor of the Bastille was not vacant until the following month, when François de Besmaux, the then governor, died, and at that stage there had been no talk of moving Saint-Mars. Barbezieux resented the Controller of Finance meddling in the affairs of the Ministry of War.

Saint-Mars was governor of Sainte-Marguerite island for eleven and a half years, from April 1687 until September 1698, and the fortress he commanded, including the prisons he built, still stands. It is not an impressive building, more like a fortified village than a castle, but facing the town of Cannes on the French Riviera, its situation is spectacular. It rises from an outcrop of rock on a long low island, thick with pines and eucalyptus trees, less than half a mile from the tip of the Pointe-de-la-Croisette, with the bay of la Napoule and the distant red-rock mountains of the Esterel on one side, the bay called Golfe Juan and the far off white-ice peaks of the Alps on the other. Six rectangular windows, identical, in line and evenly spaced, mark the eastern end of the wall which faces across the sea to Cannes. These are the only windows in that wall and they are always in darkness because their orientation is due north. They are the windows of the prison cells.

The coast has been altogether transformed in the three hundred years since Saint-Mars was there. Seen from the terrace of the fortress today, the bays either side are a continuous stretch of hotels, public buildings and apartment blocks, shops, restaurants, gardens and villas, the shoreline a chain of yacht harbours, beaches, parks and promenades; in his day the land was bare and deserted. Cannes was that section of modern Cannes which is called Le Suquet, just a small fishing village built on a hill a couple of miles west of the Pointe-de-la-Croisette and surrounded by marshland. The village had no harbour and the fishing boats were beached among reeds at the foot of the hill. On the Pointe-de-la-Croisette itself, where today the Palm Beach Casino stands, there was nothing but a bastion and the hills behind were wastes of scrub and moorland. It was a lost corner of France reached only from the north by hard travelling across the harsh and desolate mountains of the Pre-Alps or by sea along the coast from Marseilles, a perilous voyage since even the coastal waters were infested with pirates from North Africa. The Esterel, which was bandit country too dangerous to cross, blocked access from the west, and the border with Savoy was less than fifteen miles along the coast to the east.

South of Sainte-Marguerite, across a narrow strait, is the smaller island of Saint-Honorat, famous for its old monastery with its fortified tower. People today who wish to visit the tower and the fortress, to picnic in the woods and swim in the protected waters between the islands, have a choice of several boat services from various points along the coast. The fortress has become a student holiday centre, combining language classes with courses in sailing and skin-diving. The original garrison area has been taken over for that, but the prison building remains unchanged.