Scarcely a parish of it, from Rivoli in the west, to Aquileia in the east, but has, at one time or another—and, in many instances, not once but again and again—been deluged with the blood of armies and of individuals in public and private struggles during the course of the centuries. From Rivoli, rock-bound in the shadow of the Savoy and Alps, across to sad Aquileia, slowly decaying among its fever-stricken rice-fields by the Adriatic lagoons, shades of Masséna’s Frenchmen may well look over to where their hereditary foes first poured into the southern “Mayland,” as they named it under the leadership of Attila, a thousand and three hundred and forty-five years earlier; whilst, between the two, the dust of innumerable armoured condottieri and “Landsknechte” of the middle ages and the Renaissance is mingled with that of hundreds of thousands—Latins, Teutons, Slavs, and Magyars—since fallen in this, the cloth-and-bullet age of our development from the days of Pavia to those of Solferino and Custozza.
Truly, this “Mayland” of the Gothic invaders—whence, as some hold, is derived the name of Milan—is one of the most fertile of all soils for those endowed with the gift of what Sir Thomas Browne so quaintly styled, “the art of reminiscential evocation.” Its history has been made familiar to us, moreover, by many writers and painters and sculptors, all along the road of the centuries; and yet, for me, at least, the very essence of its fascination lies in some of the less known recesses of its treasure-house of human vicissitudes and human good and evil. Its towns and castles, its villas and churches, have their tales of glory or of terror, of sorrow or triumph to tell; and the story of them is the story of a people, and of a society, that have preserved their characteristics intact throughout more changes of government and of ideas than have fallen to the lot of any others in all the world, with the possible exception of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Naples.
There are in this world of ours certain spots that, on first beholding them, cause our hearts to thrill and glow with an extraordinary gladness, by reason of their perfect beauty and the exquisite harmony of them with their surroundings; until, suddenly, we learn the name of the place—and then it seems to us as though the loveliness at which we have been gazing changes under our very eyes, and, as we draw closer to it, becomes swiftly hideous with all the loathsomeness of some dead thing first seen from afar.
Such a one was once, for Victor Hugo, on viewing it of a summer’s evening from the window of a railway train, the town of Sedan, and just such another, for the wanderer who comes into sight of it for the first time, is to be found in a little old bourg at the foot of the mountains in western Lombardy, nestling among poplars and gardens, and crowned by the spire of an ancient church that rises from near the remains of a contemporary castle, once the citadel of the place.
The name of the town is Pinerolo.
The name of Pinerolo, though not so widely known as that of Sedan, is yet linked for ever with one of the most tragically famous of all personalities—that of the “Man in the Iron Mask,” Hercules Anthony Mattioli, as he has now at last been proved irrefutably to have been by Monsieur Funck-Brentano in that gentleman’s luminous “Legends and Archives of the Bastille,” in which at one blow the writer destroys the pretensions of the several other candidates for that mournful honour.
Very few riddles, I should think, if any at all, have so constantly occupied the minds of those interested in historical curiosities during the last hundred and fifty years as has done that of the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV; rarely, if ever, has any question been so hotly disputed by one generation and another of antiquarian scholars. But perhaps the most fascinating work on the subject is an English one, that of Mr. Tighe Hopkins,[25] which I would cordially recommend to all lovers of historical writings.
The whole episode of the “Man in the Iron Mask” furnishes as consummate an instance as any on record of the atrocious vengeance of one human being upon another; if ever Louis XIV was unworthy of his title of “the most Christian King” it was in his unmerciful cruelty towards the man who had inflicted upon him the most crushing diplomatic defeat of his whole reign, that same Count Mattioli. It was for making him ridiculous in the eyes of all who had any knowledge of the affair, by destroying his pet political scheme in regard to Italy, that King Louis condemned Mattioli to life-long imprisonment and to total separation from all that could make his existence endurable—the man’s religion alone excepted. So that, for twenty-four years, from May 2, 1679, to the hour of his death, which took place about ten o’clock in the night of November 19, 1703, the unhappy Italian endured the living death of a man deprived of all knowledge of those he had loved and left behind him, and who on their side had long assumed him to be dead in very fact. Neither his wife nor his father ever learned what became of Mattioli after his disappearance on that fatal 2d of May.
The beginnings of Mattioli’s tragedy were simple enough. They had their foundation, on the one hand, in the overweening ambition of Louis XIV in regard to Italy, where France had possessed Pinerolo since Cardinal Richelieu’s time; and, on the other hand, in the extravagance and debauchery—and the consequent need of money—of one of the most contemptible men who ever lived: Charles of Gonzaga, fourth Duke of Mantua and the owner of the Marquisate of Montferrat, with its strong place of Casale, that lay on the Po, between forty and fifty miles east of Turin. Thus, if Casale could only be brought within his power, the French King would be in a position to prevent any further advance of the Piedmontese into Italy by his own domination in Lombardy. It was his minister of war, the brilliant, if unscrupulous and personally immoral Louvois, who suggested to Louis in 1676 the idea of possessing himself of Casale, and so of making France the arbiter of Italian development.