The château of Palteau is still in existence. In his work on Superintendent Fouquet, M. Jules Lair gives a description of it. “The château of Palteau, situated on an eminence among woods and vines, presented at that time, as it does to-day, the aspect of a great lordly mansion in the style of the time of Henri IV. and Louis XIII. First there is a wide courtyard, then two wings; within, the principal building and the chapel. The lower story is supported on arches, and its lofty windows go right up into the roof, and light the place from floor to attic.” Since the eighteenth century, however, the château has undergone some modifications. The room in which Saint-Mars dined with his prisoner is now used as a kitchen.
The Notes of Major Chevalier.—In addition to the entries in du Junca’s Journal which we have transcribed, scholars are accustomed to invoke, as equally worthy of credence though later in date, the testimony of Father Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and that of Major Chevalier.
The extracts from du Junca quoted above were published for the first time in 1769 by Father Griffet, who added the following comments: “The memory of the masked prisoner was still preserved among the officers, soldiers, and servants of the Bastille, when M. de Launey, who has long been the governor, came to occupy a place on the staff of the garrison. Those who had seen him with his mask, when he crossed the courtyard on his way to attend mass, said that after his death the order was given to burn everything he had used, such as linen, clothes, cushions, counterpanes, &c.: that the very walls of the room he had occupied had to be scraped and whitewashed again, and that all the tiles of the flooring were taken up and replaced by others, because they were so afraid that he had found the means to conceal some notes or some mark, the discovery of which would have revealed his name.”
The testimony of Father Griffet happens to be confirmed by some notes from the pen of a major of the Bastille named Chevalier. The major was not a personage of the highest rank in the administration of the Bastille, since above him were the governor and the king’s lieutenant: but he was the most important personage. The whole internal administration, so far as the prisoners were concerned, was entrusted to him. Chevalier fulfilled these duties for nearly thirty-eight years, from 1749 to 1787. M. Fernand Bournon’s estimate of him is as follows: “Chevalier is a type of the devoted hard-working official who has no ambition to rise above a rather subordinate rank. It would be impossible to say how much the administration of the Bastille owed to his zeal and to his perfect familiarity with a service of extraordinary difficulty.”
Among notes put together with a view to a history of the Bastille, Chevalier gives in condensed form the information furnished by du Junca’s register, and adds: “This is the famous masked man whom no one has ever known. He was treated with great distinction by the governor, and was seen only by M. de Rosarges, major of the said château, who had sole charge of him; he was not ill except for a few hours, and died rather suddenly: interred at St. Paul’s, on Tuesday, November 20, 1703, at 4 o’clock p.m., under the name of Marchiergues. He was buried in a new white shroud, given by the governor, and practically everything in his room was burnt, such as his bed, chairs, tables, and other bits of furniture, or else melted down, and the whole was thrown into the privies.”
These notes of Father Griffet and Major Chevalier have derived great force, in the eyes of historians, from their exact agreement; but a close examination shows that the testimony of Chevalier was the source of Father Griffet’s information; in fact, Chevalier was major of the Bastille when the Jesuit compiled his work, and it is doubtless upon his authority that the latter depended.
Documents recently published in the Revue Bleue upset these assertions, which appeared to be based on the firmest foundations.
In the Journal of du Junca, which we have already mentioned, we read under date April 30, 1701: “Sunday, April 30, about 9 o’clock in the evening, M. Aumont the younger came, bringing and handing over to us a prisoner named M. Maranville, alias Ricarville, who was an officer in the army, a malcontent, too free with his tongue, a worthless fellow: whom I received in obedience to the king’s orders sent through the Count of Pontchartrain: whom I have had put along with the man Tirmon, in the second room of the Bertaudière tower, with the ancient prisoner, both being well locked in.”
The “ancient prisoner” here referred to is no other than the masked man. When he entered the Bastille, as we have seen, on September 18, 1698, he was placed in the third room of the Bertaudière tower. In 1701, the Bastille happened to be crowded with prisoners, and they had to put several together in one and the same room; so the man in the mask was placed with two companions. One of them, Jean-Alexandre de Ricarville, also called Maranville, had been denounced as a “retailer of ill speech against the State, finding fault with the policy of France and lauding that of foreigners, especially that of the Dutch.” The police reports depict him as a beggarly fellow, poorly dressed, and about sixty years old. He had formerly been, as du Junca says, an officer in the royal troops. Maranville left the Bastille on October 19, 1708. He was transferred to Charenton, where he died in February, 1709. It must be pointed out that Charenton was then an “open” prison, where the prisoners associated with one another and had numerous relations with the outside world.
The second of the fellow-prisoners of the man in the mask, Dominique-François Tirmont, was a servant. When he was placed in the Bastille, on July 30, 1700, he was nineteen years old. He was accused of sorcery and of debauching young girls. He was put in the second room of the Bertaudière tower, where he was joined by Maranville and the man in the mask. On December 14, 1701, he was transferred to Bicêtre. He lost his reason in 1703 and died in 1708.