Behind the mask

A masked man lived in the Bastille for years and, still wearing a mask, there he died. Two Musketeers were at his sides, ready to kill him if he took his mask off. He ate and slept wearing the mask. There must have certainly been some good reason for this custom, for nonetheless he was well treated, well taken care of and he was given everything he asked for.

It was Charlotte Elisabeth, Duchesse d'Orleans and cousin to King Louis XIV, who wrote these words on October 15, 1711. It is probably the first written reference to a man with a mask imprisoned at the Bastille, the terrible Parisian prison.

In one of his famous novels, Alexandre Dumas imagines that the three Musketeers save the Man in the Iron Mask and discover that he really is the twin brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, imprisoned by the king in order to prevent any claim on the throne by him. Is there any truth in such a story that, in the last 300 years, has nurtured over 200 books, dozens of movies, and a multitude of possible candidates?

A Masked Musketeer?

Recently, thanks to Legend Detectives, a Discovery Channel series that I cohosted, I had a chance to meet in Paris with British historian Roger MacDonald. In his book, The Man in the Iron Mask, he has come up with an extraordinary solution to the mystery of the masked prisoner. "Since the early eighteenth century," says MacDonald, "rumors had been circulating in the prison of a famous masked prisoner. The famous French writer Voltaire spent some time here in 1717 and he published an article that strongly hinted that the Masked Man must have had a face so familiar that he would have been recognized by everyone in France--hinting very strongly that whoever it was looked like the king Louis XIV."

It is a fact that a man with his face covered by a mask truly existed, and we know this also thanks to the many letters that his gaoler, Benigne d'Auvergne de Saint-Mars, wrote to the French Minister of War, the Marquis de Louvois. Reading their correspondence, one finds out that our man had been arrested in 1699 and then imprisoned in Pinerol, now a town in northern Italy but at that time a French stronghold. He was then transferred by Saint-Mars to the Chateau d'Exilles, then on the Island of Saint Marguerite, just in front of the town of Cannes, then finally to the Bastille, where he died in 1703.

The question remains, who was this man who had been forced to wear a mask? Some fifty-two different identities have been proposed over the centuries. Some say he was an Italian spy, Antonio Ercole Mattioli, Secretary of State to the Duke of Mantua; others think he was the French Minister of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, who was arrested for embezzlement; some even say he was the French playwright, Moliere, who had ridiculed the powerful in his plays.

MacDonald believes he. has the right answer: "I think that behind the mask there was a very famous man, someone who knew too much about the corruption and wickedness at the heart of the court of Louis XIV. Someone who had to be removed forever. And I am certain that this someone was none other than D'Artagnan, the famous musketeer."

D'Artagnan as well was a real historical figure, and he was the true inspiration for some of Dumas's novels. Yet it is well known that D'Artagnan died in the batde of Maastricht in 1673, so how could he be the masked prisoner?

"Coded letters show that Saint-Mars, the Iron Mask's gaoler--and D'Artagnan's former boss, was summoned to Maastricht on a secret errand," says MacDonald. "I contend it was to whisk D'Artagnan away to the prison at Pinerol; I think he was seriously injured at the Battle of Maastrich, but recovered. They then put a mask on his face to keep his identity hidden from SaintMars' staff, who were all former musketeers and might have helped him escape. My proof? For example, the fact the D'Artagnan's biographer, Courtilz, was imprisoned in the Bastille when the man in the iron mask was there: maybe the biography he wrote turned out to be so amazingly accurate because it was D'Artagnan himself (wearing the mask) who told him the story of his life."

Wouldn't it have been easier just to kill him?

"No," states MacDonald, "because Saint-Mars owed him--he'd been his boss after all and I think it was him who had the idea of putting a mask over [D'Artagnan's] face."

A Dangerous Prisoner?

MacDonald still has to convince the experts, who say that his are just conjectures without hard evidence. The solution to the mystery, they say, may then lie somewhere else. "If you read through the prison records," explains Jean-Christian Petit-Fils, France's leading Iron Mask historian, "you can find out who was imprisoned with Saint Mars, where and when and gradually as he is transferred you can work out the prisoners transferred with him. One name emerges from the list of Saint Mars' prisoners--the name of a man called Eustache Danger, or Danger. However there are conflicting theories about who Eustache Danger really was because two people seem to share the same name. And this makes it really confusing."