The Man Behind the Iron Mask (3 page)

A mask without features, a phantasm's head,

In the torchlight a face made of iron glowed red.

Many years before, the old priest had heard rumours of such a prisoner: a beautiful, noble, sweet-voiced man, royally born and guilty of no crime, condemned from youth to spend his life in prison with his face concealed in a mask. Once one of his fellow monks had found a golden goblet at the foot of the prison tower and had taken it to the prison commander. There had been a message from the masked prisoner scratched into the gold and, because the monk had read it and learned some perilous secret, he had never been seen again. Remembering this, this old priest falls silent. The prisoner speaks: after a life of such unmitigated and unmerited suffering, how can he believe in a just and merciful God:

I have fed on despair, and my tears wept in vain

Have rusted the cheeks of the mask of my pain.

The old priest has nothing to say, and the prisoner babbles on in a delirium telling of the girl he never knew and all the longings of his lost life: the sun on his face, the wind in his hair, dreams of mountains and the sea, of rivers and trees and simple love. In a final moment of clarity before he dies, he rejects the viaticum and, with a last despairing gesture, breaks his arm against the prison-wall. The priest stays to pray beside his body throughout the night and in the morning sees it wrapped in its winding-sheet, the face still covered in its iron mask.

It was in 1850 that the story of the Twin in the Iron Mask reached final form and lasting celebrity in another work of fiction, the best-selling novel of Alexandre Dumas,
The Viscount of Bragelonne.
This was the third and last volume of the adventures of his famous Musketeers, d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis. The first two volumes,
The Three Musketeers
in 1844 and
Twenty Years After
in 1845, had been an immense success, and the third book was written for the same readers, reaching the death of d'Artagnan in the last paragraph. The sufferings of the Iron Mask were subsidiary to the deeds and deaths of the Musketeers, just part of the melodrama of French history in which they played key rôles, but it nonetheless was, and still is, the most vivid and elaborate version of the Iron Mask story. This, reduced to eleven short scenes, is how Dumas told it:

Scene One
: The bedroom of the Queen Mother in the Royal Palace. Late morning. Anne of Austria, stricken by some secret grief, is talking sadly with her ladies of honour. Enter a mysterious woman in a loo-mask, come to cure her strange complaint. The ladies of honour withdraw and the mysterious woman talks of a terrible secret kept by the Queen Mother since the day her son, the King, was born, twenty-three years ago. On that fateful day she gave birth not just to one son but to two, and in spite of the floods of bitter tears she shed that second child, for reasons of State, for the peace and safety of the realm, was taken from her and hidden away. Shocked at the stranger's knowledge of the secret, the Queen Mother turns pale as death and feels beneath her icy hand the beads of perspiration on her brow. The mysterious woman then removes her mask: it is the Duchesse de Chevreuse, the once bewitchingly beautiful favourite of the Queen Mother, now hideously old and witchlike. After years of banishment she has returned to beg the protection of her one-time friend and mistress. The Queen Mother takes her into her arms and apparently into her confidence; the ill-fated boy, she tells her, died of consumption while still a child.

Scene Two
: A prison room on the third floor of the Bertaudière Tower in the Bastille. A starry night sky beyond the bars of the window. Clothes discarded on a leather armchair; supper-dishes untouched on a small table; a young man sprawled disconsolately under the half-drawn curtains of a bed. A man dressed in grey has just entered with a lantern, a distinguished-looking man in late middle age, calm and confident, cold and calculating. It is Aramis, the one-time musketeer, and he has just used the secret powers of the Jesuit Society, of which he is the Father-General, to gain entrance to this room. No one has ever been allowed to see this prisoner. Few people even know that he exists.

Before he was a prisoner here, the young man lived with a nurse and tutor in the confines of a large house and walled garden lost in the country. A house without mirrors, without books of history or literature, without a portrait of the King. In the time he was there a lady of majestic bearing came to see him every month, sometimes accompanied by another lady, once by Aramis, and once by another gentleman. Apart from his former nurse and tutor, his present turnkey and prison governor, these people are the only ones he has ever spoken to in his life. The efforts made to seclude him from the world, the care taken to educate him for that same world, and the respect shown him within the little world in which he lived, made him wonder sometimes about his origin and identity. But he was always told that he was an orphan and that no one had any interest in him.

The incident that transformed his life had occurred eight years previously, soon after his fifteenth birthday. He was sleeping in the hall one day, exhausted after a long lesson of fencing, when he heard his tutor call out in consternation to his nurse. A letter had blown out of a window and fallen down the well. In their agitation the old couple did not realize that he could hear them, and he understood from what they said that they had to retrieve the letter because it was from the Queen. She would want it back to burn, as she did with all the letters they received from her, and they would be in peril of their lives from Mazarin if they could not produce it when next she came. To find someone to help them, someone who would be able to recover the letter without being able to read it, they hurried off to the village, leaving the young man alone in the house.

Urged on then by that impulse whch drives a man to his own destruction, he lowered the cord from the windlass and slid down it into the darkness. Plunging into the water, he seized the letter, clambered back up to the courtyard and escaped into the garden. The paper was sodden and torn, the writing almost erased, but what he could read was enough for him to realise that the Queen herself was deeply concerned in his welfare and upbringing, and that the tutor and nurse, who treated him with such respect, were themselves of noble rank. Since the villager who climbed down the well could find nothing, it might have been assumed that the letter had sunk out of sight, but the young man's wet clothes aroused suspicions. When later he was taken ill with a violent fever, brought on by the chill and the excitement of the discovery, these suspicions were borne out. In his delirium he revealed all that had happened. The letter was found and the Queen was informed. The young man was arrested and taken to the Bastille.

What became of the tutor and nurse, the young man does not know, but Aramis does. They were poisoned, he says, and while the young man presses his icy fingers to his clammy brow, his trembling fingers to his beating heart, he goes on to reveal the direful secret of his birth. He produces a mirror and a portrait of Louis XIV to prove it. The resemblance of the young man and his brother, the King, is the God-given instrument of truth and justice, Aramis declares, the weapon which will restore the balance of fate. It was a crime against nature to render different in happiness and fortune brothers conceived and born so much the same. The equilibrium will be restored only when the rôles of prisoner and king have been exchanged. In that high endeavour Aramis intends to liberate the young man from the Bastille.

Scene Three
: Deep night under arching foliage in the depths of the Forest of Sénart.
¹⁸
A carriage-and-four pulled off the road and hidden in thickets of undergrowth. The horses snuffling as they nibble the young oak shoots. The driver lying silently on a slope beside them. Two figures emerge from the carriage and stand there, black in the darkness, keeping silence too: the young man entranced, feeling the night air on his face, the ecstasy of freedom; Aramis apprehensive, watching him. The young man has a decision to make. Aramis has offered to give him a thousand pistoles,
¹⁹
two of his horses and the driver, as servant and guide, to take him far away to a place of safety and obscurity where no one will ever seek him; he can live out his life in ease and liberty close to nature and its honest laws among simple honourable men. Between that and a bid to substitute him for his brother, the King, with the immediate risk of failure, and the lifelong dangers in success, he is to choose. He bows his head and, at last, with a look full of courage and pride, his brow contracted, his jaw clenched, he makes his choice: the crown. Aramis has briefed him with all the information necessary to carry off the impersonation and he is confident that he can do it. Once he has taken his brother's place, Colbert,
²⁰
the King's favourite minister, will be exiled and Fouquet,
²¹
the minister out of favour, will be restored to office. Aramis will be elevated to the rank of Cardinal and become Prime Minister. Aramis will make him a great king, and he will make Aramis pope, then bound in mutual trust, crown and tiara together they will establish an empire greater than Charlemagne's.

Scene Four
: Vaux-le-Vicomte.
²²
Later that night. Aramis and the young man in the Blue Room, seated above a secret trapdoor, looking down through a hidden spyhole in the painted dome which spans the King's chamber below. The King, in sour disgruntled mood, talking with Colbert. He is the guest of Fouquet, whose palatial new home this is, and he feels humiliated by the splendour of the hospitality and entertainment provided for him. The style and wealth of his host fills him with envy. He wants to know where Fouquet has found the money necessary for such a display and Colbert produces a letter which appears to prove that he stole it. There is a deficit in the state accounts of thirteen million francs and the letter written by Mazarin makes it clear that precisely such an amount was taken from the state coffers to be deposited with Fouquet.

Scene Five
: Vaux-le-Victome. The following night. The King walking in the gardens with Colbert. Fouquet's lavish generosity, through all the brilliant festivities of the day, has only made the King more resentful. Deep in the park, the King's mistress, Louise de La Vallière, is waiting for him and, when she discovers that he is about to have Fouquet arrested, she persuades him that he cannot honourably do that so long as he is a guest in Fouquet's house. Colbert bends a look of hatred upon the charming couple as they embrace behind a lime tree; when the young lady leaves, he takes a letter from his pocket and gives it to the King, pretending that she has just dropped it. The King assumes that it must be a love note meant for him, but it is an old letter of admiration and gallantry written to her by Fouquet.

Scene Six
: Vaux-le-Vicomte. Later that night. The King in his chamber shuddering with loathing as Fouquet bends to kiss his hand. Through the windows the sky ablaze with fireworks which the King did not wish to see. He wants only to see d'Artagnan,
²³
the Captain of the Musketeers, who arrives promptly as soon as everyone else has withdrawn. Handsome, noble d'Artagnan, whose heart is as kind and faithful as it is courageous, whose eyes are as frank and true as they are piercing, whose Gascon blood, tempered with the subtlety and irony of a great spirit, would civilize the most savage tyrant, the most brutal slave. The King wants Fouquet arrested and his rage explodes when d'Artagnan requests the order in writing. He stamps his feet and gnaws his lips, but the order is nonetheless moderated. Fouquet is to be kept under guard pending arrest. There is to be no fuss, no show, and the King will decide in the morning what is to be done with him. When d'Artagnan leaves, the King's frenzy erupts once more. He strides about the room, knocking over the furniture, flings himself onto the bed and rolls from side to side, biting the sheets to smother his tears and groans. When finally he sleeps it is from sheer exhaustion. He dreams that the bed is descending slowly throught the floor, and wakes from his dream to find himself in a subterranean passage between the menacing silhouettes of two men, masked and cloaked. As they bundle him away through the darkness, the empty bed lifts slowly back to its original place in the chamber. One of the masked men is of huge stature and vast circumference; he is Porthos: honest, mighty, innocent, gentle, magnificent Porthos. The other man is Aramis.

Scene Seven
: Vaux-le-Vicomte. Dawn the next morming. Fouquet alone in his bedroom. D'Artagnan, who has spent the night dozing in an armchair beside him, has gone to the King for further orders. When he returns he is bearing the good news that Fouquet is not to be arrested after all, and he is accompanied by Aramis, who for some extraordinary reason appears to have become the King's confidant overnight. Fouquet is bewildered: he still does not understand why he was put under guard in the first place and, as soon as d'Artagnan has left the room, he asks for an explanation. Aramis tells him how Colbert turned the King against him and how the King's apparent change of mind is in reality a change of kings: the King of yesterday being Fouquet's implacable enemy, the King of today his friend. Confident of Fouquet's collusion, Aramis reveals all: that Louis XIV has an identical twin brother who until yesterday was kept locked up in the Bastille, that last night their places were switched and the King became the prisoner while the prisoner became the King. Fouquet, however, is horrified. Never would he connive at an act of treason against the King, an act of treachery against a guest. Aramis, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth trembling, has plunged his hand into his breast, as though to grasp a dagger, but Fouquet is not intimidated: it is his sacred duty to denounce this execrable crime, he says, and he is ready to die for his honour. When Aramis draws out his hand, his fingers are covered in blood, but he has no weapon. In the passionate anguish of his defeat, he has torn open the flesh of his own breast with his bare hand. Leaving Aramis to make good his escape, Fouquet takes horse to rescue his King from the Bastille.