Legends of the Bastille

by Frantz Funck-Brentano

The prisoners, then, were five in number, and the masked man is to be found, of necessity, among them. Now we know who these five were: (1) a certain La Rivière, who died at the end of December, 1686; (2) a Jacobin, out of his mind, who died at the end of 1693; (3) a certain Dubreuil, who died at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite about 1697. There remain Dauger and Mattioli. The Man in the Mask is, without possible dispute, the one or the other. We have explained above the reasons which lead us to discard Dauger. The mysterious prisoner, then, was Mattioli. The proof is mathematically exact.

3. Opposite this page will be found a facsimile reproduction of the death certificate of the masked prisoner as inscribed on the registers of the church of St. Paul. It is the very name of the Duke of Mantua’s former secretary that is traced there: “Marchioly.” It must be remembered that “Marchioly” would be pronounced in Italian “Markioly,” and that Saint-Mars, governor of the Bastille, who furnished the information on which the certificate was drawn up, almost always wrote in his correspondence—a characteristic detail—not “Mattioli,” but “Martioly”: that is the very name on the register, less distorted than the name of the major of the Bastille, who was called “Rosarges,” and not “Rosage,” as given on the register; and the name of the surgeon, who was called “Reilhe,” and not “Reglhe.”

It has been shown above how, as time went on, the rigorous seclusion to which the masked prisoner had been condemned was relaxed. What it had been thought necessary to conceal was the manner in which Mattioli had been captured, and with time that secret itself had lost its importance. As the Duke of Mantua had declared himself very well pleased with the arrest of the minister by whom he, no less than Louis XIV., had been deceived, there was nothing to prevent the name from being inscribed on a register of death, where, moreover, no one would ever have thought of looking for it.

Let us add that, in consequence of error or carelessness on the part of the officer who supplied the information for the register, or perhaps on the part of the parson or beadle who wrote it, the age is stated incorrectly, “forty-five years or thereabouts,” while Mattioli was sixty-three when he died. However, the register was filled up without the least care, as a formality of no importance.

4. The Duke de Choiseul pressed Louis XV. to reveal to him the clue to the enigma. The king escaped with an evasion. One day, however, he said to him: “If you knew all about it, you would see that it has very little interest;” and some time after, when Madame de Pompadour, at de Choiseul’s instigation, pressed the king on the subject, he told her that the prisoner was “the minister of an Italian prince.”

In the Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette by her principal lady in waiting, Madame de Campan, we read that the queen tormented Louis XVI., who did not know the secret, to have a search made among the papers of the various ministries. “I was with the queen,” says Madame de Campan, “when the king, having finished his researches, told her that he had found nothing in the secret papers which had any bearing on the existence of this prisoner; that he had spoken on the subject to M. de Maurepas, whose age brought him nearer the time when the whole story must have been known to the ministers (Maurepas had been minister of the king’s household as a very young man, in the early years of the eighteenth century, having the department of the lettres de cachet), and that M. de Maurepas had assured him that the prisoner was simply a man of a very dangerous character through his intriguing spirit, and a subject of the Duke of Mantua. He was lured to the frontier, arrested, and kept a prisoner, at first at Pignerol, then at the Bastille.”

These two pieces of evidence are of such weight that they alone would be sufficient to fix the truth. When they were written, there was no talk of Mattioli, of whose very name Madame de Campan was ignorant. Supposing that Madame de Campan had amused herself by inventing a fable—an absurd and improbable supposition, for what reason could she have had for so doing?—it is impossible to admit that her imagination could have hit upon fancies so absolutely in accord with facts.[41]

And so the problem is solved. The legend, which had reared itself even as high as the throne of France, topples down. The satisfaction of the historian springs from his reflection that all serious historical works for more than a century, resting on far-reaching researches and eschewing all preoccupations foreign to science—such, for example, as the desire of attaining a result different from the solutions proposed by one’s predecessors—have arrived at the same conclusion, which proves to be the correct solution. Heiss, Baron de Chambrier, Reth, Roux-Fazillac, Delort, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul de Saint-Victor, Camille Rousset, Chéruel, Depping, have not hesitated to place under the famous mask of black velvet the features of Mattioli. But at each new effort made by science, legend throws itself once more into the fray, gaining new activity from the passions produced by the Revolution.