The man behind the iron.., p.15
The Man Behind the Iron Mask, page 15
Not only did Renneville give us a full portrait gallery of the men who guarded the masked prisoner, but also what is almost certainly a brief glimpse of the prisoner himself. When he entered the room where the prisoner from Sainte-Marguerite happened to be, he was bundled straight out again so he did not have time to see much at all. He did not notice that the prisoner’s face was covered by a mask, but he did not see the prisoner’s face anyway. ‘As soon as the officers saw me coming in,’ he explains, ‘they made him turn his back towards me which stopped me seeing his face.’ The prisoner turned so quickly that he glimpsed nothing more than the back of his head. ‘He was a man of average height,’ he says, ‘but well built and his hair which he wore in a very thick pony-tail was black with not a single strand of white in it.’ Jet black hair, thick and strong, is not what one would have expected. According to Palteau, who got his information from eye-witnesses, the prisoner’s hair at this time was white. If Palteau’s information was correct, Ru’s identification was wrong; but it is unlikely that Ru could have been mistaken or deliberately untruthful about the prisoner Renneville saw, and the fact that the prisoner was made to turn around as soon as Renneville walked in does seem to bear him out.
The contradiction between Palteau and Renneville defies all resolution unless, as might easily have happened in that sudden and rapid glimpse. Renneville himself made a mistake. What he took to be a pony-tail of black hair might very well have been the knot and tail of two broad bands of black velvet which wrapped the prisoner’s head and held his mask in place. If the prisoner was really the man Ru said he was, then he was certainly wearing a mask because, according to Du Junca, the prisoner from Provence was always kept masked. Renneville, however, had no reason to suppose that he had seen the back of a mask. In all the record of his eleven years in the Bastille, he never once mentions seeing or hearing of prisoners wearing masks. Presumably therefore it did not occur to him that the prisoner he glimpsed was wearing one.
Unfortunately Renneville’s picture of the mysterious prisoner, obscure as it is amidst the vivid portraits of his gaolers, is blurred by yet another error. The date he gives for the encounter was sometime in 1705 and we know from Du Junca that the prisoner died in 1703. The mistake this time is certainly Renneville’s. If his date is correct, then his informants were wrong and that is out of the question. Although it is only unlikely that Ru would have mistaken another man for the prisoner he travelled with from Sainte-Marguerite, it is altogether impossible that Reilhe could have mistaken another inmate for the man whose burial certificate he had signed. The only possible explanation is that Renneville, writing twelve years or more after the event, made a mistake in the date, or alternatively that ‘1705’ was a printer’s error, overlooked in the reading of the proofs. The first edition of Renneville’s book has so many printer’s errors that two and a half pages of major corrections had to be included at the end. Three words were accidentally omitted from the text just six lines before the mention of 1705 and there is yet another error in the catchword at the foot of the same page. So far as one can learn from Renneville’s account, there were only two occasions between the time of his arrival in May 1702 and the death of the masked prisoner in November 1703 when he was taken from his cell to any room other than another cell. The first was 24 May 1702 when he had to be questioned by Saint-Mars, and the second was 13 May 1703 when he had to be questioned by Du Junca. It was on one or other of these two occasions that, by accident and without knowing it, he met the prisoner who was later known as the Man in the Iron Mask.
The lack of official records and communications referring to the masked prisoner in the time he was in the Bastille is no doubt due to the fact that, in matters of security, the minister responsible could deal with the governor in person without needing to put anything on paper. The Comte de Pontchartrain, who was the minister in charge, rarely visited the prison, but his deputy, M. Desgranges, did so regularly. As the father-in-law of the youngest son of Saint-Mars, he made social as well as official calls. In prisons far from Paris, however, even secret communications could only be made by correspondence, and before being at the Bastille Saint-Mars had always received directions from his superiors in writing, and had sent regular written reports to them. A great many of these dispatches have survived, especially those received by Saint-Mars, and there is a good deal of information to be had from them. By way of clarification it should be noted that the Bastille came under the control of the Ministry of Finance, but all the other state prisons in France were the concern of the Ministry of War. The last Minister of War with whom Saint-Mars had to deal was the Marquis de Barbezieux.2 On 19 July 1698 the governor received from him the following dispatch: ‘The King sees fit that you leave the islands of Sainte-Marguerite and come to the Bastille with your long-time prisoner, taking care to avoid him being seen or known to anyone. You can write in advance to His Majesty’s Lieutenant of the Bastille to keep a room ready to accommodate this prisoner on your arrival.’
As governor of Sainte-Marguerite, Saint-Mars had charge of a number of prisoners but only the masked prisoner, called his ‘long-time prisoner’ by the minister and Du Junca, accompanied him to the Bastille. Earlier references by Barbezieux or Saint-Mars to his ‘long-time prisoner’ clearly concern the same man and so it is the masked prisoner who is referred to in an angry letter addressed to the prison governor by the minister on 17 November 1697. ‘With your letter of the 10th, I received the copy of the letter M. de Pontchartrain wrote to you concerning the prisoners who are in the islands of Sainte-Marguerite under orders from the King, signed by him or the late M. de Seignelay.3 You have no other conduct to follow with regard to those who are confided to your charge than to continue to watch over their surety without saying anything to anyone about the past acts of your longtime prisoner.’ This letter was written less than a year before the prisoner moved to the Bastille and came under the authority of Pontchartrain’s ministry, but the post of governor of the Bastille was not vacant until the following month, when François de Besmaux, the then governor, died, and at that stage there had been no talk of moving Saint-Mars. Barbezieux resented the Controller of Finance meddling in the affairs of the Ministry of War.
Saint-Mars was governor of Sainte-Marguerite island for eleven and a half years, from April 1687 until September 1698, and the fortress he commanded, including the prisons he built, still stands. It is not an impressive building, more like a fortified village than a castle, but facing the town of Cannes on the French Riviera, its situation is spectacular. It rises from an outcrop of rock on a long low island, thick with pines and eucalyptus trees, less than half a mile from the tip of the Pointe-de-la-Croisette, with the bay of la Napoule and the distant red-rock mountains of the Esterel on one side, the bay called Golfe Juan and the far off white-ice peaks of the Alps on the other. Six rectangular windows, identical, in line and evenly spaced, mark the eastern end of the wall which faces across the sea to Cannes. These are the only windows in that wall and they are always in darkness because their orientation is due north. They are the windows of the prison cells.
The coast has been altogether transformed in the three hundred years since Saint-Mars was there. Seen from the terrace of the fortress today, the bays either side are a continuous stretch of hotels, public buildings and apartment blocks, shops, restaurants, gardens and villas, the shoreline a chain of yacht harbours, beaches, parks and promenades; in his day the land was bare and deserted. Cannes was that section of modern Cannes which is called Le Suquet, just a small fishing village built on a hill a couple of miles west of the Pointe-de-la-Croisette and surrounded by marshland. The village had no harbour and the fishing boats were beached among reeds at the foot of the hill. On the Pointe-de-la-Croisette itself, where today the Palm Beach Casino stands, there was nothing but a bastion and the hills behind were wastes of scrub and moorland. It was a lost corner of France reached only from the north by hard travelling across the harsh and desolate mountains of the Pre-Alps or by sea along the coast from Marseilles, a perilous voyage since even the coastal waters were infested with pirates from North Africa. The Esterel, which was bandit country too dangerous to cross, blocked access from the west, and the border with Savoy was less than fifteen miles along the coast to the east.
South of Sainte-Marguerite, across a narrow strait, is the smaller island of Saint-Honorat, famous for its old monastery with its fortified tower. People today who wish to visit the tower and the fortress, to picnic in the woods and swim in the protected waters between the islands, have a choice of several boat services from various points along the coast. The fortress has become a student holiday centre, combining language classes with courses in sailing and skin-diving. The original garrison area has been taken over for that, but the prison building remains unchanged.
To reach the prison cells today one must pass, as one did three hundred years ago, by way of the adjoining building where Saint-Mars and his family used to live and which serves today as a small marine museum. The museum foyer was formerly the guardroom and access to the prison building can only be made from there. Through a narrow doorway one enters a high-vaulted passageway which leads to the right, a distance of forty feet or so, dimly lit by a single oval-shaped window high up in the arch of the wall on one’s left. There are two doors of heavy wood reinforced with iron in the facing wall, and it is the nearest of these doors, so tradition has it, which gives on to the prison of the Iron Mask. In the time of Saint-Mars, the passage, which is narrow, was severely cramped by the presence of two bulky screens built in front of the doors and by a simple altar which stood in front of the end wall on one’s right. The screens were of timber braced with iron and had solid doors bolted and padlocked. Under the oval window another larger doorway gives on to a second passageway, longer and less dim, which continues the first and contains the doors of four more cells. These doors too were once enclosed by screens.
The door to the Iron Mask’s prison cell is no different from the others. It is of massive wood studded and strapped with iron and has rings for a bolt. It pulls backwards into the passageway, giving access through the thickness of the wall, a depth of three feet, to another door of the same construction which pushes forward into the cell. When this inner door is open at right angles to the jamb, it lies flat against the wall of the cell, allowing an unimpeded view from the doorway of the entire room: twenty feet to the wall facing the door, fifteen feet to the wall on the left. The walls either side curve overhead in a smooth arc like the sides of a tunnel and in the wall at the end, four feet from the ground, is a large barred window, seven feet high by four feet wide. Beyond the window, the prison wall drops sheer, flush with the cliff, to rocks and waves more than a hundred feet below. However, the window affords no view of this; the wall it pierces is six feet thick and the opening is closed by three iron grilles set one behind the other, restricting the view to a narrow section of the distant mainland. On the left of the window is a fireplace and on the right a privy. The wall is roughly plastered and the floor is paved with brick.
Some idea of the security measures which surrounded the life of the masked prisoner in this room is provided by a report addressed to Barbezieux by Saint-Mars on 6 January 1696. Here also, nearly three years before the move to the Bastille, he was referred to as the ‘longtime prisoner’:
You ask me to tell you what arrangements are made when I am absent or sick for the day to day visits and precautions regarding the prisoners who are in my charge. My two lieutenants give the meals at set times in the way they have seen me give them and as I still very often do when I am feeling well. This is how it is done. The senior lieutenant takes the keys to the prison of my long-time prisoner with whom we begin. He opens the three doors and enters the room of the prisoner who duly hands him the dishes and plates which he himself has piled together. The lieutenant has only to go out of two doors to give them to one of my sergeants who puts them on a table two steps away , where the other lieutenant inspects everything going in or out of the prison and sees that there is nothing written on the dishes. Once he has been given all that is necessary, an inspection is made inside and under the bed, from there to the bars of the window and to the privy. A complete search of the room is made and very often a body-search as well. Then when he has been asked in a civil fashion if he needs anything else the doors are closed and the same thing is repeated with the other prisoners.
Their table-linen is changed twice a week, along with their shirts and the other linen they use, it being counted and carefully inspected both when it is collected and when it is returned. One can be badly caught out in the coming and going of laundry for the prisoners of consequence, some of whom I know have attempted to bribe the washerwomen. They, however, swore to me that they were unable to do what was asked of them because I had the linen soaked as soon as it came out of the rooms and because when it was clean and half-dry the washerwomen came to my apartment to iron and fold it in the presence of one of my lieutenants, who locked up the laundry baskets in a strong-box until they were to be handed over to the prisoners’ valets. One must be on one’s guard about the candles too. I have known some which, when broken or employed, were found to have paper in them in place of the wick. I used to send for them to Turin, to shops which were not suspect. Ribbons leaving the prisoners’ cells are also dangerous, because they may write on them as they do on their linen, without one realizing it. The late M. Fouquet used to make fine paper and I would let him write on it, then I would go at night and take it from a little plcket which he had sewn into the seat of his breeches and I would send it to your late father.
At this point the report has been so badly torn that the next five lines are impossible to read, but from what few legible words remain it seems that Saint-Mars is explaining how he ensures that the prisoners are unable to speak or shout to anyone. He then concludes:
As a final precaution, the prisoners are given surprise visits from time to time at irregular hours of the day and night and it is frequently discovered then that they have been writing messages on their dirty laundry. No one else could possibly read what they write, however, as you known from the pieces I have sent you.
One of the lieutenants referred to by Saint-Mars was no doubt Palteau’s father Corbé; and to bring the scene to life, one has only to remember Renneville’s description of him: crooked and unkempt, sly and malevolent. Saint-Mars had arrived on Sainte-Marguerite with two other lieutenants, Laprade and Boisjoly, but the former had been transferred in May 1692 and the latter had been retired in December 1693. Corbé replaced Boisjoly, receiving his promotion in January 1694. Among the sergeants referred to in the report, one was certainly the drunken Rosarges, brutal and slovenly with his bloated purple face, and another was possibly the huge hump-backed L’Ecuyer. One might add here that though Lamotte-Guérin succeeded Saint-Mars in the functions of governor and so became responsible for the state-prisoners on the island, he did not until that time have any duties connected with them. He came to the island in 1692 but not as a member of the prison-staff. The charge he performed, in the time the Iron Mask was there, was that of King’s Lieutenant, an administrative post in the fort.
Voltaire’s story of the silver plate found by the fisherman and Papon’s story of the shirt found by the barber come to mind when one reads that Saint-Mars was afraid his prisoners might try to get messages past the guard by writing on their plates and their linen. As it is, however, no actual report of these stories survives as proof. All that does exist is a mention, made earlier by Saint-Mars, that another prisoner, a Protestant minister named Pierre Salves, had been writing on his dishes, made of pewter not silver, and on his dirty laundry, but so far as one can make out he never threw any of these things out of the window. His intention was to communicate with the other prisoners if he could, and with the outside world, but only by means of the washerwomen. Saint-Mars had reason to be on his guard but not, so far as we know, because of anything attempted by his ‘longtime prisoner’.
In a letter to Saint-Mars on 13 August 1691, Barbezieux, who at that time had just succeeded to the Ministry of War following the death of his father, Louvois, gave instructions which clearly concern the same ‘longtime prisoner’: ‘Whenever you have something to tell me about the prisoner who has been in your charge for twenty years, I beg you to employ the same precautions that you used when you wrote to M. de Louvois.’ In 1691 Saint-Mars had been governor of Sainte-Marguerite for four years; before that he had been governor of Exiles for six years; and before that he had been at Pignerol for sixteen years. Barbezieux may have used the number twenty as a round figure to cover anything from eighteen to twenty-two years, but whatever year it was that the prisoner first came into the custody of Saint-Mars, the minister’s statement is in perfect accord with Du Junca’s note that the masked prisoner had been with Saint-Mars ever since Pignerol. Moreover, since Saint-Mars brought only one prisoner with him when he arrived from Exiles to take up his post at Sainte-Marguerite, the prisoner he brought was evidently that same ‘longtime prisoner’.
