The Man Behind the Iron Mask (17 page)

Molière was not the only Iron Mask to be incarcerated by religious bigots. Another theory professed the masked prisoner to be Archbishop Avedik of the Armenian Orthodox Church, Patriarch of Constantinople and Jerusalem, a man of simple birth and honest faith, loved by his spiritual flock and respected by his temporal masters, who was hounded into exile from Turkey and smuggled into prison in France by Jesuit missionaries and the agents of Louis XIV. It has been asserted that Avedik's first name was Michael, that the Armenian community actually called him saint during his lifetime and that the name ‘Marchioly' in the Armenian language means ‘Saint Michael': ‘Mar' being the word for saint and ‘Kioly' the diminutive for ‘Michael'. That much of the story is invention – ‘Mar Kioly' has no meaning in the Armenian language and the first name of the patriarch was quite simply and precisely Avedik – but the truth of Avedik's secret abduction and imprisonment in the Bastille is incontrovertible.

Avedik Yevtokiatsi was born at Tokat in Armenia in 1657, the son of a weaver who was himself the son of an Orthodox priest. Though prepared from childhood for the weaver's trade, the influence of his grandfather, who taught him to read and write, led him into the priesthood. At the age of eighteen he became a deacon and, though he did not become a priest until the age of thirty-two, he so distinguished himself in defence of the Armenian community during an outbreak of brutal and bloody persecution by the Turkish population that just three years after his ordination he was nominated Bishop of Erzinkan and Erzurum. His reputation as a man of energy and discretion in his dealings not only with the Turkish and Moslem authorities but also with the Dominican and Jesuit missionaries in Armenia reached beyond his diocese and eventually prompted the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople to turn to him for help.

In the time of Louis XIV, as today, the Christians of Constantinople were members of the Greek or Armenian Churches, their faith being as much an expression of national origin and cultural identity as of religious belief. Missionaries from western Europe were received by them with cordiality and allowed to preach in their churches, but in their zeal to make converts to Catholicism the Jesuits went beyond the limits of good faith and plain sense, openly attacking Orthodox doctrine and secretly fomenting pastoral discord. By 1699 the situation was out of hand. The leaders of the Greek and Armenian communities appealed to the Sultan for protection and the Jesuit missionaries appealed to their embassies for support.

The French ambassador, though a priest himself, was not prepared to condone the excesses of the Jesuit campaign and so found himself accused in Versailles of sympathy to Islam. He was recalled and replaced by a man of more forceful temper, the Comte de Fériol. The new ambassador had distinguished himself in nothing except brawling over women and cards, and came to the post with nothing to recommend him except a sister-in-law who was the mistress of a government minister in Paris and a spell of service as a mercenary in the pay of the Turks in Hungary. Soon after his arrival in Constantinople he demonstrated his mastery of the situation by securing the exile of Avedik, the staunchest defender of the Armenian Church, on the charge that he had been heard to make some disrespectful remarks about Louis XIV. The Jesuit missionaries were delighted to have such a champion in their midst and direct contact between Fériol and Rome was quickly established.

Avedik, however, was not himself without influence. The Great Mufti, head of the Moslem religion in Turkey, was a personal friend of his and in February 1702 not only managed to have him released from exile but also to have him nominated Archbishop of Constantinople. Some retaliation against Fériol might have been expected, but Avedik showed no resentment. He insisted that the Jesuits should refrain from attacking Orthodox doctrine when preaching inside Orthodox churches but was otherwise conciliatory and exhorted the Armenians to tolerance and peace. Fériol, belligerent but powerless, bided his time and, when in July 1703 the Great Mufti was assassinated and the Sultan overthrown, rushed to persuade the new regime that Avedik should be deposed and imprisoned. The fortress of the Seven Towers in Constantinople, grim as it was, seemed to Fériol too pleasant a place for someone like Avedik. At his insistence the patriarch was moved to the island-prison of Ruad off the coast of Syria and kept, as Fériol himself reported with no small delight, ‘in a cell full of water from which he could see no daylight.'

The Armenian community, loyal and resolute, refused to recognize any patriarch but Avedik and in December 1704, having put together a large sum of money, bribed the Grand Vizier to release and restore him. Again Fériol and the Jesuits feared retaliation, but again Avedik was conciliatory. There seemed every reason for him to be as rabidly anti-French and anti-Catholic as Fériol claimed he was, but in fact he gave no sign of being so. His attitude from the outset and throughout was never other than defensive: unyielding but forbearing. In December 1705, a deputation from three hundred well-to-do Armenians, led by Avedik, appealed to Fériol in person for his support towards a peaceful settlement with the Jesuits, but in February 1706 Fériol went to the Grand Vizier with a bribe of his own to have Avedik sent back to Syria. This time the French Government was prepared to ensure that he would not return.

The boat carrying Avedik stopped on its way at the island of Chios and it was there that he was abducted. His guard, bribed before setting out, handed him over to the French vice-consul who put him aboard a French merchant ship bound for Marseilles. The story told by the guards afterwards was that Avedik had been carried off by pirates. As it was, bad weather forced the French ship to put in at Genoa and there Avedik managed to smuggle two letters into the hands of a Greek who was on his way to Constantinople. One was addressed to the chief interpreter of the Turkish government, the other to a leading figure in the Armenian community. The letters reached Constantinople within a matter of days, but it was Fériol who received them. The Greek had broken his journey at Smyrna and there had confided in friends who had persuaded him to sell the letters to the French consul. Avedik meanwhile had been brought to Marseilles and locked up in the prison of the Arsenal.

Whatever it was the French government and the Jesuit Society had hoped to achieve by their abduction of Avedik, it was certainly not what happened, although what did happen was perhaps only to be expected. The cover-up story of a pirate attack was not believed and eventually under torture the guard confessed the truth. The French Embassy was notified that, if Avedik was not returned, the Catholic community would be held responsible. Fériol replied that he knew nothing at all about the matter, but if Avedik had left Turkey he had no doubt done so by his own design to escape going back to prison. The Turkish authorities were not deceived and the threat of reprisals was carried out. The Jesuits were banned and their printing-press destroyed. All Turks who professed the Catholic faith were rounded up, and those who did not apostasise were executed.

About Avedik's fate, however, nothing could be established. There were rumours that he had been seen in Malta and Messina, but people who went to hunt for him there could find no trace. The Vatican was greatly concerned that the truth should not get out, and warned Versailles repeatedly of the need to take every precaution. In February 1707, Louis XIV informed the Sultan that the French for their part had done their utmost to find the missing patriarch and after extensive investigations made in Italy and Spain had reason to believe that the poor man was dead. The Armenians knew the French were lying, and in 1708 a group of them even carried the search to Marseilles, but left without learning anything.

In the opinion of Pierre de Taulès, whose book
L'Homme au Masque de fer
was published in 1825, the story of Avedik, after his arrival in France, is the story of the Iron Mask. He was moved from Marseilles to the island of Sainte-Marguerite and from there some time later to the Bastille where, masked and anonymous, he died. Taulès was well aware that according to the journal of Du Junca the Iron Mask was brought to the Bastille on 19 September 1698 and died on 18 November 1703, the latter date being all of three years before Avedik's abduction, but as Taulès pointed out, the man responsible for finding and publishing that journal was Henri Griffet and he was a Jesuit. Du Junca's journal was a forgery, Taulès declared, invented by Griffet to cover up the fact that the Iron Mask had been a victim of the Jesuits, abuducted and imprisoned at their instigation, against all code and conscience, all law and sense.

In fact, what happened to Avedik after his arrival in France is not now a secret and , though certainly an indictment of Jesuits and the Catholic Church, of Louis XIV and his government, bears little resemblance to anything ever said about the Iron Mask. In November 1706, he was moved from Marseilles and the Mediterranean Sea across France to the Atlantic coast and a monk's cell in the Benedictine abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. The orders given to the abbot were that he was to be kept in secret and allowed contact with no one. As it was, he could not speak French and so was unable to communicate at all. Only in July 1707 did the authorities decide that a monk who had some knowledge of the Armenian language could be sent from Rome to act as interpreter. The first communication made by Avedik through this interpreter was an appeal for justice: ‘Judge me', he is reported to have said, ‘and condemn me to the punishment I deserve. Or else, if I am innocent, say so and set me free.' He would only go free, he was told, when he confessed his crimes against God and the true Church, abjured the Orthodox faith and became a Catholic. In December 1709 he was transferred to the Bastille, and in September 1710 he made his abjuration. Some days later he was ordained a Catholic priest and went to live with his interpreter in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, where unknown and unnoticed he said mass everyday until his death in July 1711.

This is not the only theory in which Jesuit machinations were held responsible for the Iron Mask's fate. The first version ever published of the mysterious prisoner's identity made him out to be a victim of the Jesuits. It was reported by someone who had been a prisoner in the Bastille during the nine months Avedik was there, as well as being there earlier during the last year and a half of the Iron Mask's life. On 16 May 1702, when according to Du Junca the masked prisoner had been in the Bastille for more than three and a half years, a certain René-Augustin Constantin de Renneville was arrested and imprisoned there. He had been working for the French secret service in Holland, but was a Protestant and suspected of being a double agent. No charge was ever made against him, but he was kept in the Bastille for eleven years and then exiled. From 1715 to 1719 he published his prison memoirs in four volumes under the title
L'Inquisition Fran aise ou l'Histoire de la Bastille
and in the preface to the first volume he spoke about the prisoner who had come to the Bastille with Saint-Mars. It was a story he had got from two members of the prison staff, a turnkey called Antoine Ru, who had accompanied the prisoner from Sainte-Marguerite, and the prison surgeon, Abraham Reilhe, whose signature appears on the prisoner's burial certificate.

One day, when for some reason Renneville was taken out of his cell to some other part of the prison, he was led into a room where another prisoner happened to be and was quickly bundled out again. On the way back to his cell, he asked his guards who this prisoner was, and Ru replied ‘that he had been a prisoner for thirty-one years and that M. de Saint Mars had brought him with him from the island of Sainte-Marguerite.' Renneville's curiosity was aroused and, when he persisted with his questions, Ru at length explained that the prisoner ‘had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment for having written two lines of verse against the Jesuits when he was a schoolboy of twelve or thirteen.' Ru was unable or unwilling to say more, but Renneville remembered that a great uproar had been caused about thirty years before by someone writing a couplet against the Jesuits and posting it on the gate of their college in Paris. The name of that college had been Clermont College of the Society of Jesus and those words had been emblazoned in large golden letters above the gate. The couplet made its appearance when that name was taken down and replaced by another. The story, as told by Renneville, is this:

The Jesuits invited the King and his court to honour with their presence a tragedy which they had staged to the glory of His Majesty and they had it performed by their very best students … The King was very pleased with it and as the rector of the college was escorting His Majesty away, one of the King's favourites praised the Reverend Fathers of the Society on the great success of the play, at which the King exclaimed. ‘Is it so surprising? It's my own college!' The rector was too clever a courtier not to profit from this favourable remark. That very instant he sent for workers and ordered them to engrave ‘College of Louis the Great' in large golden letters on black marble, insisting that it should be ready by the following morning … A schoolboy who witnessed the zeal of those Reverend Fathers wrote the following two lines of verse which he posted that night on the gate of the college and in various other places in Paris:-

They have erased JESUS from here and put up the name of the King.

Impious people! No other God do they worship.

The Society did not fail to clamour sacrilege and apparently the author was discovered. Though one of their youngest students, he was, if it was him whom I saw, condemned to perpetual imprisonment at the request of the Reverend Fathers and transferred to the Islands of Sainte Marguerite in Provence for that effect.

That however was not the end of Renneville's story. Some time later he was told by Reilhe that the prisoner had been freed two or three months after he had seen him. His liberation, moreover, had been secured by the Jesuits themselves through the intervention of a certain Abbé Riquelet, who was attached to the Bastille as a confessor and was himself a Jesuit. ‘During the time of his imprisonment, he had become the sole heir of his family, which possessed great wealth. He was notified of this by the charitable Riquelet, his confessor. The shower of gold which opened the Tower of Danaë had the same effect upon that of the Bastille. The zeal of the Abbé Riquelet made apparent to the Fathers of the Society, very disinterested people as everyone knows, the useful necessity of liberating his penitent, and the Society begged the King to pardon a lord whose family without him would have been extinguished. The King, who had only consented to the imprisonment of this child out of consideration for the Reverend Fathers, willingly signed his liberation at their request.'