The man with the iron mask

by Marius Topin

Among the numerous theories which attempt to explain the existence of the Man with the Iron Mask,[13] some have been imagined so carelessly, conceived with so much haste, and supported in so loose a manner, that they are not worthy of a serious examination, and simply to mention them will suffice to do them justice. But there are others, due to an ingenious inspiration, and sustained with incontestable talent, which, without being true, have at least many appearances of being so. Among others, the most devoid of proofs, but also the most romantic, is that which makes the Man with the Iron Mask a brother of Louis XIV. “There are many things which everybody says because they have been said once,” remarks Montesquieu.[14] This is especially true of things which border on the extraordinary and the marvellous. So, there are few persons who, on hearing the Man with the Iron Mask mentioned, do not immediately evoke a brother of Louis XIV. Whether the result of an intrigue between Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham,[15] or a legitimate son of Louis XIII. and twin brother of Louis XIV., matters little to popular imagination. These are but different branches of a system which is profoundly engrafted in the public mind, and which it will not be unprofitable to overthrow separately, since it has still innumerable partisans, and touches upon the rights, moreover, the Bourbons have had to the throne of France.

By whom was this widely-spread opinion first put forward? And by whom has it been revived in our own days? What proofs, or, at least, what probabilities are invoked in its support? On what recollections, on what writings, is such a supposition based? Does it agree with official documents? Is it in accord with the character of Anne of Austria or with that of Louis XIII.? Is it founded on reason?

First Voltaire,[16] in his Siècle de Louis XIV., published in 1751, wrote the following lines, destined to excite a lively attention and to start a theory which he only completed in his Dictionnaire Philosophique:—

“Some months after the death of Mazarin,” he says, “an event occurred which has no parallel, and what is no less strange, all the historians have ignored it. There was sent with the greatest secresy to the château of the Isle Sainte-Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence, an unknown prisoner, above the average height, and of a most handsome and noble countenance. This prisoner, on the journey, wore a mask, the chin-piece of which was furnished with steel springs, which left him free to eat with the mask covering his face. Orders had been given to kill him if he should remove it. He remained in the island till a confidential officer, named Saint-Mars, governor of Pignerol, having been appointed governor of the Bastille in 1690, went to fetch him in the Isle Sainte-Marguerite and conducted him to the Bastille, always masked. The Marquis de Louvois went to see him in this island before his removal, and spoke to him standing, and with a consideration which betokened respect. This unknown individual was taken to the Bastille, where he was lodged as well as he could be in the château. Nothing that he asked for was refused him. His greatest liking was for linen of an extraordinary fineness and for lace; he played on the guitar. He had the very best of everything, and the governor rarely sat down in his presence. An old doctor of the Bastille, who had often attended this singular man in his illnesses, has stated that he never saw his face, although he had examined his tongue and the rest of his body. He was admirably made, said this doctor; his skin was rather brown: he interested one by the mere tone of his voice, never complaining of his state, and not letting it be understood who he could be. This stranger died in 1703, and was interred during the night in the parish church of Saint-Paul. What redoubles one’s astonishment is that at the period when he was sent to the Isle Sainte-Marguerite, there had disappeared from Europe no important personage. This prisoner was without doubt one, since this is what occurred shortly after his arrival in the island:—The governor himself used to place the dishes on the table, and then to withdraw after having locked him in. One day, the prisoner wrote with a knife on a silver plate, and threw the plate out of the window towards a boat which was on the shore, almost at the foot of the tower. A fisherman, to whom the boat belonged, picked up the plate and carried it to the governor. He, astonished, asked the fisherman: ‘Have you read what is written on this plate, and has any one seen it in your possession?’ ‘I do not know how to read,’ answered the fisherman; ‘I have just found it, and nobody has seen it.’ The peasant was detained until the governor had ascertained that he could not read, and that the plate had been seen by nobody. ‘Go,’ he then said to him, ‘you are very lucky not to know how to read!’”[17]

The following is the explanation by which, in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, Voltaire, under his editor’s name, afterwards completed this first story: “The Man with the Iron Mask was doubtless a brother, and an elder brother of Louis XIV., whose mother had that taste for fine linen on which M. de Voltaire relies. It was from reading the Mémoires of the period which relate this anecdote concerning the Queen, that, recollecting this very taste of the Man with the Iron Mask, I no longer doubted that he was her son, of which all the other circumstances had already convinced me. It is known that Louis XIII. had not lived with the Queen for a considerable time, and that the birth of Louis XIV. was only due to a lucky chance.” Voltaire proceeds to relate that previous to the birth of Louis XIV., Anne of Austria had been delivered of a son of whom Louis XIII. was not the father, and that she had confided the secret of his birth to Richelieu: he then goes on to say,—“But the Queen and the Cardinal, equally penetrated with the necessity of hiding the existence of the Man with the Iron Mask from Louis XIII., had him brought up in secresy. This was unknown to Louis XIV. until the death of the Cardinal de Mazarin. But this monarch, learning then that he had a brother, and an elder brother, whom his mother could not disavow, who, moreover, perhaps had characteristic features which betokened his origin, and reflecting that this child, born during marriage, could not, without great inconvenience and a horrible scandal, be declared illegitimate after Louis XIII.’s death, may have considered that he could not make use of wiser and better means to assure his own security and the tranquillity of the State than those which he employed, means which dispensed with his committing a cruelty which policy would have represented as being necessary to a monarch less conscientious and less magnanimous than Louis XIV.”[18]

What improbabilities, what contradictions, what errors accumulated in a few pages! This unknown, whom no one, not even his doctor, has ever seen unmasked, has his face described as “handsome and noble;” Saint-Mars, named governor of the Bastille in 1690, and traversing the whole of France in order to fetch a prisoner, for whom during eight-and-twenty years another gaoler had sufficed; this mask with steel springs covering day and night the face of the unknown without affecting his health; this resignation which prevented his complaining of his position and which did not allow him to give any one a glimmering as to who he was, and this eagerness to throw out of his window silver plates on which he had written his name; this peculiar taste for fine linen, which Anne of Austria also possessed, and which revealed his origin; this haste on her part to confess her adultery to her enemy, the Cardinal de Richelieu; the Queen of France making only the Prime Minister the confidant of her confinement; and these two events, the birth and the abduction of a royal child, so well concealed that no contemporary memoir makes mention of them: such are the reflections which immediately suggest themselves on reading this story.

No less improbable, and more romantic still, is the fictitious account given by the governor himself of the Man with the Iron Mask, and which Soulavie has introduced into the apocryphal memoirs of the Marshal de Richelieu.[19] “The unfortunate prince whom I have brought up and guarded to the end of my days,” says the governor,[20] “was born 5th September, 1638, at half-past eight in the evening, while the King was at supper. His brother, now reigning (Louis XIV.), was born at twelve in the morning, during his father’s dinner. But while the birth of the King was splendid and brilliant, that of his brother was sad and carefully concealed. Louis XIII. was warned by the midwife that the Queen would have a second delivery, and this double birth had been announced to him a long time previously by two herdsmen, who asserted in Paris that if the Queen was brought to bed of two Dauphins, it would be the consummation of the State’s misfortune. The Cardinal de Richelieu, consulted by the King, replied that, if the Queen should bring twin sons into the world it would be necessary to carefully hide the second, because he might one day wish to be King. Louis XIII. was consequently patient in his uncertainty. When the pains of the second labour commenced, he was overwhelmed with emotion.” The Queen is delivered of a second child “more delicate and more handsome than the first.” The midwife is charged with him, “and the Cardinal afterwards took upon himself the education of this Prince who was destined to replace the Dauphin if the latter should die. As for the shepherds who prophesied on the subject of Anne of Austria’s confinement, the governor did not hear them spoken of any more, whence he concludes that the Cardinal found a means of sending them away.”

“Dame Péronnette, the midwife, brought the Prince up as her own son, and he passed for being the bastard of some great lord of the time. The Cardinal confided him later to the governor to educate him as a King’s son, and this governor took him into Burgundy to his own house. The Queen-mother seemed to fear that if the birth of this young Dauphin should be discovered, the malcontents would revolt, because many doctors think that the last-born of twin brothers is really the elder, and therefore King by right. Nevertheless, Anne of Austria could not prevail upon herself to destroy the documents which established this birth. The Prince, at the age of nineteen, became acquainted with this State secret by searching in a casket belonging to his governor, in which he discovered letters from the Queen and the Cardinals de Richelieu and Mazarin. But, in order better to assure himself of his true condition, he asked for portraits of the late and present Kings. The governor replied that what he had were so bad that he was waiting for better ones to be painted, in order to place them in his apartment. The young man proposed to go to Saint-Jean de Luz, where the court was staying, on account of the King’s marriage with the Spanish Infanta, and compare himself with his brother. His governor detained him, and no longer quitted his side.

“The young Prince was then handsome as Cupid, and Cupid was very useful to him in getting him a portrait of his brother, for a servant with whom he had an intrigue procured him one. The Prince recognized himself, and rushed to his governor, exclaiming, ‘This is my brother, and here is what I am!’ The governor despatched a messenger to court to ask for fresh instructions. The order came to imprison them both together.”[21]

“It is at last known, this secret which has excited so lively and so general a curiosity!”[22] says Champfort, in noticing these fictitious Mémoires du Maréchal de Richelieu. This implacable and sceptic railer allowed himself to be really seduced by this interpretation. Many others were convinced with him, which exonerates them; and the version given by Voltaire was rather neglected for that of Soulavie.