So much audacity and such an exaggerated pride sufficiently explain the dissimulation and the minute solicitude of Louis XIV., without one’s seeking the cause elsewhere. But if he matured this coup-d’état in secret, and accomplished it with a prudence, without which he would have certainly failed, none of the crimes which rendered it necessary were hidden from contemporaries. The preparations for the arrest were alone mysterious. During the three following years, every one of the documents relating to the trial was presented to the judges, communicated to Fouquet,[382] and was the subject of long discussions. From this there resulted the proof of his skill in argument, but not at all of his innocence. On account of his extortions and of his plan of revolt, he had, according to the laws and customs of the time, deserved death. The majority of his judges condemned him to banishment, a punishment rightly considered too lenient by Louis XIV., who changed it into perpetual imprisonment. But long before his condemnation the numerous mémoires which the accused composed in order to defend himself had been secretly printed by his friends,[383] and circulated among the people. There had thus been nothing ignored or left in obscurity. There is nothing imaginary or hypothetical in the account of what preceded and brought about Fouquet’s imprisonment. It is essential to establish this first of all. Let us now see if, during his stay at Pignerol, any event occurred which, sixteen years after his condemnation, could all at once have determined Louis XIV. to simulate Fouquet’s death, and to make of a captive, long since inoffensive and forgotten, that mysterious and nameless prisoner who is to come from the Isles Sainte-Marguerite to die obscurely in the Bastille.
FOOTNOTES:
[336] It is needless to say that I have put on one side the numerous opinions which are not worthy of being discussed, simply because they do not rest upon a pretext even. There was a period (that of the public disputes between Fréron, Saint-Foix, Lagrange-Chancel, Father Griffet, and Voltaire) when to imagine a solution of this problem was in fashion, and people suggested a name without troubling themselves with the proofs, or at least with the motives which might render this name probable. It is in this manner that two-and-twenty so-styled solutions have been put forward. I have discussed those which concern the brothers of Louis XIV. (son of Buckingham and Anne of Austria, son of Anne of Austria and an unknown person, son of Anne of Austria and Louis XIII., born some hours after Louis XIV.) I have subsequently refuted the Vermandois solution, and the Monmouth, Beaufort, and Avedick. I shall content myself with simply mentioning the opinions which make the Man with the Iron Mask a natural and adulterine son of Marie-Louise d’Orléans, wife of Charles II., King of Spain; a natural and adulterine son of Marie-Anne de Neubourg, second wife of Charles II., King of Spain, who would have been put out of the way by Louis XIV.; a natural son of the Duchess Henriette d’Orléans and Louis XIV.; a natural son of the same Princess and the Count de Guiche; a natural son of Marie-Thèrese, wife of Louis XIV. and of the negro servant whom she had brought with her from Spain; a son of Christine of Sweden and of her Grand Equerry Monaldeschi; a son of Cromwell; a lover of Louise d’Orléans, imprisoned when she became Queen of Spain; a woman; a pupil of the Jesuits incarcerated for an abusive distich, and sent to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite. All these opinions have, as may be seen, very little weight.
Lastly, it is proper to name the Chevalier Louis de Rohan, Master of the Hounds, condemned to death in 1674, as a conspirator, and who, according to one theory, had his life spared. M. Pierre Clément, in the work which he has devoted to this individual (Enguerrand de Marigny, Beaune de Semblançay, le Chevalier de Rohan, épisodes de l’Histoire de France), and in chapter vi. of his curious volume, La Police sous Louis XIV., has clearly established that the Chevalier de Rohan was beheaded. He was executed with his accomplices in front of the Bastille, November 27, 1674. The execution was public, and it was impossible to have substituted any one else. It was not because no effort was made to move the heart of Louis XIV.; but Louvois was always on the watch, and in this instance thought it desirable to renew the severities of Richelieu. Even supposing it were possible to prove that Louis XIV. had spared the life of this conspirator, it would also be necessary to prove that he was the Man with the Iron Mask, and not merely by showing the probabilities and indicating the possibilities. Such a process, indeed, sufficed in the last century to build up a theory; but historical criticism in our own times is rightly more exacting. It is essential now-a-days to establish the perfect conformity between the Chevalier de Rohan and the Man with the Iron Mask, by following the former from prison to prison, from the time that his life is said to have been spared until his death in 1703. But this is utterly impossible. One prisoner only was brought to Saint-Mars in 1674, but on April 18, long before the Chevalier’s trial: this prisoner was an insignificant and obscure monk. Now we are acquainted with all the prisoners confided to Saint-Mars since that time, we know the causes of their imprisonment, and there is no doubt, moreover, that he had no others. Numerous despatches attest this fact, and it has been established and recognized since a long time. The only doubtful point is which of Saint-Mars’ prisoners was the Man with the Iron Mask. But not one of them has, in his existence, his age, the manner in which he was treated, the time at which he was incarcerated, any feature which resembles the Chevalier de Rohan even in conjecture. See, besides the two volumes mentioned: Imperial Archives, Manuscript Registers of the Secretary’s office of the King’s Household, year 1674, pp. 133, 165, 184. Archives of the Ministry of War, letter from Louvois to the King, October 6, 1674. Mémoires Militaires de Louis XIV., vol. iii. p. 522; Basnage, chap. civ. p. 549; La Hode, book xxxv. p. 514; Limiers, book vi. p. 274; Lafare, chap. vii. p. 211; Sismondi, Histoire des Français, vol. xxv. pp. 280 and 282; Camille Rousset, Histoire de Louvois, vol. ii. p. 120.
[337] Cessione di Pinerolo, fatta da Enrico III. ad Emanuele Filiberto il Grande Duca di Savoia, Pinèrolo, 1858.
[338] Pinerolo antico e moderno e suoi dintorni, del Canonico G. Groset-Monchet; Veduta di S. Maurizio, dell’ Abate Car. Jacopo Bernardi, Pinerolo, 1858.
[339] Corografia fisica dell’ Italia, di Attilio Zuccagni-Orlandini.
[340] Mémoires de D’Artagnan, by Sandraz de Courtilz, Cologne, 1701, vol. iii. pp. 222 and 385; Annales de la Cour et de Paris, for the years 1697 and 1698, vol. ii. p. 380.
[341] Order of Le Tellier to d’Artagnan, December 3, 1661:—Archives of the Ministry of War.
[342] Ibid.