The Man Behind the Iron Mask (40 page)

Dijol would have us believe that the King really did believe that a black man's presence could blacken the skin of a child in the womb and so it was only in June 1666, when the Queen was pregnant again, that he had the Moor removed from the palace. The Queen made such a fuss over losing her pet that the King decided to get rid of him for good. According to Dijol, he sent him to the Company of the Islands of America in Dunkirk, which had a monopoly on the French slave-trade, in the expectation that he would be shipped to America and sold. The president of the company, however, who was the governor of Dunkirk, realized that as a court page the boy had more value in Europe and so kept him for his own household. No one in Paris suspected that the Queen's black page was in Dunkirk until in 1669 preparations were begun for a visit from the King. Madame was to go to Dover in May 1670 to speak with her brother Charles II of England. Louis XIV and his court were to accompany her to Dunkirk and wait there until she returned. In June 1669 someone, sent from Paris to make arrangements for the forthcoming royal visit, recognized the Moor and reported back to Louvois. Afraid that if the boy were allowed to remain he would meet the Queen again, the minister had him arrested and taken off to Pignerol. It was to avoid any possible complications, Dijol concludes, that the governor of Dunkirk was not informed of the arrest.

Saint-Mars must have been surprised to receive a black prisoner since, so Dijol claims, he already had a black man locked up in his prison. La Rivière, the valet of Fouquet, was also black. In February 1661
La Gazette
reported the baptism of a convert from Islam named La Rivière. He was an African from the Cape Verde Islands, aged about thirty, and his godmother was Madame Fouquet, the mother of the Superintendent of Finance. According to Dijol, La Rivière was a groom at a fashionable riding school in Paris and being a skilful rider was often asked to give lessons to people of rank, including Madame de La Vallière. Towards the end of 1665, when Madame de La Vallière became pregnant, the King was alarmed about the possibility of La Rivière changing the colour of her baby's skin so he rid himself of the man by packing him off to Pignerol with the son of his godmother. Why the King thought it necessary to send the poor man to the far reaches of his kingdom, or why, having chosen to send him so very far away, he did not banish him to some even more distant place – to America for instance where he had given orders to send the Moor – Dijol does not say. Nor does he explain how the King could have decided that a gentleman like Fouquet could be properly served by a man whose job it had been to look after horses.

As it was, when Fouquet died in 1680, the King was once again in difficulties, afraid that some word might reach Paris about the two black valets who were at Pignerol and that the Queen, hearing about them, would have her suspicions aroused. Lauzun knew that Eustache d'Auget was a prisoner, but the true danger lay elsewhere. The Abbé d'Estrades, who as ambassador to Turin had played such an important part in the kidnapping of Matthioli, was the son of Comte Godefroy d'Estrades, the governor of Dunkirk, and therefore had almost certainly met Eustache d'Auget before his arrest. If Lauzun told the Abbé that d'Auget was a prisoner, he might pass on the information to his parents, and through them the secret might reach the Queen. It was to forestall this possibility that Louvois gave orders to pretend that the two black valets had been liberated. Ironically, however, the Abbé D'Estrades already knew that Eustache d'Auget was a prisoner. Apparently he had kept the secret to himself, because Saint-Mars trusted him enough to go on keeping him informed. On 25 June 1681, when Saint-Mars wrote to d'Estrades to inform him of his appointment to Exiles, he included a word about the two black valets as well as about Matthioli: ‘I will have in my charge,' he wrote, ‘two blackbirds that I have here, who have no other name than the gentleman of the Lower Tower. Matthioli will stay here with two other prisoners.'

To give Dijol his due, the basic theory he has to offer answers a number of major questions left unanswered by other theoreticians, not least the reason why the mysterious prisoner was obliged to wear a mask. In seventeenth-century France there were so few black men that a state prisoner who was black would have attracted a great deal of attention. His theory also explains why the prisoner was described as ‘only a valet' and forbidden to speak of what he had done in the past. As valet to the Queen, he had been responsible, however one cares to view that responsibility, for giving her a black daughter. It is reasonable to presume that, as long as the Queen was alive, the King was concerned to keep her pet's imprisonment secret. Since when she died in 1683 her black daughter was nineteen years of age and no doubt already convinced that she was the daugher of the Queen, it is also logical to suppose that the King thought it wise to continue the imprisonment and the secrecy. One might go further and conclude that if, as seems likely, the King had enough gumption to realize that a black child born to his wife must have been conceived by a black man, then it is even more reasonable to suppose that he would have wished to keep that man locked up and silent for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, however, Dijol's theory raises one problem more difficult than any of the problems it resolves: his candidate for the Iron Mask was a dwarf. If the prisoner in the mask had been no taller than a child, then the witnesses who actually saw him, like Du Junca and the peasants at the Château de Palteau, would certainly have mentioned it. None of them did, of course, and what descriptions do exist are in agreement that on the contrary he was a fine figure of a man, tall and well-built.

According to Pierre-Jacques Arrèse, whose book
Le Masque de Fer
was published in 1969, it is not the identity of Eustache Dauger which is the important factor in the case, but the secrecy surrounding it. Who he was and what he had done were irrelevant. His significance was invented by the authorities to create the existence of a top-security prisoner whose identity was a mystery; a man unknown whose place could one day be taken by someone else who was well known and could in this way be made to disappear. No doubt he was really just a valet and whatever he had done would normally have got him hanged. He was forbidden to speak about his past, not because it contained some terrible secret, but precisely because it contained nothing of any consequence; such a disclosure would have raised suspicions about the motives of those responsible for the pretence. The plan to use him in this way was worked out and set in motion in the summer of 1669, the date at which he was sent to Pignerol. By that time, the man who was one day to take his place had already been in Pignerol for four and a half year: the man hated and feared alike by Louis XIV and all his ministers: the former Superintenent, Nicolas Fouquet.

Arrèse's theory is thus a revamping of the old theory first presented by Paul Lacroix, and much of his argument is based upon the confusions and uncertainties surrounding Fouquet's death. In his view, it was the death of Eustache Dauger which Saint-Mars reported in the letter he wrote to Louvois on 23 March 1680, and it was then that the minister was told to go ahead with the prepared substitution of one prisoner for the other. Presumably the original plan had been to choose the moment for the exchange and thus create the most favourable circumstances for its success, but Dauger's sudden death left no alternative. The plan had to be adapted to the situation as given, or abandoned altogether. The chief difficulty, so far as the authorities were concerned, was that as soon as Fouquet's death was announced, his family would ask to have the body. This in fact happened and to allay any suspicion it was necessary to grant that permission immediately; however, written authorization was deliberately delayed and did not reach Saint-Mars until nearly four weeks after the death, by which time, Arrèse assumes, the family would not have wished to open the coffin. Thus in spring 1680, Fouquet became the mysterious prisoner known later as the Iron Mask, while Eustache Dauger, the miserable nonentity who had acted the rôle of the original prisoner, was buried in his place.

That the mysterious prisoner arrested in 1669 was ‘only a valet' was also the view offered in 1970 by Jean Christian Petitfils in his book
L'Homme au Masque de fer
. His theory was the development of a line of investigation first suggested by Théodore Jung, who ironically was himself unaware that the man he called ‘Eustache Dauger, Danger or d'Augers' was the Iron Mask. Petitfils also insisted that the prisoner's name was Danger (or d'Angers) and not Dauger. ‘It is because of a reading error made by the first investigators that the majority of historians, without themselves referring to the documents, have called him Eustache Dauger', he maintained, and throughout his book he gave the prisoner's name as Eustache Danger. The argument developed by Petitfils is one of the best recent contributions to the subject, made without sensationalism, trickery or distortion, and, though he often treads ground well-worn by others, the debt he owes to Jung or anyone else is finally minimal.

As other writers before him, Petitfils would have us recognize that there is a difference between the government attitude to the Iron Mask before his stay on Sainte-Marguerite and after. At some stage during the eleven years he was there, he ceased to be the prisoner of consequence he had been, and where once the authorities had shown great anxiety and vigilance on his account, they came to show no particular concern or interest. It is evident for instance from government dispatches that whereas the prisoner's security was a major consideration in the decision to transfer Saint-Mars from Pignerol to Exiles, it was no longer an important issue when Saint-Mars was invited to move to the Bastille. In fact it is even possible that there was no intention of having Saint-Mars bring his prisoner with him to the Bastille until Saint-Mars himself proposed it.

The difference in treatment of the prisoner before and after Sainte-Marguerite is particularly noticeable in the way he was transported from one prison to another. For the journey to Exiles he was shut up inside a closed litter and for the journey to Sainte-Marguerite in a sedan-chair covered with oil-cloth. On the journey to the Bastille, however, he was merely given a loo-mask to wear and allowed to sit in an open litter with Saint-Mars. Though the journey was much longer than the previous ones, the open litter was not escorted, as were the closed litter and the sedan-chair, by a company of troops; Saint-Mars had no other guard with him than half a dozen members of his prison staff. It was no doubt for this reason that before setting out for Paris he applied for a royal warrant to empower him to requisition lodging for himself and his prisoner en route, but the authorities thought even this precaution excessive. ‘His Majesty does not consider it necessary,' Barbezieux informed him on 4 August 1698, ‘to issue you with the authorization you request for lodging on your way to Paris. It will suffice for you to lodge and pay as comfortably and securely as you can wherever you judge it appropriate to stay.' Clearly the prisoner's security was no longer a top priority.

The same change of attitude can be found in all matters relating to the prisoner's day-to-day life. Whereas at Pignerol, Exiles and Sainte-Marguerite special high-security cells had to be built for him to ensure that he would be completely sealed off from the world, even from the eyes and ears of the sentries who guarded him, at the Bastille he was lodged like any other prisoner in a normal prison cell. Until he and La Rivière became secret prisoners he was allowed to see a confessor four times a year and after that on strict orders from the minister only once a year; at the Bastille the minister himself imposed no restrictions at all. When he first arrived at Pignerol it was Saint-Mars who took him whatever he needed for the day and later, as a secret prisoner at Exiles and on Sainte-Marguerite, the minister was concerned that only the senior-lieutenant should deputize for Saint-Mars when he was ill or absent. At the Bastille, however, the prisoner was given over entirely to the care of a sergeant.

What happened to alter the prisoner's status is not at all evident. No record exists of any conscious change of attitude directed by a minister. What did change, however, as Petitfils points out, was the actual minister. In July 1691, when the prisoner had been on Sainte-Marguerite for four years, Louvois died and was succeeded by his son, Barbezieux. It was after this date, Petitfils maintains, that government concern for the prisoner's security declined. Neither Barbezieux before the move to the Bastille, nor Pontchartrain after it, ever showed the kind of obsessive concern that Louvois had always shown. Petitfils is thus brought to the conclusion that Louvois had some personal reason for keeping the prisoner under such tight security.

Under the absolute rule of Louis XIV, Petitfils reminds us, what passed for the will of the King was only too often some minister's interpretation of the King's intention, made according to his own will, and no one abused his ministerial powers more in this regard than Louvois. In his case it even happened that matters of personal interest unrelated to state affairs were conducted in the name of the King. In 1668, for instance, when he wanted to make Sidonia de Courcelles his mistress, he had her husband and Louis de Cavoye, who was her lover, held in prison on a charge for which they had been acquitted. Two years later he contrived to bypass a court order for their release and keep them in prison for another two years. When the lady in question refused nevertheless to become his mistress, he hounded her into prison too, and from there into permanent exile. This, as Petitfils points out with examples of even more outrageous conduct, was not at all an exceptional way for Louvois to behave, and so it is not on the face of it impossible that Eustache was the victim of just such a misuse of power. The official papers relating to his arrest and imprisonment make it clear that apart from Louvois, his father Le Tellier and his confidential agents, Vauroy and Saint-Mars, no one but the King could possibly have known of Eustache's fate; and for the King to have been aware was not even necessary since Louvois had access to royal warrants already signed and sealed in blank. The evidence, such as it is, establishes the fact that Eustache's imprisonment could have been arranged by Louvois for personal reasons and the truth kept hidden from everyone else in the government, including the King.