king’s lieutenant at the Bastille, from which we learn that on the
18th of September 1698 a new governor, Bénigne D’Auvergne
de Saint-Mars, arrived from the fortress of the Isles Ste
Marguerite (in the bay of Cannes), bringing with him “un
ancien prisonnier qu’il avait à Pignerol” (Pinerolo, in Piedmont),
whom he kept always masked and whose name remained untold.
(Saint-Mars, it may here be noted, had been commandant at
Pignerol from the end of 1664 till 1681; he was in charge there
of such important prisoners as Fouquet, from 1665 to his death
in 1680, and Lauzun, from 1671 till his release in 1681; he was
then in authority at Exiles from 1681 to 1687, and at Ste
Marguerite from 1687 to 1698). Du Junca subsequently records
that “on Monday the 19th of November 1703, the unknown
prisoner, always masked with a black velvet mask, whom M. de
Saint-Mars had brought with him from the islands of Ste
Marguerite, and had kept for a long time,... died at about ten
o’clock in the evening.” He adds that “this unknown prisoner
was buried on the 20th in the parish cemetery of Saint Paul,
and was registered under a name also unknown”—noting in the
margin that he has since learnt that the name in the register
was “M. de Marchiel.” The actual name in the register of
the parish cemetery of Saint Paul (now destroyed, but a facsimile
is still in existence) was “Marchioly”; and the age of the
deceased was there given as “about 45.”
The identity of this prisoner was already, it will be observed, a mystery before he died in 1703, and soon afterwards we begin to see the fruit of the various legends concerning him which presumably started as early as 1670, when Saint-Mars himself (see below) found it necessary to circulate “fairy tales” (contes jaunes). In 1711 the Princess Palatine wrote to the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and suggested that he was an English nobleman who had taken part in a plot of the duke of Berwick against William III. Voltaire, in his Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), told the story of the mysterious masked prisoner with many graphic details; and, under the heading of “Ana” in the Questions sur l’encyclopédie (Geneva, 1771), he asserted that he was a bastard brother of Louis XIV., son of Mazarin and Anne of Austria. Voltaire’s influence in creating public interest in the “man in the mask” was indeed enormous; he had himself been imprisoned in the Bastille in 1717 and again in 1726; as early as 1745 he is found hinting that he knows something; in the Siècle de Louis XIV he justifies his account on the score of conversations with de Bernaville, who succeeded Saint-Mars (d. 1708) as governor of the Bastille, and others; and after Heiss in 1770 had identified the “mask” with Mattioli (see below), Voltaire was not above suggesting that he really knew more than he had said, but thought it sufficient to have given the clue to the enigma. According to the Abbé Soulavie, the duke of Richelieu’s advice was to reflect on Voltaire’s “last utterances” on the subject. In Soulavie’s Mémoires of Richelieu (London, 1790) the masked man becomes (on the authority of an apocryphal note by Saint-Mars himself) the legitimate twin brother of Louis XIV. In 1801 the story went that this scion of the royal house of France had a son born to him in prison, who settled in Corsica under the name of “De Buona Parte,” and became the ancestor of Napoleon! Dumas’s Vicomte de Bragelonne afterwards did much to popularize the theory that he was the king’s brother. Meanwhile other identifications, earlier or later, were also supported, in whose case the facts are a sufficient refutation. He was Louis, count of Vermandois, son of Louise de la Vallière (Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de Perse, Amsterdam, 1745); Vermandois, however, died in 1683. He was the duke of Monmouth (Lettre de Sainte Foy ... Amsterdam, 1768), although Monmouth was beheaded in 1685. He was François de Vendôme, duke of Beaufort, who disappeared (and pretty certainly died) at the siege of Candia (1669); Avedick, an Armenian patriarch seized by the Jesuits, who was not imprisoned till 1706 and died in 1711; Fouquet, who undoubtedly died at Pignerol in 1680; and even, according to A. Loquin (1883), Molière!
Modern criticism, however, has narrowed the issue. The “man in the mask” was either (1) Count Mattioli, who became the prisoner of Saint-Mars at Pignerol in 1679, or (2) the person called Eustache Dauger, who was imprisoned in July 1669 in the same fortress. The evidence shows conclusively that these two were the only prisoners under Saint-Mars at Pignerol who could have been taken by him to the Bastille in 1698. The arguments in favour of Mattioli (first suggested by Heiss, and strongly supported by Topin in 1870) are summed up, with much weight of critical authority, by F. Funck-Brentano in vol. lvi. of the Revue historique (1894); the claims of Eustache Dauger were no less ably advocated by J. Lair in vol. ii. of his Nicolas Foucquet (1890). But while we know who Mattioli was, and why he was imprisoned, a further question still remains for supporters of Dauger, because his identity and the reason for his incarceration are quite obscure.
It need only be added, so far as other modern theories are concerned, that in 1873 M. Jung (La Vérité sur la masque de fer) had brought forward another candidate, with the attractive name of “Marechiel,” a soldier of Lorraine who had taken part in a poisoning plot against Louis XIV., and was arrested at Peronne by Louvois in 1673, and said to be lodged in the Bastille and then sent to Pignerol. But Jung’s arguments, though strong destructively against the Mattioli theory, break down as regards any valid proof either that the prisoner arrested at Peronne was a Bastille prisoner in 1673 or that he was ever at Pignerol, where indeed we find no trace of him. Another theory, propounded by Captain Bazeries (La Masque de fer, 1883), identified the prisoner with General du Bulonde, punished for cowardice at the siege of Cuneo; but Bulonde only went to Pignerol in 1691, and has been proved to be living in 1705.
The Mattioli Theory.—Ercole Antonio Mattioli (born at Bologna on the 1st of December 1640) was minister of Charles IV., duke of Mantua, who as marquess of Montferrat was in possession of the frontier fortress of Casale, which was coveted by Louis XIV. He negotiated the sale of Casale to the French king for 100,000 crowns, and himself received valuable presents from Louis. But on the eve of the occupation of Casale by the French, Mattioli—actuated by a tardy sense of patriotism or by the hope of further gain—betrayed the transaction to the governments of Austria, Spain, Venice and Savoy. Louis, in revenge, had him kidnapped (1679) by the French envoy, J. F. d’Estrades, abbé of Moissac, and Mattioli was promptly lodged in the fortress of Pignerol. This kidnapping of Mattioli, however, was no secret, and it was openly discussed in La Prudenza trionfante di Casale (Cologne, 1682), where it was stated that Mattioli was masked when he was arrested. In February 1680 he is described as nearly mad, no doubt from the effects of solitary confinement. When Saint-Mars was made governor of Exiles in 1681 we know from one of his letters that Mattioli was left at Pignerol; but in March 1694, Pignerol being about to be given up by France to Savoy, he and two other prisoners were removed with much secrecy to Ste Marguerite, where Saint-Mars had been governor since 1687. Funck-Brentano emphasizes the fact that, although Eustache Dauger was then at Ste Marguerite, the king’s minister Barbezieux, writing to Saint-Mars (March 20, 1694) about the transfer of these prisoners, says: “You know that they are of more consequence (plus de conséquence), at least one” (presumably Mattioli), “than those who are at present at the island.” From this point, however, the record is puzzling. A month after his arrival at Ste Marguerite, a prisoner who had a valet died there.[1] Now Mattioli undoubtedly had a valet at Pignerol, and nobody else at Ste Marguerite is known at this time to have had one; so that he may well have been the prisoner who died. In that case he was clearly not “the mask” of 1698 and 1703. Funck-Brentano’s attempt to prove that Mattioli did not die in 1604 is far from convincing; but the assumption that he did is inferential, and to that extent arguable. “Marchioly” in the burial register of Saint Paul naturally suggests indeed at first that the “ancien prisonnier” taken by Saint-Mars to the Bastille in 1698 was Mattioli, Saint-Mars himself sometimes
- ↑ Barbezieux to Saint-Mars, May 10, 1694: “J’ai reçu la lettre que vous avez pris la peine de m’écrire le 29 du mois passé; vous pouvez, suivant que vous le proposez, faire mettre dans la prison voûtée le valet du prisonnier qui est mort.” It may be noted that Barbezieux had recently told Saint-Mars to designate his prisoners by circumlocutions in his correspondence, and not by name.
