These are all the particulars, worthy of credit, to be collected respecting Matthioli during his confinement at the Bastille, which lasted rather more than five years. He died there after a few hours’ illness, November 19th, 1703. Dujonca’s journal gives the following account of his decease and interment.
“Monday, 19th November, 1708. The unknown prisoner, who was always masked with a mask of black velvet, whom M. de St. Mars brought with him, when he came from the Islands of St Margaret, and whom he had had the care of for a long time, having found himself rather more unwell when he came out from mass, died to-day, about ten o’clock in the evening, without having had any considerable illness. M. Girault, our chaplain, confessed him yesterday. Death having come suddenly on, he was not able to receive his sacraments, and our chaplain only had time to exhort him for a moment before he died. He was interred on Tuesday the 20th November, at four in the afternoon, in the church-yard of St. Paul, which is our parish. His interment cost forty livres.”
This extract is confirmed in its facts by the register of the Bastille,[149] as well as by the register of burials of the church of St. Paul, at Paris. The former document also informs us that he was wrapped in “a winding-sheet of new linen,”[150]—and the latter, that he was buried in the presence of Rosarges, Major of the Bastille, and of Reilh, Surgeon-Major of the same prison.
In the register of the church he is designated by the name of Marchialy, and his age is entered as forty-five; assertions which are both of them evidently incorrect, and probably only made in order to mislead the curious. At the time of his death, Matthioli was sixty-three years of age, as appears from the date of his birth before given. Shortly before he died, he told the Apothecary of the Bastille that he believed he was sixty years[151] old—a degree of inaccuracy as to his own age, which is easily to be conceived in a man who had been so long and so rigorously imprisoned. His confinement had lasted above twenty-four years.
After the decease of Matthioli, every thing was done to endeavour to destroy all trace even of his former existence. His clothes were burnt, as was all the furniture of his room; the silver plate, the copper, and the pewter, which had been used by him, were melted down; the walls of his chamber were first scraped, and then fresh white-washed; the floor was new paved; the old ceiling was taken away and renewed; the doors and windows were burnt; and every corner was searched in which it was thought any paper, linen, or other memorial of him might be concealed.[152]
Thus were continued, to the very last, the same extraordinary precautions against discovery, which marked the whole imprisonment of the mysterious prisoner: a circumstance, which of itself certainly affords a strong confirmation of the fact, that the Iron Mask of the Bastille, was one and the same person with the Count Matthioli, who had been so secretly introduced into Pignerol, and so mysteriously conveyed from place to place by St. Mars. But the actual proof of this is only to be found in the documents which form the groundwork of the preceding narrative; and which, undoubtedly, do present a most convincing and satisfactory chain of evidence upon the subject.
An important corroboration of this evidence is also derived from the well-attested fact, that Lewis the Fifteenth, who is allowed, on all hands, to have known the history of the Iron Mask, affirmed, more than once, that he was the minister of an Italian sovereign. He told the Duke de Choiseul,[153] on one occasion, that he knew who the Iron Mask was; and, upon the Duke’s questioning him further, would only add, that all the conjectures hitherto made upon the subject were erroneous.[154] The Duke then begged Madame de Pompadour[156] to ask the King who it was; she did so, and his reply was, “The minister of an Italian prince!”[157] The Duke de Choiseul, unsatisfied by this reply, which he considered to be only an evasion, took another opportunity of again applying to the King upon the subject, who again answered, “He believed that the prisoner was a minister of one of the courts of Italy!”[158]
Thus has the ill-fated Matthioli been identified with the Iron Mask, and traced through his long and dreary prison to his grave. It is probable that much of the illusion and interest, which accompanied the mysterious appellation of the Iron Mask, will be destroyed by the certainty of who he really was; as well as by the comparative insignificance of the personage who has successfully laid claim to the title. Still it is surely satisfactory that truth, after being so long overwhelmed by error, should be at length triumphant.
The lovers of romance, who still wish to know more of the magnificent conjectures of former days; or who desire to be made acquainted with the reasons that induced a belief, that the Iron Mask was either the Duke de Beaufort; or the Count de Vermandois; or the Duke of Monmouth; or an elder or a twin-brother of Lewis the Fourteenth; or a son of Oliver Cromwell; or Arwediks, the Armenian Patriarch; are referred to Voltaire, Dutens, St. Foix, La Grange Chancel, Gibbon, the Père Papon, the Père Griffet, the Chevalier de Taulés, and Mr. Quintin Craufurd. Of these accounts, perhaps Voltaire’s is the least curious, find Mr. Craufurd’s the most so; because the first did not seek for truth, but only wished to invent a moving tale; while the latter was most anxious to arrive at the truth, and had all the advantage in his researches of the former writers upon the same subject.