were kept in the Bastille.  Again, in 1701, in this “noble prison,” the Mask was turned out of his room to make place for a female fortune-teller, and was obliged to chum with a profligate valet of nineteen, and a “beggarly” bad patriot, who “blamed the conduct of France, and approved that of other nations, especially the Dutch.”  M. Funck-Brentano himself publishes these facts (1898), in part published earlier (1890) by M. Lair.[1] Not much noblesse here!  Next, if Rosarges, a gentleman, served the Mask, Saint-Mars alone (1669) carried his food to the valet, Dauger.  So the service of Rosarges does not ennoble the Mask and differentiate him from Dauger, who was even more nobly served, by Saint-Mars.

[1] Legendes de la Bastille, pp. 86-89.  Citing du Junca’s Journal, April 30, 1701.

On November 19, 1703, the Mask died suddenly (still in his velvet mask), and was buried on the 20th.  The parish register of the church names him “Marchialy” or “Marchioly,” one may read it either way; du Junca, Lieutenant of the Bastille, in his contemporary journal, calls him “M. de Marchiel.”  Now, Saint-Mars often spells Mattioli, “Marthioly.”

This is the one strength of the argument for Mattioli’s claims to the Mask.  M. Lair replies, “Saint-Mars had a mania for burying prisoners under fancy names,” and gives examples.  One is only a gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly said that, as he is a prisoner, his real name is not to be given, so he is registered as Pierre Maret (others read Navet, “Peter Turnip").  If Saint-Mars, looking about for a false name for Dauger’s burial register, hit on Marsilly (the name of Dauger’s old master), that might be miswritten Marchialy.  However it be, the age of the Mask is certainly falsified; the register gives “about forty-five years old.”  Mattioli would have been sixty-three; Dauger cannot have been under fifty-three.

There the case stands.  If Mattioli died in April, 1694, he cannot be the Man in the Iron Mask.  Of Dauger’s death we find no record, unless he was the Man in the Iron Mask, and died, in 1703, in the Bastille.  He was certainly, in 1669 and 1688, at Pignerol and at Sainte-Marguerite, the center of the mystery about some great prisoner, a Marshal of France, the Duc de Beaufort, or a son of Oliver Cromwell.  Mattioli was not mystery, no secret.  Dauger is so mysterious that probably the secret of his mystery was unknown to himself.  By 1701, when obscure wretches were shut up with the Mask, the secret, whatever its nature, had ceased to be of moment.  The captive was now the mere victim of cruel routine.  But twenty years earlier, Saint-Mars had said that Dauger “takes things easily, resigned to the will of God and the King.”