The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies. Lang Andrew
exactly as another prisoner was carried masked from Provence to the Bastille in 1695. M. Funck-Brentano argues that Saint-Mars was now quite fond of his old Mattioli, so noble, so learned.
At last, on September 18, 1698, Saint-Mars lodged his ‘old prisoner’ in the Bastille, ‘an old prisoner whom he had at Pignerol,’ says the journal of du Junca, Lieutenant of the Bastille. His food, we saw, was brought him by Rosarges alone, the ‘Major,’ a gentleman who had always been with Saint-Mars. Argues M. Funck-Brentano, all this proves that the captive was a gentleman, not a valet. Why? First, because the Bastille, under Louis XIV., was ‘une prison de distinction.’ Yet M. Funck-Brentano tells us that in Mazarin’s time ‘valets mixed up with royal plots’ were kept in the Bastille. Again, in 1701, in this ‘noble prison,’ the Mask was turned out of his room to make place for a female fortune-teller, and was obliged to chum with a profligate valet of nineteen, and a ‘beggarly’ bad patriot, who ‘blamed the conduct of France, and approved that of other nations, especially the Dutch.’ M. Funck-Brentano himself publishes these facts (1898), in part published earlier (1890) by M. Lair.* Not much noblesse here! Next, if Rosarges, a gentleman, served the Mask, Saint-Mars alone (1669) carried his food to the valet, Dauger. So the service of Rosarges does not ennoble the Mask and differentiate him from Dauger, who was even more nobly served, by Saint-Mars.
*Legendes de la Bastille, pp. 86-89. Citing du Junca’s Journal,
April 30, 1701.
On November 19, 1703, the Mask died suddenly (still in his velvet mask), and was buried on the 20th. The parish register of the church names him ‘Marchialy’ or ‘Marchioly,’ one may read it either way; du Junca, the Lieutenant of the Bastille, in his contemporary journal, calls him ‘Mr. de Marchiel.’ Now, Saint-Mars often spells Mattioli, ‘Marthioly.’
This is the one strength of the argument for Mattioli’s claims to the Mask. M. Lair replies, ‘Saint-Mars had a mania for burying prisoners under fancy names,’ and gives examples. One is only a gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly said that, as he is a State prisoner, his real name is not to be given, so he is registered as Pierre Maret (others read Navet, ‘Peter Turnip’). If Saint-Mars, looking about for a false name for Dauger’s burial register, hit on Marsilly (the name of Dauger’s old master), that MIGHT be miswritten Marchialy. However it be, the age of the Mask is certainly falsified; the register gives ‘about forty-five years old.’ Mattioli would have been sixty-three; Dauger cannot have been under fifty-three.
There the case stands. If Mattioli died in April 1694, he cannot be the Man in the Iron Mask. Of Dauger’s death we find no record, unless he was the Man in the Iron Mask, and died, in 1703, in the Bastille. He was certainly, in 1669 and 1688, at Pignerol and at Sainte-Marguerite, the centre of the mystery about some great prisoner, a Marshal of France, the Duc de Beaufort, or a son of Oliver Cromwell. Mattioli was no mystery, no secret. Dauger is so mysterious that probably the secret of his mystery was unknown to himself. By 1701, when obscure wretches were shut up with the Mask, the secret, whatever its nature, had ceased to be of moment. The captive was now the mere victim of cruel routine. But twenty years earlier, Saint-Mars had said that Dauger ‘takes things easily, resigned to the will of God and the King.’
To sum up, on July 1, 1669, the valet of the Huguenot intriguer, Roux de Marsilly, the valet resident in England, known to his master as ‘Martin,’ was ‘wanted’ by the French secret police. By July 19, a valet, of the highest political importance, had been brought to Dunkirk, from England, no doubt. My hypothesis assumes that this valet, though now styled ‘Eustache Dauger,’ was the ‘Martin’ of Roux de Marsilly. He was kept with so much mystery at Pignerol that already the legend began its course; the captive valet was said to be a Marshal of France! We then follow Dauger from Pignerol to Les Exiles, till January 1687, when one valet out of a pair, Dauger being one of them, dies. We presume that Dauger is the survivor, because the great mystery still is ‘what he HAS DONE,’ whereas the other valet had done nothing, but may have known Dauger’s secret. Again, the other valet had long been dropsical, and the valet who died in 1687 died of dropsy.
In 1688, Dauger, at Sainte-Marguerite, is again the source and centre of myths; he is taken for a son of Oliver Cromwell, or for the Duc de Beaufort. In June 1692, one of the Huguenot preachers at Sainte-Marguerite writes on his shirt and pewter plate, and throws them out of window.* Legend attributes these acts to the Man in the Iron Mask, and transmutes a pewter into a silver plate. Now, in 1689-1693, Mattioli was at Pignerol, but Dauger was at Sainte-Marguerite, and the Huguenot’s act is attributed to him. Thus Dauger, not Mattioli, is the centre round which the myths crystallise: the legends concern HIM, not Mattioli, whose case is well known, and gives rise to no legend. Finally, we have shown that Mattioli probably died at Sainte-Marguerite in April 1694. If so, then nobody but Dauger can be the ‘old prisoner’ whom Saint-Mars brought, masked, to the Bastille, in September 1698, and who died there in November 1703. However, suppose that Mattioli did not die in 1694, but was the masked man who died in the Bastille in 1703, then the legend of Dauger came to be attributed to Mattioli: these two men’s fortunes are combined in the one myth.
*Saint-Mars au Ministre, June 4, 1692.
The central problem remains unsolved,
WHAT HAD THE VALET, EUSTACHE DAUGER, DONE?*
*One marvels that nobody has recognised, in the mask, James Stuart (James de la Cloche), eldest of the children of Charles II. He came to England in 1668, was sent to Rome, and ‘disappears from history.’ See
‘The Mystery of James de la Cloche.’
II. THE VALET’S MASTER
The secret of the Man in the Iron Mask, or at least of one of the two persons who have claims to be the Mask, was ‘WHAT HAD EUSTACHE DAUGER DONE?’ To guard this secret the most extraordinary precautions were taken, as we have shown in the fore-going essay. And yet, if secret there was, it might have got wind in the simplest fashion. In the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne,’ Dumas describes the tryst of the Secret-hunters with the dying Chief of the Jesuits at the inn in Fontainebleau. They come from many quarters, there is a Baron of Germany and a laird from Scotland, but Aramis takes the prize. He knows the secret of the Mask, the most valuable of all to the intriguers of the Company of Jesus.
Now, despite all the precautions of Louvois and Saint-Mars, despite sentinels for ever posted under Dauger’s windows, despite arrangements which made it impossible for him to signal to people on the hillside at Les Exiles, despite the suppression even of the items in the accounts of his expenses, his secret, if he knew it, could have been discovered, as we have remarked, by the very man most apt to make mischievous use of it – by Lauzun. That brilliant and reckless adventurer could see Dauger, in prison at Pignerol, when he pleased, for he had secretly excavated a way into the rooms of his fellow-prisoner, Fouquet, on whom Dauger attended as valet. Lauzun was released soon after Fouquet’s death. It is unlikely that he bought his liberty by the knowledge of the secret, and there is nothing to suggest that he used it (if he possessed it) in any other way.
The natural clue to the supposed secret of Dauger is a study of the career of his master, Roux de Marsilly. As official histories say next to nothing about him, we may set forth what can be gleaned from the State Papers in our Record Office. The earliest is a letter of Roux de Marsilly to Mr. Joseph Williamson, secretary of Lord Arlington (December 1668). Marsilly sends Martin (on our theory Eustache Dauger) to bring back from Williamson two letters from his own correspondent in Paris. He also requests Williamson to procure for him from Arlington a letter of protection, as he is threatened with arrest for some debt in which he is not really concerned. Martin will explain. The next paper is endorsed ‘Received December 28, 1668, Mons. de Marsilly.’ As it is dated December 27, Marsilly must have been in England. The contents of this piece deserve attention, because they show the terms on which Marsilly and Arlington were, or, at least, how Marsilly conceived them.
(1) Marsilly reports, on the authority of his friends at Stockholm, that the King of Sweden intends, first to intercede with Louis XIV. in favour of the French Huguenots, and next, if diplomacy fails, to join in arms with the other Protestant Powers of Europe.
(2) His correspondent in Holland learns that if the King of England invites