Was Dauger a valet? If Dauger was the “mask,” it is just as well to remove a misunderstanding which has misled too many commentators.
1. If Louvois’s letter of July 19 be read in connexion with the preceding correspondence it will be seen that ever since Fouquet’s incarceration in 1665 Saint-Mars had had trouble over his valets. They fall ill, and there is difficulty in replacing them, or they play the traitor. At last, on the 12th of March 1669, Louvois writes to Saint-Mars to say (evidently in answer to some suggestion from Saint-Mars in a letter which is not preserved): “It is annoying that both Fouquet’s valets should have fallen ill at the same time, but you have so far taken such good measures for avoiding inconvenience that I leave it to you to adopt whatever course is necessary.” There are then no letters in existence from Saint-Mars to Louvois up to Louvois’s letter of July 19, in which he first refers to Dauger; and for three months (from April 22 to July 19) there is a gap in the correspondence, so that the sequence is obscure. The portion, however, of the letter of the 19th of July, cited above, in which Louvois uses the words “ce n’est qu’un valet,” does not, in the present writer’s judgment, refer to Dauger at all, but to something which had been mooted in the meanwhile with a view to obtaining a valet for Fouquet. This is indeed the natural reading of the letter as a whole. If Louvois had meant to write that Dauger was “only a valet” he would have started by saying so. On the contrary, he gives precise and apparently comprehensive directions in the first part of the letter about how he is to be treated: “Je vous en donne advis par advance, afin que vous puissiez faire accomoder un cachot où vous le mettrez surement, observant de faire en sorte que les jours qu’aura le lieu où il sera ne donnent point sur les lieux qui puissent estre abordez de personne, et qu’il y ayt assez de portes fermées, les unes sur les autres, pour que vos sentinelles ne puissent bien entendre,” &c. Having finished his instructions about Dauger, he then proceeds in a fresh paragraph to tell Saint-Mars that orders have been given to “Sieur Poupart” to do “whatever you shall desire.” He is here dealing with a different question; and it is unreasonable to suppose. and indeed contrary to the style in which Louvois corresponds with Saint-Mars, that he devotes the whole letter to the one subject with which he started. The words “et vous ferez préparer les meubles qui sont nécessaires pour la vie de celui que l’on vous aménera” are not at all those which Louvois would use with regard to Dauger, after what he has just said about him. Why “celui que l’on vous aménera,” instead of simply “Dauger,” who was being brought, as he has said, by Vauroy? The clue to the interpretation of this phrase may be found in another letter from Louvois not six months later (Jan. 1, 1670), when he writes: “Le roy se remet à vous d’en uzer comme vous le jugerez à propos à l’esgard des valets de Monsieur Foucquet; il faut seulement observer que si vous luy donnez des valets que l’on vous aménera d’icy, il pourra bien arriver qu’ils seront gaignez par avance, et qu’ainsy ils feroient pis que ceux que vous en osteriez présentement.” Here we have the identical phrase used of valets whom it is contemplated to bring in from outside for Fouquet; though it does not follow that any such valet was in fact brought in. The whole previous correspondence (as well as a good deal afterwards) is full of the valet difficulty; and it is surely more reasonable to suppose that when Louvois writes to Saint-Mars on the 19th of July that he is sending Dauger, a new prisoner of importance, as to whom “il est de la dernière importance qu’il soit gardé avec une grande seureté,” his second paragraph as regards the instructions to “Sieur Poupart” refers to something which Saint-Mars had suggested about getting a valet from outside, and simply points out that in preparing furniture for “celui que l’on vous aménera” he need not do much, “comme ce n’est qu’un valet.”
2. But this is not all. If Dauger had been originally a valet, he might as well have been used as such at once, when one was particularly wanted. On the contrary, Louvois flatly refused Saint-Mars’s request in 1672 to be allowed to do so, and was exceedingly chary of allowing it in 1675 (only “en cas de nécessité,” and “vous pouvez donner le dit prisonnier à M. Foucquet, si son valet venoit à luy manquer et non autrement”). The words used by Saint-Mars in asking Louvois in 1672 if he might use Dauger as Lauzun’s valet are themselves significant to the point of conclusiveness: “Il ferait, ce me semble, un bon valet.” Saint-Mars could not have said this if Dauger had all along been known to be a valet. The terms of his letter to Louvois (Feb 20, 1672) show that Saint-Mars wanted to use Dauger as a valet simply because he was not a valet. That a person might be used as a valet who was not really a valet is shown by Louvois having told Saint-Mars in 1666 (June 4) that Fouquet’s old doctor, Pecquet, was not to be allowed to serve him “soit dans sa profession, soit dans le mestier d’un simple valet.” The fact was that Saint-Mars was hard put to it in the prison for anybody who could be trusted, and that he had convinced himself by this time that Dauger (who had proved a quiet harmless fellow) would give no trouble. Probably he wanted to give him some easy employment, and save him from going mad in confinement. It is worth noting that up to 1672 (when Saint-Mars suggested utilizing Dauger as valet to Lauzun) none of the references to Dauger in letters after that of July 19, 1669, suggests his being a valet; and their contrary character makes it all the more clear that the second part of the letter of July 19 does not refer to Dauger.
In this connexion it may be remarked (and this is a point on which Funck-Brentano entirely misinterprets the allusion) that, even in his capacity as valet to Fouquet, Dauger was still regarded an as exceptional sort of prisoner; for in 1679 when Fouquet and Lauzun were afterwards allowed to walk freely all over the citadel, Louvois impresses on Saint-Mars that “le nommé Eustache” is never to be allowed to be in Fouquet’s room when Lauzun or any other stranger, or anybody but Fouquet and the “ancien valet,” La Rivière, is there, and that he is to stay in Fouquet’s room when the latter goes out to walk in the citadel, and is only to go out walking with Fouquet and La Rivière when they promenade in the special part of the fortress previously set apart for them (Louvois’s letter to Saint-Mars, Jan. 30, 1670).
Was Dauger James de la Cloche? In The Man of the Mask (1908) Monsignor Barnes, while briefly dismissing Mr Lang’s identification with Martin, and apparently not realizing the possibility of reading Louvois’s letter of July 19, 1669, as indicated above[6] deals in detail with the history of James de la Cloche, the natural son of Charles II. (acknowledged privately as such by the king) in whom he attempts to unmask the personality of Dauger. Mr Lang, in The Valet’s Tragedy, had some years earlier ironically wondered why nobody made this suggestion, which, however, he regarded as untenable. The story of James de la Cloche is indeed itself another historical mystery; he abruptly vanishes as such at Rome at the end of 1668, and thus provides a disappearance of convenient date; but the question concerning him is complicated by the fact that a James Henry de Bovere Roano Stuardo, who married at Naples early in 1669 and undoubtedly died in the following August, claiming to be a son of Charles II., makes just afterwards an equally abrupt appearance; in many respects the two men seem to be the same, but Monsignor Barnes, following Lord Acton, here regards James Stuardo as an impostor who traded on a knowledge of James de la Cloche’s secret. If the latter then did not die in 1669, what became of him? According to Monsignor Barnes’s theory, James de la Cloche, who had been brought up to be a Jesuit and knew his royal father’s secret profession of Roman Catholicism, was being employed by Charles II. as an intermediary with the Catholic Church and with the object of making him his own private confessor; he returned from Rome at the beginning of 1669, and is then identified by Monsignor Barnes with a certain Abbé Pregnani, an “astrologer” sent by Louis in February 1669 to influence Charles II. towards the French alliance. Pregnani, however, made a bad start by “tipping winners” at Newmarket with disastrous results, and was quickly recalled to France, actually departing on July 5th (French 15th). But he too now disappears, though a letter from Lionne (the French foreign secretary) to Colbert of July 17 (two days before Louvois’s letter to Saint-Mars about Dauger) says that he is expected in Paris. Monsignor Barnes’s theory is that Pregnani alias James de la Cloche, without the knowledge of Charles II., was arrested by order of Louis and imprisoned as Dauger on account of his knowing too much about the French schemes in regard to Charles II. This identification of Pregnani with James de la Cloche is, however, intrinsically incredible. We are asked to read into the Pregnani story a deliberate intrigue on Charles’s part for an excuse for having James de la Cloche in England. But this does not at all seem to square with the facts given in the correspondence, and it is hard to understand why Charles should have allowed Pregnani to depart, and should not have taken any notice of his son’s “disappearance.” There would still remain, no doubt, the possibility that Pregnani, though not James de la Cloche, was nevertheless the “man in the mask.” But even then the dates will not suit; for Lionne wrote to Colbert on July 27, saying, “Pregnani has been so slow on his voyage that he has only given me (m’a rendu) your despatch of July 4 several days after I had already received those of the 8th and the 11th.” Allowing for the French style of dating this means that instead of arriving in Paris by July 18, Pregnani only saw Lionne there at earliest on July 25. This seems to dispose of his being sent to Pignerol on the 19th. Apart altogether, however, from such considerations, it now seems fairly certain, from Mr Lang’s further research into the problem of James de la Cloche (see [La Cloche]), that the latter was identical with the “Prince” James Stuardo who died in Naples in 1669, and that he hoaxed the general of the Jesuits and forged a number of letters purporting to be from Charles II. which were relied on in Monsignor Barnes’s book; so that the theory breaks down at all points.
The identification of Dauger thus still remains the historical problem behind the mystery of the “man in the mask.” He was not the valet Martin; he was not a valet at all when he was sent to Pignerol; he was not James de la Cloche. The fact nevertheless that he was employed as a valet, even in special circumstances, for Fouquet, makes it difficult to believe that Dauger was a man of any particular social standing. We may be forced to conclude that the interest of the whole affair, so far as authentic history is concerned, is really nugatory, and that the romantic imagination has created a mystery in a fact of no importance.
Authorities.—The correspondence between Saint-Mars and Louvois is printed by J. Delort in Histoire de la détention des philosophes (1829). Apart from the modern studies by Lair, Funck-Brentano, Lang and Barnes, referred to above, there is valuable historical matter in the work of Roux-Fazaillac, Recherches historiques sur l’homme au masque de fer (1801); see also Marius Topin, L’Homme au masque de fer (Paris, 1870), and Loiseleur, Trois Énigmes historiques (1882).
(H. Ch.)