The Man Behind the Iron Mask (7 page)

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François-Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois
, 1639–1691. Minister of War under Louis XIV from 1662 to 1691.

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Racine
: Jean, poet and dramatist, 1639–1699.

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Conti
: junior branch of the House of Condé which was itself a branch of the Royal House of Bourbon.

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Samuel Bernard
: Comte de Courbet, 1651–1739. French banker and financier through whom and from whom Louis XIV raised enormous loans.

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Monastery of Lérins
: on the island of Saint-Honorat.

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Mougins
: village close to Cannes.

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FACES BEHIND THE MASK

T
he reason used by Voltaire to help his readers solve for themselves the mystery of the Iron Mask's identity consisted of two simple syllogisms. The first was that in 1661, when the mysterious prisoner was arrested, no one well-known disappeared and so therefore the prisoner was a man unknown. The second was that though he was unknown no one was allowed to see his face, and so therefore he looked like someone who was well-known. Voltaire carried his argument no further, but on the basis of this intelligence the reader was expected to have no difficulty in deducing the rest for himself. Since the prisoner's face was concealed with a mask, ordinary differences in styles of appearance and conditions of life were inadequate to counteract the resemblance, therefore he must have been the very double of the person he resembled. The only person sufficiently well-known to make such an absolute measure necessary was Louis XIV, and the only explanation for such a complete resemblance was that the prisoner and the King were identical twins. Amazing, but elementary.

The logic is impeccable, but the argument is specious. The first syllogism takes for both its premises suppositions which are unwarranted, and the second employs for one of its premises the conclusion of the first. It is untrue to say that in 1661 no one well-known disappeared. In fact someone very well-known was arrested in that year and not only disappeared from public life, but became soon after a prisoner of Saint-Mars at Pignerol.
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However, and in any case, there are simply no grounds for the belief that the mysterious prisoner was arrested in 1661. Lagrange-Chancel gives at least some reason to believe that the arrest took place in 1669, and as it happens a veritable celebrity did actually and literally disappear at that time.
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Voltaire's swift logic is without foundation; nor is that the only reason to suspect that he has misrepresented the facts. His argument leads to a theory which makes sense only if he was guilty of inventing his description of the prisoner to suit a public misconception about the appearance of the King.

To anyone reading contemporary descriptions of Louis XIV, the description of the Iron Mask, as being above average height with a good figure and a noble bearing, might seem to support Voltaire's hypothesis. All those who saw Louis XIV described him in those very terms, as for instance did the Venetian ambassador, Aloïse Grimani, who reported that he was of a ‘tall build and majestic appearance.' The impression of tallness, however, was contrived: Louis XIV was a little man, very much below average height. He wore shoes with four-inch heels, a periwig, which added another six inches to the top of his head, and wherever he went, indoors or out, a high-crowned hat. His apparent height was something over six feet, but his actual height was only five feet two inches. The prisoner, we may presume, wore neither periwig nor high-heels and so if he looked tall the fact is that, unlike the King, he was tall. Identical twins, we may conclude, were never so unlike.

None of Voltaire's readers seemed to appreciate the significance of this, but most of those who were tempted to play armchair detective were in any event satisfied with a logic less than elementary. In their haste to give the prisoner a princely identity they did not even pause to appreciate the necessity to Voltaire's theory of a near-perfect resemblance. For them the mask could be explained by a much less striking resemblance, a likeness which was not even a full family-likeness, a similarity of feature due to the prisoner and the King being half-brothers by the same mother, Louis XIII's wife, Anne of Austria. In the second edition of
Questions sur l'Encyclopédie
, published in 1771, Voltaire's reference to the Iron Mask was developed along these lines in a long and laborious note inserted by the publisher:

From the manner in which M. de Voltaire has recounted the matter, the publisher conjectures that this famous historian is just as convinced as he is of the suspicion he now intends to reveal, but that M. de Voltaire, as a Frenchman, did not wish to say it openly, especially since he had said enough to ensure that the clue to the puzzle would not be difficult to find. Here then is my interpretation: the Iron Mask was doubtless a brother, and an elder brother, of Louis XIV, whose mother had that taste for fine linen referred to by M. de Voltaire. While reading contemporary memoirs which record this characteristic of the Queen, I remembered that the Iron Mask had the same taste and became convinced that he was her son, something which already seemed likely in the light of all other circumstances.

It is well known that for a long time Louis XIII had not lived with the Queen, and that the birth of Louis XIV was due to a happy chance cleverly exploited, a chance which compelled the King to sleep in the same bed as the Queen. Here then is how I believe things took place. The Queen imagined that it was her fault that an heir to Louis XIII had not been born. The birth of the Iron Mask undeceived her. The Cardinal, to whom she confided the secret, knew more than one way of profiting from it. He contrived to turn the event to his own benefit and the advantage of the State. Convinced from what had happened that the Queen could bear children to the King, he arranged the situation which produced the chance of a single bed for the King and the Queen.

The Queen and the Cardinal, equally aware of the necessity of hiding from Louis XIII the existence of the Iron Mask, had him raised in secret. It was a secret from Louis XIV until the death of Cardinal Mazarin and then he learned that he had a brother, an elder brother whom his mother could not disown and who moreover bore features which in a noticeable way declared his origin. Reflecting then that this child, born in wedlock, could not without embarrassment and scandal be declared illegitimate after the death of Louis XIII, Louis XIV judged that he could not use a wiser and more just method to assure his own security and the tranquillity of the State than the one which he employed. It was a method which spared him from committing a cruelty which a monarch less principled and magnaminous than Louis XIV would have considered a political necessity.

It has often been suggested that Voltaire himself is the real author of this note, that he used the publisher as a front to print his own final and conclusive revelation, but the note is so blurred and confused, so padded out with banality and repetition, that it is difficult to imagine how anyone could take such a suggestion seriously. Cleared of coyness and claptrap, the theory is simple enough: Louis XIV's mother, unable to conceive a child by her husband, imagined herself to be sterile. When she and her husband stopped living together she took a lover and one day to her surprise and alarm she found herself to be pregnant. This child, born and raised in secret, became the Iron Mask. Louis XIV was born later, after the Queen arranged to have the King spend one night in her bed.

The publisher's vague references to ‘the Cardinal' appear to be a deliberate equivocation to cover confusion and uncertainty as to who the Cardinal in question was. At first sight it seems that Cardinal Mazarin is referred to since he is the only one mentioned by name. Mazarin was Prime Minister from 1642 to 1661 and the Queen's devoted ally; there is even reason to believe that sometime after the death of Louis XIII in 1643 he became the Queen's husband by morganatic marriage. That he would have protected her if she had turned to him for help is credible, but he was not at that time in a position to do so. If the Iron Mask was older than Louis XIV, then his birth was prior to 1638 and the Cardinal trusted by the Queen would then have to be Cardinal de Richelieu, who was Prime Minister before Mazarin from 1624 until 1642. Richelieu, however, was the Queen's implacable enemy and exploited every opportunity possible to set the King against her. It is difficult to imagine that the Queen would have confided to him so perilous a secret.

To give the publisher his due, however, the basic theory he proposes is not altogether without interest. It is perfectly true that when Louis XIV's parents brought him into the world they had been married for twenty-three years without producing a child, that for many years they had been living separately in mutual distrust, and that this conception had been the consequence of a deliberate plan to have the King spend just one night in the same bed as the Queen. In August 1637, she had been found guilty of treasonable correspondence with Spain and had been placed under house arrest at the Louvre. By that time she had already been estranged from her husband for more than ten years and the King certainly had no wish to share her bed ever again. On the night of 5 December 1637, so the story goes, the King was caught in a storm in the centre of Paris and was unable to reach his own bed, which had been prepared for him at the Condé estate of Saint-Maur, south-east of Vincennes. According to the custom of the time, his household staff, along with his bed and furniture, food and kitchen, went ahead of him each day to prepare his supper and lodging wherever it was that he planned to spend the night. Cut off from them, he literally had no bed to sleep in, and so was persuaded by Guitaut, the Captain of the Queen's Guard, to spend the night at the Louvre. As a consequence, the King and Queen ate together and, since there was no other royal bed available except the Queen's, slept together as well.

News of the event spread quickly through the city and the following morning, after the King's departure, the Queen was informed by the Superior of the Franciscan Order in Paris that one of his fellow friars had received word from heaven that a Dauphin had been conceived. He was right: nine months later to the very day, the Queen bore a son, the future Louis XIV. The newborn baby was wonderfully large and well-developed, with two teeth already fully grown, and were it not for the fact that everyone knew the Queen had just given birth to him, one would have thought he was at least three months old. Such being the marvel of Louis XIV's conception and birth, there is clearly room for conjecture on more than one score.

Louis XIII was not happy with women: he feared and distrusted them, and his Queen, Anne of Austria, was not the kind of women to help him overcome his difficulty. He was cold by nature and unsure of himself, a neurotic and chronic invalid, suspicious, prudish, repressed and morose. She, by contrast, was hot-blooded and self-possessed, coquettish and wilful. She was, moreover, Spanish and his lifelong fear and detestation of the Spanish bordered on paranoia. When they were married in 1615, they were both only fourteen years of age. The Queen Mother put them to bed together on the wedding-night, but thereafter no amount of persuasion could induce the young King to share his wife's bed again until four years later when against his will and in spite of his tears, he was literally picked up and carried to her bedroom. Despite their incompatibility they then managed to live as man and wife, but the King only out of a sense of duty to beget a son and heir. In March 1622, the Queen was said to have had a miscarriage when she was six weeks pregnant, but not everyone was prepared to believe it, and the King's obedient submission to the functions of procreator was otherwise without fruit. For many it was not without significance that the King continued into his middle twenties with no sign of a beard, being given his first shave, and that for form rather than necessity, only on 1 August 1624 when he was twenty-three years old. Hope for a son and heir grew dim and the relationship, such as it was, disintegrated gradually until in 1625 whatever sense of conjugal obligation remained in the King was shattered by his wife's scandalous behaviour with the Duke of Buckingham.

Buckingham had been sent by Charles I of England to escort his future queen, Henrietta of France, the sister of Louis XIII, to London. Darling of fortune, favourite of kings, idol of society, Buckingham outshone all the most brilliant stars of the court of Europe. He had youth, beauty and charm along with fame, wealth and power, an irresistible combination which at first sight dazzled eyes to his arrogance and flippancy, his aggressiveness and conceit. He was an accomplished courtier, an exciting and romantic personality, but as a statesman, diplomat and commander he was brash, self-seeking and incompetent. He arrived in Paris on 24 May 1625 with a retinue worthy of a king and overwhelmed the French nobility with the kind of splendour and refinement they admired as characteristic of themselves: provocative, extravagant, exquisite. His appearances at court were a sensation, his clothes dripping with pearls and diamonds which broke off and fell as he moved, scattering beneath the feet of his admirers. Anne of Austria, twenty-three years old and her marriage already cold, was as fascinated by him as were her ladies-in-waiting, and Buckingham, sensing a personal triumph, played gallant to her with a total disregard for propriety.

On 2 June, Henrietta of France, escorted by Buckingham and his party, left Paris for Boulogne, and the Court, including Anne of Austria and the Queen Mother
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but not the King, accompanied them as far as Amiens. There one evening while walking in the garden of the house where Anne was staying, Buckingham lured her away from the company and seized her in his arms. At what stage her cry brought their companions rushing to the scene is not certain. However, her servants and attendants maintained that she could not have been held in Buckingham's passionate embrace long enough to substantiate the story, told later by Cardinal de Retz, that the next morning she commissioned her friend the Duchesse de Chevreuse ‘to ask Buckingham if he was quite sure she was not in danger of being pregnant.'