To sum up, on July 1, 1669, the valet of the Huguenot intriguer, Roux de Marsilly, the valet resident in England, known to his master as “Martin,” was “wanted” by the French secret police.  By July 19, a valet, of the highest political importance, had been brought to Dunkirk, from England, no doubt.  My hypothesis assumes that this valet, though now styled “Eustache Dauger,” was the “Martin of Roux de Marsilly.  He was kept with so much mystery at Pigernol that already the legend began its course; the captive valet was said to be a Marshal of France!  We then follow Dauger from Pignerol to Les Exiles, till January, 1687, when one valet out of a pair, Dauger being one of them, dies.  We presume that Dauger is the survivor, because the great mystery still is “what he has done,” whereas the other valet had done nothing, but may have known Dauger’s secret.  Again the other valet had long been dropsical, and the valet who died in 1687 died of dropsy.

In 1688, Dauger, at Sainte-Marguerite, is again the source and center of myths; he is taken for a son of Oliver Cromwell, or for the Duc de Beufort.  In June 1692, one of the Huguenot preachers at Saint-Marguerite writes on his shirt and pewter plate and throws them out of the window.[1] Legend attributes these acts to the Man in the Iron Mask, and transmutes a pewter into a silver plate.  Now, in 1689-1693, Mattioli was at Pignerol, but Dauger was at Sainte-Marguerite, and the Huguenot’s act is attributed to him.  Thus Dauger, not Mattioli, is the center round which the myths crystallize:  the legends concern him, not Mattioli, whose case is well known, and gives rise to no legend.  Finally, we have shown that Mattioli probably died at Sainte-Marguerite in April, 1694.  If so, then nobody but Dauger can be the “old prisoner” whom Saint-Mars brought, masked, to the Bastille, in September, 1698, and who died there in November, 1703.  However suppose that Mattioli did not die in 1694, but was the masked man who died in the Bastille in 1703, then the legend of Dauger came to be attributed to Mattioli:  these two men’s fortunes are combined in the one myth.

[1] Saint-Mars au Ministre, June 4, 1692.

The central problem remains unsolved.

What had the valet, Eustache Dauger, done?[1]

[1] One marvels that nobody has recognized, in the mask, James Stuart (James de la Cloche), eldest of the children of Charles ii.  He came to England in 1668, was sent to Rome, and “disappears from history.”  See infra, “The Mystery of James de la Cloche.”

III

THE VALET’S MASTER

The secret of the Man in the Iron Mask, or at least of one of the two persons who have claims to be the Mask, was “What had Eustache Dauger done?” To guard this secret the most extraordinary precautions were taken, as we have shown in the foregoing essay.  And yet, if secret there was, it might have got wind in the simplest fashion.  In the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” Dumas describes the tryst of the Secret-hunters with the dying Chief of the Jesuits at the inn in Fontainebleau.  They come from many quarters, there is a Baron of Germany and a laird from Scotland, but Aramis takes the prize.  He knows the secret of the Mask, the most valuable of all to the intriguers of the Company of Jesus.