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Alexandre Dumas wrote a book about him. So did Dennis Wheatley. Films have been made about him. Many people have heard about him. This enigmatic figure known as "the ancient prisoner" spent 34 years of his life in prison, eventually in the Bastille, dying there in 1703. Yet nobody knows who he really was. All anyone can do is guess. According to Dumas in his book he was either the real Sun King himself or his twin brother, and he was made to wear a mask so that nobody would see that he was. The title of the book was, of course, The Man in the Iron Mask. But some facts are known, and these make the whole story even more mysterious. So let us start at the beginning. In July 1669, in the town of Dunkirk (which was then in English hands), a man was arrested. Whether he was trying to enter the country or leave it has never been established. He was then taken to a prison in north-west Italy, at Pignerol near Turin, where the governor of the prison, a Monsieur Saint-Mars, had received a letter from the French Minister of War, the marquis de Louvois, instructing him to take special care of his new prisoner. According to this letter, the man, one Eustache Dauger, had been sent to Pignerol at the direct order of the king, Louis XIV. He was to be most securely guarded and was not to be permitted to give any information about himself, nor to send any letters to anyone. He was to be placed in a cell such that there were no windows which could be approached from the outside, and that the approach to the cell should have two sets of doors with the guards restricted to the outside of the second set so that they would not be able to hear anything. Only the governor was allowed to go through these doors to unlock the closest door, and he was never to listen to anything that the prisoner said, even to threaten him if he opened his mouth to speak of anything but his day-to-day needs. All this suggests that Dauger (or D'Auger as he was sometimes called) was no ordinary prisoner, and that he could in some way pose a threat to the security of the realm. In March of the year 1698, Saint-Mars was given the post of governor of the Bastille, and Dauger went with him to Paris, though now he was wearing a velvet mask with metal clasps. The arrival of this mysterious prisoner made everyone in the Bastille very curious. The gossip-mongers had a field day. Could this man be the illegitimate son of the Queen Mother and her Chief Minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Or was he the real Louis XIV, the man on the throne being an illegitimate sibling. It was Voltaire who invented the myth of the 'Iron mask' and he suggested that the prisoner was an illegitimate half-brother of Louis XIV, the result of an act of infidelity by the queen of Louis XIII. There were endless theories, but the only man who ever saw the prisoner's face was Saint-Mars, and he told no one. A doctor who once examined the man never actually saw his face, only his tongue and his naked body. The man in the mask died in the Bastille in 1703. All the furniture that he had used was burned, as was all his personal effects. The walls of the cell were scraped and whitewashed just in case he had left some mark on them. Even the tiles on the floor were taken up and destroyed and replaced by others. And the burial certificate gives his name as 'Marchioly', which only deepens the mystery of his identity. So who was this man whose face no one was allowed to see. Did he bear a resemblance to some prominent person in France. Why was a special governor appointed to guard the masked prisoner for all of his life? Why wasn't he executed after his arrest in Dunkirk? This would have been a much simpler and cheaper course of action. Was he allowed to live because he meant something to someone in power. Was Voltaire right when he suggested that the prisoner was the half-brother of Louis XIV? Or was he the real father of Louis XIV? This latter theory is very interesting. Louis XIII and his queen, Anne of Austria, were married for 22 years. During the first thirteen years of the marriage they had no children - the king was impotent. Cardinal Richelieu knew that it was important that the monarch should produce an heir (especially if this heir became a puppet of Richelieu). The royal pair had separated, mainly because they hated each other. But Richelieu managed to get them together for a reconciliation. Then, in 1638 the queen gave birth to a boy, an event which shocked everyone. How could this pair, who had never had a child in thirteen years and had finished up detesting one another, suddenly manage to produce an heir to the throne? It has been suggested that Richelieu introduced the queen to one of the illegitimate sons of Henry of Navarre, and the liaison had the result that he wanted. This theory is borne out by the fact that Louis XIV looked nothing like his royal "father" Louis XIII. And it would certainly explain why the prisoner had his face concealed, otherwise people would notice the tell-tale resemblance to the king. It would also explain why the king did not have this famous prisoner secretly murdered - that would have been patricide. Bill Hutchings |
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page last updated 31 AUGUST 2001 |
