The Man Behind the Iron Mask (41 page)

Louvois knew, and in all likelihood was the only one who did know, the truth of Eustache's identity and crime. He referred to him as ‘only a valet' and described his secret as ‘how he was employed before coming to Pignerol'; hence Petitfils thinks it reasonable to assume that Eustache had been ‘employed' as a ‘valet' under circumstances which Louvois wished to hide. Who his master had been was evidently an important part of the secret, and leads one to suppose that if that had been revealed, the crime itself would have been exposed. Presumably the crime was known, and the perpetrator thought to be a valet in the service of someone in particular. Presumably also this valet had escaped capture and had disappeared. A state prison was the last place anyone would have thought to look for such a man and if Eustache was that man then the only motive Louvois could have had for hiding him in such an extraordinary way was that he himself had instigated Eustache to commit the crime.

When Jung wrote about ‘Eustache Dauger, Danger or d'Augers', he stated flatly that after all his researches he was sure that ‘there exists no trace of this person anywhere.' Then he went on to give what little he had turned up that might be relevant, including a story he claimed to have had from the historian Pierre Clement that there was ‘a valet of Colbert who ran away, totally disappeared, and who was accused of having wished to poison his master in 1669.' In fact Clement's reference, which was given in a book entitled
La Police sous Louis XIV
, derives from a note made in 1679 by La Reynie about a possible conspiracy to poison Colbert in 1676. Certainly at that time poisons had been acquired to use against Colbert and for many years he had been suffering from bouts of recurring illness which La Reynie thought might have been the consequence of an earlier attempt to poison him. In his view, the poisons were probably administered by ‘a servant who had been bribed and used.' La Reynie gives no date for ‘the time when M. Colbert was ill,' but Petitfils, like Jung, traced its first appearance to a much earlier date than 1676.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1668, Colbert had been in poor health, tortured by repeated attacks of gout, but in December under treatment from the King's own apothecaries his condition began to improve. However, on 27 December he suddenly became ill again with stomach pains as a result of some medicine he had taken. Petitfils would have us believe that it was ‘a violent burning of the stomach', but there is in fact no evidence for this. On 28 December Colbert described his own condition thus: ‘Today I feel very out of sorts, the result I think of a physic I took yesterday which taxed me very much.' Though after a week or so he appeared to recover, Petitfils claims that the effects of the ‘physic' were serious and long-lasting. ‘Since I have a weak stomach,' Colbert wrote to one of his brothers in November 1672, ‘I have for some time now followed a carefully regulated diet. I eat according to my own schedule and I take only chicken with soup for lunch and in the evening a piece of bread and more soup.' Whether or not it occurred to anyone that the medicine he took on 27 December 1668 was poisoned, the suspicion was not voiced at the time and there was no enquiry. At that time poisoning was thought to be rare in France, the work of foreigners, especially Italians. It was not until seven years later that the Brinvilliers trial gave the first serious hint of an underworld traffic in poison, with murders committed at all levels of French society. One of the chief features of this wave of poisonings was that in many cases the valets and servants of the victims had been bribed or blackmailed to administer the poison.

The absence of a prime minister under Louis XIV caused fierce rivalry amongst his ministers, chief of whom were Colbert, the Controller of Finance, and Le Tellier, the Minister of War. In the struggle for ascendancy, each minister brought his family and friends to power around him, while the King sought to keep the reins of government in his own hands by playing one clan off against the other. It was in 1662, when Louvois was twenty-one, that he became his father's associate and executive in the Ministry of War. He and Colbert were implacable enemies from the start. Saint-Simon, among others, maintains that Louvois was so determined to overthrow Colbert in the King's opinion that he kept up a deliberate campaign to ruin the country's economy, inciting the King to unnecessary extravagance in peace and the army to unnecessary destruction in war. His tactics were only too successful at first. In spring 1667 he was in high favour and Colbert, accused in the King's ear of embezzling ‘ten millions a year', was close to disgrace. Since Colbert was the only serious obstacle in his way, it seemed that Louvois at the age of twenty-six was about to realize supreme power. Then, unexpectedly, the wind turned. ‘Stories against M. Colbert are still going the rounds,' Saint-Maurice reported home towards the end of 1668, ‘but he is completely in favour. M. de Louvois wants to get the better of him and they are at daggers drawn. Something unpleasant is sure to happen to one or the other. M. de Louvois has become unbearable with his abrupt, touchy behaviour. He is rude to everyone who speaks to him.'

The picture of Louvois left by his contemporaries leaves no doubt as to his capacity for murder. According to Saint-Simon, he was in every way ‘arrogant, brutal and boorish'. According to La Fare, he was ‘savage and bloody', a man ‘whose sole aim was to be master' and who was capable of destroying everything around him by his extreme ‘ferocity, pride and rashness'. According to the Princess Palatine he was ‘hard and brutish'. She thought him ‘detestable', called him ‘horribly vicious', and claimed that ‘it was nothing for him to burn, poison, lie and cheat.' That he had secret contact with the criminal underworld of Paris, including those who dealt in poison and black magic arrested in the late 1670s, is an established fact. According to Primi Visconti, La Voisin, the notorious witch who was the mistress of Le Sage, ‘boasted that it was by her art that Madame de Montespan and Louvois kept themselves in favour.' It is by no means inconceivable therefore that in December 1668, when Colbert unexpectedly came back into favour with the King, Louvois should have decided to take advantage of his illness to do away with him. Colbert was a very sick man, worn out by months of suffering. If his illness had taken a sudden turn for the worse and he had died, no one would have suspected foul play.

Thus Petitfils arrives at his hypothesis. Eustache Danger is one of Colbert's valets, bought by Louvois and furnished by him with poison to use against his master. Danger adds the poison to Colbert's medicine on 27 December 1668, but the dose is not strong enough and Colbert survives. Danger leaves Colbert's service then or soon after, presumably because he is under suspicion for what he has done or as a result of some second attempt in which he failed go get the poison into the medicine. With or without the help of Louvois he then goes into hiding in England, but in July 1669 he believes, or is led to believe, that it is safe to return to France. Louvois, who with or without his knowledge has followed his movements closely, has him arrested and bundled off to prison the moment he lands in Dunkirk. For Louvois it is a great relief to know that the agent of his crime is safely locked up and silenced for ever. If Danger had fallen into the hands of La Reynie and had been made to talk, Louvois would certainly have been incriminated.

Thus Danger, who is ‘only a valet', is arrested by a confidential agent of Louvois under circumstances of the greatest secrecy and is then taken all the way across the country to the custody of another of Louvois' confidential agents. He is forbidden to speak to anyone about what he did and is held under conditions of the highest security. Eight months after his arrival, everyone is so curious to know who he is that Saint-Mars has taken to inventing preposterous stories about him. Then to everyone's surprise, just one year after his arrival, Louvois himself decides to go to Pignerol. ‘They say that M. de Louvois is going to Pignerol to see what has to be done in that place to improve the fortifications,' reports Saint-Maurice on 25 July 1670, and he continues: ‘I hardly think that he would undertake such a long journey in the heat of the summer and that he would separate himself from the person of the King for such a long time just for the supposed fortifications.' At Pignerol, Louvois changes the garrison, giving no reason for his action and taking the precaution of allowing no contact between the newly-appointed officers and those they replace. Presumably the new garrison does not know that in the state prison there is a mysterious prisoner held incommunicado in a specially built cell, and so there is no more curiosity.

Though permission is given for Danger to act as valet to Fouquet, under no circumstances is he to be allowed contact with Lauzun. Since Fouquet was imprisoned more than seven years before the attempt on Colbert's life, he is not likely to know anything about a valet who was under suspicion and, since he was imprisoned by Colbert, he is not likely to feel much concern for Colbert if Danger tells him about it. Lauzun by contrast is, in Saint-Simon's words, a ‘long-standing friend' of Colbert and will know his household well enough to recognize Danger as the suspect valet who disappeared. If Lauzun learns the truth from Danger, he will sooner or later somehow or other get the information to Colbert. Unknown to Saint-Mars and Louvois, however, Lauzun manages to communicate with Fouquet's cell by way of the chimney, makes contact with Danger and discovers the secret.

Lauzun's loyalties being first and foremost to himself, he decides to offer Louvois a deal: his liberty in return for his silence. On 27 January 1680 he writes to Louvois saying that he has information for him which ‘is in your interest' to have delivered by ‘word of mouth.' It is ‘of an importance for you above anything you could imagine' and ‘you alone should be informed.' He wants his friend Barrail sent to Pignerol to act as messenger and eventually Louvois agrees. Barrail arrives on 17 March, but as things turn out Fouquet dies while he is there, and Saint-Mars discovers the communicating hole. A full report of the new situation reaches Louvois from Saint-Mars just before Barrail arrives to deliver the message that Lauzun knows all about Danger and will keep the secret to himself only if he is liberated.

Louvois does not reply to Lauzun directly. He tells Saint-Mars to inform him that, since Fouquet is dead, Danger's services are no longer required and so he has been released. Lauzun is thus left to deduce that the story he got from Danger is a ridiculous lie and that Louvois has more serious matters to concern himself with than his foolish attempt at blackmail. Danger, he is to believe, was not even a prisoner at Pignerol but was, like La Rivière, a simple valet hired to serve a prisoner and paid off when that prisoner died. Louvois is playing a game of bluff and to succeed in it he has to play the game with everyone at Pignerol; thus Danger from then on becomes a secret prisoner to be hidden away as well as silenced. Lauzun, however, is a wily bird and Louvois can never be sure that he has succeeded in deceiving him. A year later, when Lauzun is allowed to leave Pignerol and live under surveillance at Bourbon and Chalon, Louvois has all his mail intercepted, and when finally he is allowed to return to Paris, summons him to a private meeting before he has time to visit Colbert. To everyone's surprise, the two men, hostile to each other though they always have been, stay talking together from half past ten until midnight. What they discuss is not known and no one can possibly imagine. Presumably in the course of their conversation Louvois refers to the story told by Danger and either does a deal with Lauzun or in some devious way contrives to smother any remaining suspicions he might have.

Petitfils acknowledges that his contribution is ‘only a hypothesis', but maintains, with no small justification, that ‘no other explanation takes better account of the singular features which surround the arrest and imprisonment of Eustache Danger.' It explains, one might add, why later governments were always unable to dig up any information on the prisoner and so fell back on the story of Matthioli. But what it does not explain is why, being the kind of man he was, Louvois chose to give himself so much trouble and anxiety. A knife in Danger's back on a dark street one night and all his problems would have been over. Paris and London were full of men who, for a small fee and no questions asked, would have taken on such a job. If Louvois could hire a valet to assassinate a government minister, he could certainly hire someone to assassinate a valet.

Since 1970, when his
L'Homme au Masque de fer
appeared, Petitfils has made a considerable contribution to the study of seventeenth century French history with the publication of several major works, including biographies of Fouquet, Lauzun and Louis XIV, and after a number of important essays on the subject published over the years, has produced a second Iron Mask book,
Le Masque de fer
, which came out in January 2003. Returning to the problem after more than thirty years of scholarship, Petitfils brings the weight of all his erudition and discernment into play, and the result is magisterial, a book of reference.

In his assessment this time he renounces the hypothetical and, limiting himself to only the most plausible interpretations of the facts as we know them, concludes, like Lang and Barnes before him, that the place and date of Eustache Danger's arrest strongly suggests a link with the under-cover negotiations then engaged between Charles II and his sister, Madame, towards the secret Treaty of Dover. This agreement, signed in June 1670, specified that the English would join the French in a military alliance against the Dutch on condition that Louis XIV supported Charles II financially and militarily in a plan to take himself and his kingdom into the Roman Catholic Church. In the view of Petitfils, it seems likely that Eustache Danger had been employed by Madame to carry secret letters to England and, whether intentionally or not, had seen and understood the contents. He was, of course, a valet but probably not one of Madame's own household, since Monsieur, jealous and resentful of the attention she receieved from other men, surrounded her with spies and would have intercepted any message she tried to send through one of her own. Perhaps he was a man from the household of Charles and Madame's mother, Henrietta of France, or alternatively a valet of the Comte de Saint-Albans. According to Lionne, writing to Croissy in February 1669, both of these servants were employed as courier to England by Madame at other times.