The Man in the Iron Mask

I

THE LEGEND

The Mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask is, despite a pleasant saying of Lord Beaconsfield’s, one of the most fascinating in history.  By a curious coincidence the wildest legend on the subject, and the correct explanation of the problem, were offered to the world in the same year, 1801.  According to this form of the legend, the Man in the Iron Mask was the genuine Louis XIV., deprived of his rights in favor of a child of Anne of Austria and of Mazarin.  Immured in the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, in the bay of Cannes (where you are shown his cell, looking north to the sunny town), he married, and begot a son.  That son was carried to Corsica, was named de Buona Parte, and was the ancestor of Napoleon.  The Emperor was thus the legitimate representative of the House of Bourbon.

This legend was circulated in 1801, and is referred to in a proclamation of the Royalists of La Vendee.  In the same year, 1801, Roux Fazaillac, a Citoyen and a revolutionary legislator, published a work in which he asserted that the Man in the Iron Mask (as known in rumor) was not one man, but a myth, in which the actual facts concerning at least two men were blended.  It is certain that Roux Fazaillac was right; or that, if he was wrong, the Man in the Iron Mask was an obscure valet, of French birth, residing in England, whose real name was Martin.

Before we enter on the topic of this poor menial’s tragic history, it may be as well to trace the progress of the romantic legend, as it blossomed after the death of the Man, whose Mask was not of iron, but of black velvet.  Later we shall show how the legend struck root and flowered, from the moment when the poor valet, Martin (by his prison pseudonym “Eustache Dauger"), was immured in the French fortress of Pignerol, in Piedmont (August, 1669).

The Man, in connection with the Mask, is first known to us from a kind of notebook kept by du Junca, Lieutenant of the Bastille.  On September 18, 1698, he records the arrival of the new Governor of the Bastille, M. de Saint-Mars, bringing with him, from his last place, the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, in the bay of Camnes, “an old prisoner whom he had at Pignerol.  He keeps the prisoner always masked, his name is not spoken . . . and I have put him alone, in the third chamber of the Bertaudiere tower, having furnished it some days before with everything, by order of M. de Saint-Mars.  The prisoner is to be served and cared for by M. de Rosarges,” the officer next in command under Saint-Mars.[1]

[1] Funck-Brentano, Legendes et Archives de la Bastille, pp. 86, 87.  Paris, 1898, p. 277, a facsimile of this entry.

The prisoner’s death is entered by du Junca on November 19, 1703.  To that entry we return later.