The Man Behind the Iron Mask (39 page)

The third document, published as early as 1938 in an article by Antoine Adam which appeared in the
Revue d'Histoire de la Philosophie
, was a funeral ode written for Eustache by another inmate of Saint-Lazare, the Comte de Brienne. The poem is not dated, but it was written in a notebook filled with verse which Brienne completed in February 1689. Brienne was a poor poet, but he was not a madman. During his detention at Saint-Lazare, which lasted from 1674 to 1692, the Abbé de Choisy used to visit him regularly to get material for his
Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de Louis XIV
. He was a man of exceptional gifts and education, shabbily treated by the King and his own family. As the eldest son of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he had received his father's charge in reversion only to have it taken from him a few months after he succeeded to the post. He was two years older than Eustache and knew the Cavoyes well. He had been present at the brawl which took place between Lauzun and one of the Cavoyes in 1666 and had lifted his cloak to hide the squabblers from the King. His elegy leaves no doubt about the fate of Eustache Dauger de Cavoye. Imprisoned by his brother and his brother-in-law, ignored by his sister and by the King, he had lived out his life with lunatics and outcasts and had drunk himself to death.

Here in this coffin at Saint-Lazare lies

Cavoye, whose saint's name was Eustache,

An intransigent gent overcome by drink

And death, which took him by surprise.

Indolent, surly, disorderly, grim,

He was the genuine tortoise-type,

But he stuck his neck out for another drink

And apoplexy poleaxed him.

So handsome he looked in his dirty white dress.

Pity he never would listen to me.

If he had, at least he'd have lived to die

A natural death nonetheless.

Since the publication of these three documents, die-hard supporters of the Cavoye theory have done their utmost to invalidate them, claiming that Brienne's poem must have been a forgery and that Cavoye's letters must have been written not from Saint-Lazare but from Pignerol. However, a fourth document, as yet unpublished, which was brought to the author's attention by Stanislas Brugnon, establishes the authenticity of the three published documents as incontrovertible. This final piece of evidence is a letter signed by Louis XIV himself which can be consulted in the register of the King's Orders in the National Archives in Paris. The document reads as follows:

Letter from the King to the General Superior of the House of Saint-Lazare. In the name of the King. Dearly Beloved, We are writing this letter to tell you that it is our intention that M. de Cavoye should have communication with no one at all, not even with his sister, unless in your presence or in the presence of one of the priests of the mission designated by you for that purpose. Let this be done without fail. For such is our desire. Given at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the 17th day of the month of August 1678. Signed ‘Louis' and ‘Colbert'.

NOTES

1
.   
not the king
: in 1987, thirteen years after Madame Mast's book appeared in French, this same theory appeared in English in a book by Harry Thompson.

12

THE MANY FACES OF EUSTACHE DAUGER

I
f Eustache Dauger was not Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, then who was he? Before Duvivier's authorative but mistaken identification, only two other theories had been proposed. Jules Laire, in his book
Nicolas Fouquet
, published in 1890, had been the first to recognize that the prisoner in the mask of black velvet who died in the Bastille in 1703 was the man called Eustache Dauger arrested in 1669; who Dauger was and what he he had done he did not know, and since it was of little significance to his theme he did not bother to follow it up. ‘In all likelihood,' he remarked, ‘Dauger was the kind of man who takes on a shady job: robbery, abduction, perhaps worse; and whose silence is ensured, once the job is done, by imprisoning him.' He made no attempt to hunt out Eustache Dauger's name in the events which preceded his arrest and it was not until 1931, just one year before Duvivier published his sensational discovery, that Emile Laloy made the first tentative steps in this direction.

From documents, Laloy discovered that ‘Daugers' was the name of the King's major-domo in 1652 and that ‘Daugé' was the name of the chaplain of the Archbishop of Sens in 1670. Aware that in the orthographical confusion of that time ‘Daugers', ‘Daugé' and ‘Dauger' could have been variant spellings of the same family name, he imagined a young man named Eustache Dauger who was the son of Daugers, the King's major-domo, and nephew of Canon Daugé, the Archbishop's chaplain, and who, following in his father's footsteps, was a member of the King's household in 1668 and 1669. The existence of such a person was purely hypothetical, but the events and circumstances which it brought into play were full of possibilities. The Archbishop of Sens was the uncle of Louis de Montespan, whose wife was the celebrated mistress of the King, and Canon Daugé was a tried and trusted friend of the Montespan family; in 1670, Montespan's mother actually named him, along with the Archbishop, executor of her will.

The King's adulterous relationship with Madame de Montespan began in July 1667, but for many months only their most intimate friends knew about it. Montespan himself was in the south of France at the time, engaged, at least ostensibly, in leading his own company of light cavalry against Spanish marauders in the Pyrenees. His troops were little better than brigands and, riding at their head with a shapely peasant-girl wearing breeches and a sword beside him, he terrorized French and Spanish alike, bullying and brawling, drinking and looting. In February 1668, he came to Paris to give his wife power of attorney to handle their affairs in his absence and then hurried back to the south. At that time it was still not realized that Madame de Montespan had become the King's mistress. ‘The King loves La Montespan,' the Marquis de Saint-Maurice, who was the Savoyard ambassador at the time, reported to Turin on 3 February. ‘She doesn't dislike him, but she holds firm.' Six months later, however, Montespan knew the truth and returned to Paris in a fury. He drove up to Saint-Germain in a hearse with stag's horns on the roof instead of plumes and denounced the King as an adulterer. He slapped his wife in public, insulted anyone he suspected of aiding them in their illicit union, and let it be known that he had deliberately contracted syphillis so that he could pass it on to the King.

It was generally suspected that Montespan had been incited to cause this uproar by his uncle, the Archbishop of Sens, who joined in the attack himself from the pulpit. Preaching at Fontainbleau when the court was there, he denounced a woman in the congregation who was living openly with another woman's husband, made her do public penance and then ordered the church laws on adultery to be published in all the parishes of his diocese. In September, Montespan was arrested and the Archbishop, fearing the same fate, kept to the sanctuary of his cathedral, sleeping in a bed put up for him behind the altar. Montespan was liberated after a couple of weeks, but banished to the south of France and the Archbishop though not arrested was confined to Sens.

The King, it is certain, was greatly alarmed by the furore. Montespan was capable of anything. Presumably he did not know then that his wife was expecting the King's child, but once he did he was certainly reckless enough to abduct his wife, pregnant as she was, or later, after the birth, to abduct the child. If one can imagine Eustache Dauger as a member of the King's household with close ties of loyalty to the Montespan family, one might also imagine him playing spy and agent against the King. No doubt he would have been the one who first informed the Archbishop of the King's adulterous relationship with Madame de Montespan. No doubt he would have discovered eventually that she was pregnant and later that a child had been born in secret. The birth took place in March 1669 and the child was raised in hiding. Perhaps, in the summer of 1669, he managed to find out where the child was hidden, but before he could pass on the information to the Montespan family or while he was himself attempting to abduct the child, he was arrested. Plausible as the story might be, however, there is not a grain of evidence that this particular Eustache Dauger ever existed.

The name ‘Eustache Dauger' was in fact ‘Eustache d'Auget'; so at least P.M. Dijol would have us believe in the book called
Nabo
which he published in 1978. His Eustache, like Laloy's, was only a valet, but with a face which made him instantly recognizable: he was black. The valet's true name was Nabo, but he was called Eustache because the governor of Dunkirk gave him to his wife on the day of Saint-Eustache; he was called d'Auget because he had been taught to play the guitar by Paul Auget, the Director of the King's Music. Since he was a Moor from North Africa, his guards naturally nicknamed him ‘Ali' and since he was a prisoner of consequence they also gave him the title of Marquis; thus he came to be known within the prison walls as the ‘Marquis Ali', which on his burial certificate was rendered ‘Marchiali'. Dijol is quite sure of all this because his mother-in-law revealed it to him on her death-bed in 1970. She was the last of the Desgranges family, descended from the father-in-law of the youngest son of Saint-Mars, who apparently on his own death-bed had, for some mysterious reason, confided the secret of his mysterious prisoner to the in-laws of his dead son.

Dijol's story, for all its extravagant claims, is based upon a modicum of fact. Nabo the Moor was real enough, and the crime he committed was certainly of sufficient gravity to merit the fate of the Iron Mask. On 16 November 1664, Queen Maria-Teresa, the wife of Louis XIV, gave birth to a black daughter. The child was said to be a month premature and so the usual witnesses were not present. The Grande Mademoiselle in her
Mémoires
reported what she heard about it from Monsieur, who was there: ‘that the daughter born to the Queen resembled a little Moor, given her by M. de Beaufort, who was very pretty and who was always with her; that when it had been remembered that her child might come to look like him he had been taken away from her but it was then too late; that the little girl was monstrous and would not live.' The mere presence of the Moor, it was imagined, had made the child turn black. Officially both the Queen and her daughter were very ill. There were no visitors and the child's death was announced on 26 December. What became of the little Moor who ‘had been taken away' is not known.

In the popular view, the child's death was only pretended. The Princess Palatine writing in 1719 observed: ‘one cannot get it out of people's heads that the child is still living and that she is in a convent at Moret, near Fontainbleau'. This was a reference to the mysterious woman known since as ‘the Mooress of Moret'. In 1695 Madame de Maintenon, who married Louis XIV after the death of Maria-Teresa, acted sponsor for a black girl who took the veil at the Benedictine Convent of Moret. The King himself endowed the girl with 20,000 crowns and she took the name of Sister Louis-Marie-Thérèse. Madame de Maintenon visited her regularly thereafter, taking various members of the royal family along with her, and everyone at the convent, including her superiors, treated her with the greatest respect. It was said that she always claimed to be the daughter of the King, even though Madame de Maintenon assured her that she was not.

The little Moor was one of the wedding gifts received by the Queen at Saint Jean-de-Luz in June 1660. He was a dwarf just two feet three inches tall and, though not fully grown since he was only ten or twelve years old, was unlikely to grow more than a few inches more. The Queen was delighted with her pet black dwarf and by October of the same year he was already her favourite companion, riding up beside the coachman of the royal carriage and climbing inside to join her and the King when it was raining. According to Dijol, he had unusual musical talents and because of this was handed over to Paul Auget who taught him to play the guitar. These talents must have been discovered early and developed rapidly because Auget, who was sixty-eight years old, died that same year; although his place as Music Director was taken by the celebrated Lully, it was from the uncelebrated Auget that the Moor took his name.

The Queen bore the King a son in November 1661 and in November 1662 a daughter, who died after two weeks. The King meanwhile had a romantic affair with Madame, his sister-in-law, and then under the pretext of hiding that liaison from his mother and brother began a passionate relationship with Madame's lady-of-honour, Madame de La Vallière. Madame, scorned and furious, turned to the Comte de Guiche for help, and with the Comtesse de Soissons and her lover the Marquis de Vardes sought a means to break up the relationship. Together they decided to send a letter to the Queen as though from her father, the King of Spain, informing her of the King's attachment to Madame de La Vallière. Vardes composed the letter and Guiche translated it into Spanish. The letter reached the Queen, Dijol asserts, on 17 February 1664. She was so deeply hurt by the news that she turned to her black page for comfort and conceived that day the black daughter who was later known as the Mooress of Moret.

The point of Dijol's story is that the Moor was the father of the Queen's black daughter, something which fortunately for his argument can be accepted without his story. To keep the record straight, however, it should be recognized that the tale, as he tells it, is a concoction. Though such a letter was written and sent, it was not sent at this time and the Queen in any event did not receive it. Guiche went to Poland in September 1663 and did not return to France until June 1664. The letter was sent sometime in 1662 and it was delivered to the Queen's lady-in-waiting, who finding it suspicious took it not to her mistress, but to the King. In 1664, moreover, the Queen was well aware of her husband's affair with Madame de La Vallière. She had known about it as early as November 1662 when she is reported to have pointed out her husband's mistress wearing diamond earrings in a crowd of court ladies. Exactly what the circumstances of the conception were, we do not know but, for what it is worth, it was precisely at this time that the King suddenly decided to change all the Queen's ladies-of-honour.