Iron Mask, THE MAN WITH THE. The story of the prisoner so called, confined in the Bastille, and other prisons in the reign of Louis XIV., has long had a romantic interest for the readers of history. The first notice of him was given in a work entitled Mémoires Secrets pour servir à l'Histoire de Perse (Amst. 1745-46), according to which, he was the Duke of Vernandois, a natural son of Louis XIV. and of Mdlle. de la Vallière, who, having given a box on the ear to his half-brother, the grand dauphin, had to expiate it with imprisonment for life. The assertion was without foundation, for the Duke of Vernandois died in camp in 1683; but the confidence with which it was made caused a deep sensation, and the romance of Mouly, L'Homme au Masque de Fer, which immediately followed (Hague, 1746), was read with all the more avidity that it was prohibited. Voltaire, in his Siècle de Louis XIV., treats the anecdote historically. According to him, the prisoner was young, and of a noble figure. In journeying from one prison to another he wore a mask, and was at last transferred to the Bastille, where he was treated with great distinction.
The first authentic information with regard to the Iron Mask was given by the Jesuit Griffet, who acted for nine years as confessor in the Bastille, in his Traité des différentes Sortes de Preuves qui servent à établir la Vérité dans l'Histoire (Liège,
1769). He brought forward the MS. Journal of Du Jonca, the lieutenant of the Bastille, according to which Saint-Mars arrived, on the 18th September 1698, from the Isle de Sainte-Marguerite, bringing with him in a litter a prisoner whom he had already had in custody at Pignerol. The prisoner's name was not mentioned, and his face was always kept concealed by a mask of black velvet. The journal mentions his death on the 19th day of November 1703, and that he was buried in the cemetery of St Paul. This is confirmed by the register of burials for the parish of St Paul's, where the prisoner is mentioned under the name of Marchiali.
After long silence Voltaire returned to the subject in his Essai sur les Mœurs, but he brought forward nothing new. In the seventh edition of the Dictionnaire Philosophique he related the story anew, under the head Ana, corrected his errors as to time from the journal of Du Jonca, and concluded with the assurance that he knew more about the matter than Griffet, but chose, as a Frenchman, to be silent. An addition to the article, apparently by the editor of the work, freely states the opinion that the Mask was an elder brother of Louis XIV. The writer declares that Anne of Austria had this son by the Duke of Buckingham, and being thus undeceived as to her supposed barrenness, brought about a meeting with her husband, and in consequence bore Louis XIV. Louis is held to have first learned the existence of this brother when he came of age, and to have put him in confinement, to guard against any possible unpleasant consequences. Saint-Michel published a book in 1790, in which he relates the story of the unfortunate being, and points to a secret marriage between Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin. What is remarkable is that not the court but Louvois continued to manifest an interest in the matter, and took every means to keep the identity of the prisoner in the dark. When the Bastille fell the prisoner's room was eagerly searched, and also the prison register; but all inquiry was vain.
The Abbé Soulavie, who published Mémoires de Maréchal Richelieu (London and Paris, 1790), tries to make out from a document written by the tutor of that unfortunate prince that the Iron Mask was a twin-brother of Louis XIV. A prophecy had announced disaster to the royal family from a double birth, and to avoid this Louis XIII. caused the last born of the twins to be brought up in secret. Louis XIV. learned of his brother's existence only after the death of Mazarin, and that brother, having discovered his relation to the king by means of a portrait, was subjected to perpetual imprisonment. This view of the matter was the one almost universally prevalent till the time of the Revolution. It is also followed in Zschokke's German tragedy, and in Fournier's drama, founded on the story. In Grimm's correspondence may be found the legend of the birth of a twin-brother of Louis XIV., but history avers that seventeen persons were present and witnessed the delivery of the queen of one male infant only. As regards the intrigue of Anne of Austria with the Duke of Buckingham the dates make the supposition absurd, as forty-eight years elapsed between their audience and the first imprisonment of the Mask in Pignerol.
The first conjecture of what till recently seemed to be the truth is contained in a letter dated 1770, written by a Baron d'Heiss to the Journal Encyclopédique. The same is repeated by Louis Duteus in his Intercepted Correspondence (1789), who declares that there is no point of history better established than the fact that the prisoner with the Iron Mask was a minister of the Duke of Mantua. This minister, Count Matthioli, had pledged himself to Louis XIV. to urge his master the duke to deliver up to the French the fortress of Casale, which gave access to the whole of Lombardy. Though largely bribed to maintain the French interests, he began to betray them; and Louis XIV., having got conclusive proofs of the treachery, contrived to have Matthioli lured to the French frontier, secretly arrested, 23d April 1679, and conveyed to the fortress of Pignerol, which was his first prison. The conclusion of D'Heiss and Dutens, that Matthioli was the Iron Mask, though acute, was only a conjecture. But the documents discovered and published by M. Roux-Fazillac in his Recherches historiques et critiques sur l'Homme au Masque de Fer (1800), by M. Delort in his Histoire de l'Homme au Masque de Fer (1825), and M. Marius Topin, in his Man with the Iron Mask (trans. 1869), seemed to leave little doubt on the subject, and the public had apparently made up its mind that the secret was at last discovered, when a still more recent work by a French officer, M. Th. Jung, La Vérité sur le Masque de Fer (Les Empoisonneurs) d'après des Documents inédits des Archives de la Guerre et autres dépôts publics, 1664-1703 (1873), conclusively showed that Matthioli could not have been the mysterious prisoner. This Italian adventurer was sent to Pignerol six years after the Mask entered that fortress. He was left behind in Pignerol when Saint-Mars removed the Mask to the Bay of Cannes, and his death there was never kept secret. Matthioli could not speak French; but the mystery, the man in the mask, spoke French with a foreign accent, was over the middle height, tall, well made, and fond of music. It says little for the perspicacity of either M. Topin or of his readers that Matthioli should ever have been accepted as the owner of the famous Mask.
M. Jung's hypothesis is vastly more meritorious; in fact, he marshals his facts so dexterously that we should almost say he had succeeded in proving that the Man in the Iron Mask was the unknown head of a widespread and formidable conspiracy, working in secret for the assassination of Louis XIV. and of some of his ablest ministers. The severity of M. Jung's labours with reference to this subject will be understood when it is stated that in the course of his researches he had to examine some seventeen hundred volumes of despatches and reports in the bureau of the Ministry of War. The adventurer upon whom he fastens the Mask was a certain soldier of fortune, a M. de Marchiel, related to several families in Lorraine, and apt to assume their names when an alias was required for his purposes. Seized by Louvois's orders at the ford of Péronne, on the morning of March 29, 1673, he was first forwarded to the Bastille. There Louvois saw him, and sent him to Pignerol and to the care of Saint-Mars. From that hour the jailor never parted from his strange prisoner. De Marchiel went with him to Exilles (1687), to St Margnérite, and died in the Bastille, November 19, 1703. His funeral cost forty livres, and it is entered in the register of the parish of St Paul as that of 'M. de Marchiel.' His clothes and his Iron Mask were burned, and there the few facts known about this man end. The names and dates all hang so well together that this conjecture is far the most reasonable that has yet been made. But nothing has been proved, except that the Mask was none of the other eleven persons he has been supposed to be. Nothing more will ever be proved until the treasures of the Vatican give up the secret, a secret which the Mask's confessor must certainly have known, and which he may have revealed to his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome.