Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

In less than a year Mattioli went out of his mind, thanks to Saint-Mars’ treatment of him; at that time three of the prisoners under the amiable Benignant’s charge in the hell of Pinerolo were insane—Mattioli, Dubreuil, and a nameless Jacobin monk. After a while Mattioli and the Jacobin were put in the same cell—and there they lived and had their miserable being together until 1694, when, in consequence of the French reverses, preparations were set on foot to abandon Pinerolo to the Savoyards. It now became necessary to remove the only three prisoners left there to safer keeping in France itself, in order that the King’s secret might be kept—the secret of his having “spirited away,” by means of his agents, the Minister of a friendly Prince.

And so Mattioli was taken off, along with Dubreuil and another—the monk was dead—in a closed litter to another fortress, that of Sainte-Marguerite, on an island off the coast of Nice; his former gaoler, Saint-Mars, had, for some years already, been the governor of Sainte-Marguerite, and to him Mattioli was brought under a strong escort of soldiers by the then governor of Pinerolo, the Marquis D’Herleville, in person.

It is to be presumed that on this journey between the two prisons Mattioli was masked, as he was similarly masked some years later, on his transference, under charge of Saint-Mars, from Sainte-Marguerite to Paris and to the Bastile itself; the mask, though, was not the traditional monstrosity of iron, but the ordinary velvet “vizard” worn to this day at masked balls.

And this brings us to one of the strangest features of the whole case—namely, that from beginning to end this secrecy on the part of Louis XIV and his henchmen was completely unnecessary, for the simple reason that the secret was no secret at all and never had been.

This is abundantly proved by the fact that, as early as 1682, little more than two years after Mattioli’s abduction by D’Estrades, there was published at Cologne a pamphlet in Italian called “La prudenza trionfante di Casale.” In this a complete, detailed account was given of the whole affair of the intrigue for Casale, with the full parts played in it by D’Estrades, Mattioli, the Duke of Mantua, Catinat, D’Asfeld, and Pinchesne; and in 1687 there was published at Leyden the “Histoire abrégée de l’Europe,” containing a letter translated from Italian into French, denouncing the abduction of Mattioli as the outrage that it was.

How the thing came thus to light and through whom, I have no means of ascertaining, and so I must leave it to the reader to decide the question for himself. But, as the “Prudenza trionfante” contains a minute description of Mattioli’s arrest, in the words, “The secretary (Mattioli) was surrounded by ten or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him, masked him, and conducted him to Pinerolo,” we can only conclude either that it must have been written by an eyewitness, or else from the description given by one of the scene in question. Moreover, there were alive, until the Eighteenth Century, many persons of the parts about Pinerolo who continued to bear witness both to Mattioli’s arrest as well as to the manner of it, especially in regard to his masking by Catinat’s men.

After all, what explanation more natural than that (for the day was a Sunday) some small boys or other idlers should have followed the march of Catinat and his few soldiers, at a respectful distance, along the three miles of road from Pinerolo to the place of the arrest and, concealing themselves among the dense trees nearby, should have seen everything?

Thus, the mystery of Mattioli’s disappearance from the world of the living was in no way a mystery, except in the fond imagination of his gaolers, seeing that the facts of it were public property over a great part of Europe, after the appearance of the publications mentioned in 1682 and 1687.

There arises then the question—whence the mystery of the “Man in the Iron Mask”?

From the early spring of 1694 until the summer of 1698, when Saint-Mars was promoted to be the governor of the Bastile in Paris, Mattioli remained under his care at the Island of Sainte-Marguerite. At the end of those four years Saint-Mars is told to come to Paris and to bring with him his “ancient prisoner” in such a manner that he shall be seen by no one.