Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Mattioli’s Betrayal of Louis XIV—Participation of Duke Charles—Louis’ True Character Exhibited to World—Abduction of Mattioli—Imprisoned for Fifteen Years—Insanity—Story of the Mask—Mattioli’s Disappearance No Mystery—Explanation of the Riddle—Mattioli’s Hardships—His End.

And so the truth came to light.

The Duchess-Regent of Savoy wrote, herself, to Louis XIV, to tell him that Mattioli had shown her the documents relating to the negotiations for Casale, and that she had in her possession copies of them. Her minister, Signor Trucci, had had an interview with Mattioli on the subject at Turin. It afterwards transpired, through Mattioli’s own admission to Catinat, that he had betrayed the whole affair to the Conde de Melgar, the Spanish Governor of Milan, and that Melgar had provided him with a cipher for their communications on the subject; and that he, Mattioli, had had secret interviews in regard to it with one of the Inquisitors of State at Venice.

Personally, I find it hard to believe with Mr. Hopkins that Mattioli acted throughout without the knowledge and consent of the Duke of Mantua. In the first place, he had no certainty of any commensurate gain to be derived from his betrayal of Louis XIV to that monarch’s adversaries—for responsible ministers of state do not generally pay largely for information before that information has been shown to be not merely negatively, but positively valuable. And Mattioli would naturally have required a very large sum in each instance to compensate him for the inevitable loss of Duke Charles’ favour when Duke Charles (always supposing the two men to have been working at cross purposes, and that the duke was in ignorance of Mattioli’s subterranean intrigues) should discover that Mattioli had disloyally wrecked his pet project of military glory, and had kept him as well out of the enjoyment of twelve thousand pounds or so.

Again, consider the duke’s own behaviour throughout—his first keenness and then his amazing apathy just at the moment when his cherished desire and a large sum of money to boot were within his reach—the “sort of carousal” put forward by him as an excuse for not going to Casale to meet the troops of which he was to have been the generalissimo—was such the conduct of any but a man anxious to evade the fulfilment of his bargain?

The fury of Louis XIV at being thus exhibited to the world in his true character of intriguer and brigand—and a feeble one at that—together with the explanations and personal untruths in which he now found himself involved (neither explanations nor personal untruths being at all to his proud taste) may be more easily imagined than described. Also his wrath with D’Estrades and Pinchesne for letting themselves be made fools of by Mattioli. The former of these, however, instantly took steps to assuage his master’s anger by submitting a plan of revenge; he proposed that Mattioli should be kidnapped and imprisoned for so long or so short a time as the King might please.

To this Louis consented, insisting only that the thing should be done with the utmost secrecy; Mattioli was to be lured on to French soil beyond the frontier of Piedmont and incarcerated in a dungeon at Pinerolo. Except his gaoler there—one Saint-Mars, baptised Benignant—and Catinat, no one was to know the prisoner’s name. As the offended Louis put it to D’Estrades, “Look to it that no one knows what becomes of this man.” So that it was now, as Americans say, “up to” D’Estrades to carry out the abduction of Mattioli.

Oddly enough, Mattioli had not the least inkling of his peril; he had no idea that the Duchess of Savoy had made known his transaction with her to Louis XIV, and so he was all unsuspecting of the advances with which D’Estrades continued to ply him. Indeed, he was now in Turin, trying to get more money out of the French representatives, on the ground of the expenses incurred by him in promoting King Louis’ interests in Italy. To that, on D’Estrades’ telling him that Catinat was at Pinerolo with funds for the express purpose of reimbursing him, Mattioli agreed to meet D’Estrades early in the morning of May 2, 1679, at a spot outside the city, whence they were to drive together to a place on the frontier near Pinerolo.

Mattioli kept the appointment; D’Estrades was waiting for him at the place set, and away the carriage rolled with its burden of revenge, and treachery, and greed, along the country roads to where, at the end of some seventeen miles, Catinat was waiting for them.

And so the meeting took place and, all unwittingly, Mattioli stepped in between the very teeth of the trap set for him by D’Estrades; and at once the teeth snapped to, never again to open for the unhappy man. At two o’clock that same afternoon, in Mr. Hopkins’ words, “Saint-Mars had him under lock in the dungeon of Pignerol—the French name for Pinerolo. There, for fifteen years, Mattioli was confined under circumstances of every severity; his name was changed, officially, to Lestang, in order that none might know his identity saving only that same Benignant Saint-Mars—as timorous and heartless a creature as ever passed for a man.

In less than a year Mattioli went out of his mind, thanks to Saint-Mars’ treatment of him; at that time three of the prisoners under the amiable Benignant’s charge in the hell of Pinerolo were insane—Mattioli, Dubreuil, and a nameless Jacobin monk. After a while Mattioli and the Jacobin were put in the same cell—and there they lived and had their miserable being together until 1694, when, in consequence of the French reverses, preparations were set on foot to abandon Pinerolo to the Savoyards. It now became necessary to remove the only three prisoners left there to safer keeping in France itself, in order that the King’s secret might be kept—the secret of his having “spirited away,” by means of his agents, the Minister of a friendly Prince.

And so Mattioli was taken off, along with Dubreuil and another—the monk was dead—in a closed litter to another fortress, that of Sainte-Marguerite, on an island off the coast of Nice; his former gaoler, Saint-Mars, had, for some years already, been the governor of Sainte-Marguerite, and to him Mattioli was brought under a strong escort of soldiers by the then governor of Pinerolo, the Marquis D’Herleville, in person.

It is to be presumed that on this journey between the two prisons Mattioli was masked, as he was similarly masked some years later, on his transference, under charge of Saint-Mars, from Sainte-Marguerite to Paris and to the Bastile itself; the mask, though, was not the traditional monstrosity of iron, but the ordinary velvet “vizard” worn to this day at masked balls.

And this brings us to one of the strangest features of the whole case—namely, that from beginning to end this secrecy on the part of Louis XIV and his henchmen was completely unnecessary, for the simple reason that the secret was no secret at all and never had been.

This is abundantly proved by the fact that, as early as 1682, little more than two years after Mattioli’s abduction by D’Estrades, there was published at Cologne a pamphlet in Italian called “La prudenza trionfante di Casale.” In this a complete, detailed account was given of the whole affair of the intrigue for Casale, with the full parts played in it by D’Estrades, Mattioli, the Duke of Mantua, Catinat, D’Asfeld, and Pinchesne; and in 1687 there was published at Leyden the “Histoire abrÉgÉe de l’Europe,” containing a letter translated from Italian into French, denouncing the abduction of Mattioli as the outrage that it was.

How the thing came thus to light and through whom, I have no means of ascertaining, and so I must leave it to the reader to decide the question for himself. But, as the “Prudenza trionfante” contains a minute description of Mattioli’s arrest, in the words, “The secretary (Mattioli) was surrounded by ten or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him, masked him, and conducted him to Pinerolo,” we can only conclude either that it must have been written by an eyewitness, or else from the description given by one of the scene in question. Moreover, there were alive, until the Eighteenth Century, many persons of the parts about Pinerolo who continued to bear witness both to Mattioli’s arrest as well as to the manner of it, especially in regard to his masking by Catinat’s men.

After all, what explanation more natural than that (for the day was a Sunday) some small boys or other idlers should have followed the march of Catinat and his few soldiers, at a respectful distance, along the three miles of road from Pinerolo to the place of the arrest and, concealing themselves among the dense trees nearby, should have seen everything?

Thus, the mystery of Mattioli’s disappearance from the world of the living was in no way a mystery, except in the fond imagination of his gaolers, seeing that the facts of it were public property over a great part of Europe, after the appearance of the publications mentioned in 1682 and 1687.

There arises then the question—whence the mystery of the “Man in the Iron Mask”?

From the early spring of 1694 until the summer of 1698, when Saint-Mars was promoted to be the governor of the Bastile in Paris, Mattioli remained under his care at the Island of Sainte-Marguerite. At the end of those four years Saint-Mars is told to come to Paris and to bring with him his “ancient prisoner” in such a manner that he shall be seen by no one.

And so Saint-Mars set out for his new post in the capital, taking with him his “ancient prisoner,” masked as ever, in a litter, with an escort of horse-soldiers. On their way they passed by Saint-Mars’ estate of Palteau, near Villeneuve in the Department of the Yonne, where Saint-Mars rested for a day or two, never letting his prisoner out of his sight; together they ate their meals, and at night Saint-Mars slept in a bed close to that of the man in the mask.

In a letter upon the subject published in the “AnnÉe LittÉraire” for June 30, 1768, and quoted in his admirable book by Mr. Tighe Hopkins, the grand-nephew of Saint-Mars, M. de Formanoir de Palteau, writes:

These things the writer had from the few remaining actual witnesses of them, seventy years before.

On the arrival of Saint-Mars at the Bastile in the later days of September, 1698, he was met by Du Junca, the King’s lieutenant of the prison, who noted the fact with all its circumstances in the register now in the library of the Arsenal in Paris. It is this entry of Du Junca’s (according to M. Funck-Brentano, as quoted by Mr. Hopkins) that is “the origin and foundation of all that has been printed on the question of the Iron Mask.”

The entry goes thus:

By degrees, though, poor Mattioli’s importance began to decrease with years and the world’s forgetfulness of the events that had so stirred France and Italy all those years before 1679; by 1701, twenty-two dreadful years after his arrest by Catinat at Pinerolo, he had fallen from his high estate of mystery, and we find him torn out of his seclusion from the common herd of malefactors, and put to share a cell with a miserable rascal imprisoned for various offences against the common law—one Tirmont, who died insane, seven years later, in the BicÊtre. And on April 30, 1701, there was added to these two yet a third prisoner, Maranville by name; the three remained together thus until the December of that year, when Tirmont was removed to BicÊtre.

The two remaining years of Mattioli’s life were spent with Maranville; one can only hope the latter was able to console him a little and to soften his last moments on earth with some particle of companionship.

And now comes the last of him; as noted in Du Junca’s handwriting in the prison register on November 19, 1703:

At the lower left-hand side of this entry in Du Junca’s prison-registry there is a note to the effect that:

As a matter of fact, the entry in the registry of Saint Paul’s runs as follows:

After seeing how Du Junca makes “Marcheil” where the sacristan of Saint Paul makes the name “Marchioly,” it is presumable that Du Junca learned it by word of mouth from some one or other; also that the name itself had been communicated to Du Junca’s informant in the same manner by Rosarges or Reilhe or the sacristan—in short, that, all along, the name was an unintentional corruption of “Mattioli.” And so good-bye to his competitors, in the popular imagination, to the title of “Man in the Iron Mask,” Vermandois, Monmouth, VendÔme, Fouquet, an unknown twin brother of Louis XIV, Avedick, the Armenian patriarch, General de Bulonde, and the rest. I would once more recommend to all interested in the subject Mr. Tighe Hopkins’ altogether admirable publication in which he traces and destroys the claims of each and every one of these candidates to be what he so aptly terms “The Sphinx of French History.”