The Man Behind the Iron Mask (45 page)

In more romantic theories than the one I propose, much has been made of the wording of the official order which Barbezieux sent to Saint-Mars on 19 July. ‘The King sees fit that you leave the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and come to the Bastille with your longtime prisoner, taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone.' There, it has been said, is proof that the prisoner's face was so well known or in some way so exceptional that it had to be masked, but in the context of the correspondence which preceded and succeeded this letter, and in the light of all we know about Danger's personal insignificance, no such conclusion is possible. Arguably the words ‘taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone' were a conventional turn of phrase in common use for such orders and therefore not to be taken literally, but even if that were not the case it seems certain that Barbezieux did not mean them to suggest that Saint-Mars should cover the prisoner's face with a mask. No such order was ever given and indeed from what we know of the prisoner such an order would have been absurd. In all probability the reason why Barbezieux expressed himself in this way arose from his lack of interest rather than his concern, it being a phrase he was echoing from something Saint-Mars himself had said. Years before in Pignerol, Saint-Mars had indeed been ordered to avoid Danger being seen or known to anyone. The same order had applied to La Rivière, of course, and its purpose had been to deceive Lauzun into the belief that they had been liberated, but no doubt Saint-Mars had embroidered upon this story to persuade Barbezieux of Danger's importance. Though Barbezieux and the King were certainly aware that the prisoner's identity was not of major importance, they would have seen no reason to contradict an old man like Saint-Mars in what after all appeared to be nothing more than an excess of concern. If they had been genuinely afraid lest the prisoner should be ‘seen or known to anyone', they would not have left Saint-Mars to find lodging for him wherever he could, including post-houses, on his way to Paris.

And so to the Bastille Saint-Mars brought his longtime prisoner, hiding his face in a mask of black velvet as if otherwise the mystery-man would have been recognized. The change from steel to velvet was a necessity in view of the more sophisticated spectators he could expect to find in Paris. A steel mask there would have caused such a sensation that the King and his ministers would have come down on him for an explanation, but a velvet mask, though sure to attract attention, was not without precedent. Saint-Mars almost certainly knew that a similar mask had been used just three years before to cover the face of a prisoner brought to the Bastille. On 21 March 1695
La Gazette d'Amsterdam
published the following report: ‘A lieutenant of the galleys accompanied by twenty horsemen has conducted to the Bastille a masked prisoner, brought from Provence in a litter and closely guarded throughout the journey, which leads one to believe that he is someone of importance, especially since his name is kept secret and those who brought him say that it is a secret from them.' Saint-Mars knew this line of thinking well: he had been exploiting it for years, and if like the lieutenant of the galleys he chose to mask his prisoner, it was with the deliberate intention of leading people to believe that the masked man was someone of unusual importance, proof to the world that he himself was, and always had been, a gaoler of unusual importance.

As it happens, the identity of the earlier masked prisoner is known, and he was not important at all. It was a certain Gesnon Fillibert, a captain of the galleys who was a Protestant, suspected of trying to reveal war-secrets to the English fleet then cruising in the Mediterranean. He was arrested at sea out of Genoa and was brought to Paris in a mask because he had to be taken by way of Lyon where his family lived; the authorities did not wish his father, who was a banker, to know about his arbitrary arrest. According to Du Junca, he arrived at the Bastille ‘in a litter with his face hidden' on 15 February 1695 and was liberated on 15 October 1697. Though the effect of Danger's mask was the same as that of Fillibert, the reason he wore it was not. Danger's mask was not to hide who the wearer was, but to hide who he was not. He was not a Marshal of France nor a President of the Parlement. He was not Richard Cromwell nor the Duc de Beaufort. He was not in himself anyone of any significance, but it was necessary for the image of his gaoler that he should appear to be so. Hiding the prisoner's face with a mask was the gaoler's way of saving his own face.

As governor of the Bastille Saint-Mars no longer needed to bluff his way to an image of importance, but the game begun at Sainte-Marguerite had to be played to the end or his pretence would have been discovered. Nor at that stage was he capable of changing his ways, let alone his game. Though in Paris he had finally become all that he had always longed to be, the honour came too late for him to enjoy the respect and consideration which his new post gave him. Seventy-two years old, as then he was, a widower, often ill and almost without friends, deaf and infirm, back-bent and trembling, he no longer had the force or the will to remake or rethink his life; imprisoned in his own masquerade, like poor Danger in his mask, he was obliged to live out his remaining years the swaggering mythomaniac he had allowed himself to become, the vainglorious old fool who in 1702 boasted of pretended past exploits in such a ridiculous way in front of Renneville:

He told me that he had left Holland the day after the birth of King William … because the day before, when everyone was celebrating, he had picked a quarrel with seven Dutchmen, had killed four and disarmed the other three … From there he had embarked for Lisbon where he had carried off the prize in a famous tourney. After that he had moved to the court of Madrid where he had won acclaim in a bullfight, carrying off the prize for that too and the admiration of all the ladies, who had wellnigh drowned him in a deluge of perfume-eggs filled with scented waters. And every fourth word he uttered was an oath to assert this big talk which was so at odds with his puny size.

The idea of keeping a prisoner masked in prison was altogether unprecedented in France, but for Saint-Mars it was a logical extension of the idea of having his prisoner masked for the journey. In this way he could be sure that under day to day circumstances which he could no longer personally control, he would be able to keep up the pretence that his prisoner's hidden identity was significant. On Sainte-Marguerite, all his prisoners had been sealed off behind his own quarters, making it possible for him to supervise and restrict all movement and contact. At the Bastille, such personal control was impossible. The staff including Du Junca had been greatly impressed by his arrival with a mysterious prisoner. Without comment from him they had assumed that a mask was needed to keep the man's identity secret, and with just a word from him they had learned that the man had been in his personal custody ever since Pignerol and the days of Fouquet and Lauzun. Saint-Mars was not the type to risk losing the magic of such a powerful first impact and was careful to keep Du Junca away from the prisoner from the outset. Du Junca owed his appointment to the King and, unlike the sorry creatures employed by Saint-Mars, he was neither a fool nor a knave. If he had been allowed into contact with the prisoner, he would sooner or later have seen through the hoax and raised questions. As it was he accepted the situation without question or resentment and to all appearances without curiosity, his lack of interest being due no doubt to his realisation that the prisoner was not of much consequence anyway. He must certainly have recognized that the man was not of high rank. Even if he never saw him close enough to know that he was dressed in a suit ‘expected to last three or four years', he did know that he had no valet to serve him and that he was to be looked after by the drunken clown Rosarges, as stupid as he was ignorant and as brutal as he was dishonest.

Nonetheless, the older members of the Bastille staff had once been accustomed to the everyday sight of someone masked and under guard. François de Besmaux, the predecessor of Saint-Mars, had in earlier days kept his wife masked and guarded in public, at least that was the claim made in 1700 by Courtilz de Sandras in the third volume of his
Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan
. Before ever he became governor of the Bastille. Besmaux had lived in constant fear that someone might try to steal his money and his wife. He put his money in a strong-box and, according to Courtilz de Sandras, would have put his wife in one too if he could, or at least kept her locked up in a chastity-belt; ‘but since that was even less permitted than the other, he bought one of the biggest masks in Paris with one of the biggest chin-pieces and obliged her to wear it on her face all the time.' It was because he judged that the Bastille was the safest place to hide away his wife and his money that he bribed and swindled his way to the governorship, and thereafter his poor wife was as much a prisoner as any of the inmates. ‘He did not want her to go out except to attend mass at the Sisters of Mary which was nearby nor to spend the least amount of money. Moreover she was only allowed out in her big mask with its big chin-piece, for all the world as if she were afraid of a sunburn, and two soldiers of the Bastille accompanied her even in her devotions.' Presumably Saint-Mars knew all about his predecessor's masked wife because in June 1663 he had been second-in-command to d'Artagnan when he had moved Fouquet to the Bastille. At that time Besmaux had been alarmed because the thirty or so musketeers who installed themselves in his prison to guard Fouquet were all fascinated by his masked wife and, as Courtilz de Sandras claimed, ‘there was no chin-piece proof against their great appetite though it were double the thickness and bigger again than the one she was wearing.' It was of course the mask which attracted Saint-Mars and his fellow-musketeers, it being their understandable assumption that if she had not been beautiful Besmaux would not have masked her. In his use of a mask for his prisoner, Saint-Mars was deliberately seeking a similar response: the assumption that if his prisoner had not been easily recognisable he would not have masked him.

At the Bastille, Saint-Mars came under a new master, the Controller of Finance, and the secretary of that minister, a man called Desgranges, cultivated his friendship. After more than thirty years in the provinces, Saint-Mars had few friends in Paris. Desgranges flattered him with shows of respect and attention in society and indulged him at the ministry by wangling gifts of government money and closing his eyes to irregularities in his accounts. ‘It is known,' the Marquis de Sourches commented wryly in his
Mémoires
for 14 June 1699, ‘that the King has given a bonus of 5,000 livres to old Saint-Mars, the governor of the Bastille, to compensate him for what he did to feed the prisoners more economically than his predecessor managed to do.' For Desgranges it was a sprat to catch a mackerel. In 1700 the son of Saint-Mars and the daughter of Desgranges were married, and even though Saint-Mars outlived his son and there were no grand-children, he included his son's widow in his will. When Saint-Mars died in 1708, at the age of eighty-two, the fortune he left behind was enormous. Each of his three nephews received a titled estate: Palteau, Dimon and Blainvilliers; and the daughter of Desgranges received the rest: furniture, arms, silver and ‘jewels of great value', as well as coffers containing ‘more than 600,000 silver francs in cash'. No one mourned his loss. Only the heirs showed any concern at his passing, and what concerned them was the extent of their share in the inheritance.

For Saint-Mars himself in the last years of his life, it was probably not the legacy of his wealth that concerned him most; to the vile and servile Corbé, whom he detested anyway, went the magnificent house and estate of Plateau. In all likelihood what he valued more was somethig he had been unable to buy and so at one time had been obliged to invent: a means to attain the awe and admiration of society. As governor of Sainte-Marguerite he had managed to impress the people around him by making a display of secrecy and importance over one of his prisoners who, whatever significance he might have had in the eyes of the authorities, would have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. As governor of the Bastille he kept up that pretence and saw the image he had invented for the prisoner outlive the prisoner's death. During the remaining years of his own life, he may even have come to realise that the myth would live on after his death too and carry his name with it to impress the world when he had gone. If the idea occurred to him, it no doubt gave him pleasure; but even he could not have imagined how, in the years that followed, coincidence and circumstance would combine to inflate the myth to archetypal proportions and make his name as famous in history as anyone in his age.

Surrounded as he was by creatures of his own mark and making, he was not alone in his exploitation of the mystery which enveloped the imprisoned valet. Blainvilliers, pretending to his young nephew Palteau that he had seen the famous prisoner through the window of his cell on Sainte-Marguerite, was playing the same game, as was his brother, Louis de Formanoir, telling the preposterous story he had concocted around a pair of steel tweezers. Since it is unlikely that either of these men had any direct contact with the prisoner, they may have believed that he was all that Saint-Mars made him out to be, but their brother Corbé knew differently. As prison lieutenant, he had accompanied Saint-Mars into the prisoner's cell and had supervised the to and fro of dishes, clothes and linen. Though he lived until 1740, outliving both his brothers, he said nothing to his son Palteau to contradict their stories, nothing of the truth, so far as we are aware, to anyone. By his silence, he contributed as much to the myth as his brothers did by their inventions.

Memories of the masked prisoner, confused with memories of Fillibert and Besmaux's wife, were already a tradition at the Bastille by the time Voltaire heard them. It is just possible that the story reported by the Princess Palatine in 1711 included details remembered from the masked and guarded excursions of Besmaux's wife, but it seems wellnigh certain that the description of the prisoner's mask given by Voltaire in 1751 was derived directly from some recollection of that poor woman's mask. An important feature of that mask had been its chin-piece, and in Voltaire's account the chin-piece was an essential feature of the prisoner's mask of iron; in fact, we know that the mask actually worn by the prisoner at the Bastille was an ordinary loo-mask which covered only the upper part of his face. The transition from velvet to iron was once difficult to explain, but not today, knowing as we now do that the prisoner was actually seen on his way to Sainte-Marguerite with his face hidden by a mask of steel.
⁶
Most of Voltaire's information was based on local tradition picked up in the region of Cannes, and it was there no doubt that the name Iron Mask
⁷
originated.