by Colin Wilson
This legend had one strong point in its favour. It originated with a certain Madame de Saint-Quentin, who was the mistress of the Marquis de Louvois, Louis XIV’s war minister. And if (as is practically certain) she heard it from the Marquis, then surely there must be a certain amount of truth in it? That is true; but the opposite may also be true. Perhaps the Marquis told her the story that Louis wanted people to believe – a story that was close enough to the truth to seem probable, but that would mislead the curious. In any case, this story also has one major drawback. If the man in the iron mask was born in 1626, then he would have been about seventy-three at the time of his death. But other clues about the prisoner suggest that he was at least ten years younger than that. Voltaire says he was young and graceful. But by 1669 – the date at which the Bastille archives revealed that the former prisoner had first been incarcerated – a man born in 1626 would have been forty-three – almost an old man in the Europe of that period.
At least Charpentier was able to find a few useful clues from the archives. The prisoner had been in Pignerol, like Mattioli, as well as on the island of St Marguerite – also like Mattioli. But it was not Mattioli. For other archive material revealed that when Saint-Mars, the prison governor of Pignerol, was given another appointment at nearby Exiles in 1681 the “ancient prisoner” went with him, while Mattioli stayed behind. And as more archive material came to light, it was discovered that various letters between the minister of war and Saint-Mars were in the file. And, more important, there were letters from the king. These proved beyond all doubt that the name of the man in the iron mask was Eustache Dauger. In July 1669 the Marquis de Louvois (the father of the one who told his mistress the fairy tale about the Duke of Buckingham) wrote to Saint-Mars:
The King has commanded that I am to have the man named Eustache Dauger sent to Pignerol. It is of the utmost importance . . . that he should be securely guarded and that he should in no way give information about himself nor send any letters . . . You must on no account listen to what he may want to say to you, always threatening to kill him if he opens his mouth . . .
And the archive contained two letters from the king himself that underlined the same point. They make one thing very plain: that Eustache Dauger knew some astonishing secret, and that the king was quite determined that no one else should know it. Then why not execute Dauger? Possibly because Louis XIV was not as ruthless and cruel as that; possibly because he had a certain affection for Dauger. Possibly even because the king was hoping that Dauger might one day reveal some great secret . . .
It was a historian called Jules Lair who first advanced the theory that the man in the mask was Eustache Dauger; he did this in a life of the finance minister Nicholas Fouquet, who was also condemned to life imprisonment by the king. Fouquet, born in 1615, had been a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu, and when Mazarin – Richelieu’s ally and successor – died in 1661 everyone expected Fouquet to become the king’s chief minister. But the young king – he was only twenty-three – was sick of Fouquet, who had become immensely wealthy as a result of his office. He may also have been jealous of Fouquet, who had tried to seduce Louise de la Vallière, the officer’s daughter who became the king’s mistress. The king appointed Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a shopkeeper’s son, assistant to Fouquet, and Colbert soon reported that Fouquet was handing the king falsified accounts every afternoon. Fouquet made the mistake of inviting the king to his château and entertaining him with extravagant magnificence, a magnificence the king knew was bought with public money. Fouquet was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress of Pignerol. And in 1675 the “ancient prisoner”, Eustache Dauger, was allowed to become Fouquet’s valet. There can have been only two possible reasons. Either Fouquet already knew Dauger’s secret of the “ancient prisoner”, or it did not matter if he found out, since he himself would never be released.
But who was Eustache Dauger, and what had he done? The first question proved slightly easier to answer than the second. In the late 1920s the historian Maurice Duvivier set out to track him down. The doctor who had attended him in the Bastille had mentioned his age as about sixty. That meant he must have been born in the late 1630s. Duvivier searched the records tirelessly for a Dauger – or D’Auger, or Danger, or Oger, or Daugé – who might fit the bill. Eventually he found one in the records of the Bibliothèque Nationale, a man called Oger de Cavoye, a member of the minor gentry of Picardy. Eustache Oger (also spelt Dauger) de Cavoye was the son of François de Cavoye, the captain of Cardinal Richelieu’s musketeers, and he was born on 30 August 1637. He was one of six brothers, four of whom died in battle. The fifth, Louis Dauger de Cavoye, had become one of Louis XIV’s most trusted officials. But Eustache seems to have been the ne’er-do-well of the family. And the more Duvivier studied him, the more certain he became that he was the man in the iron mask.
Eustache’s father, François de Cavoye, went to court to seek his fortune about 1620. Like Dumas’s D’Artagnan, he soon achieved celebrity for his courage. (D’Artagnan was in fact a real person, and he escorted Fouquet to Pignerol prison.) He married a young widow, Marie de Sérignan, and became the captain of the cardinal’s guard in 1630. Marie was extremely popular in her own right, and became a friend of Richelieu and of the king, and a maid of honour to the queen. So her sons were brought up at court, and the young Eustache was a playmate of the young Louis XIV – which seems to explain why Louis was unwilling to have him executed. François de Cavoye was killed at the siege of Bapaume in 1641, but his widow’s position ensured that the children continued to be favoured at court. But four of the brothers were to die in the army. Eustache, who was also a soldier, had served in seven campaigns by the time he was twenty-one.
In 1659, when he was twenty-two, Eustache Dauger seems to have been involved in an extremely strange incident. He was present on the Good Friday of that year at a black mass in the Castle of Roissy, in which a pig was christened and eaten. The scandal was tremendous, and a number of careers were ruined, but Eustache seems to have escaped punishment, probably because of the respect in which his mother was held at Court. But six years later he was involved in another scandal which forced him to resign his commission. There was some sort of quarrel with a page-boy outside the old castle of St Germain; one account (by the Duc d’Enghien) says that the page was drunk, and that he managed to strike the Duc de Foix with his pike as he staggered past him. A quarrel flared, and “a man called Cavoye” killed the page. This was regarded as an act of sacrilege, since the place was sanctified by the king’s presence. The Duc de Foix escaped unpunished, but Cavoye was forced to sell his commission. That the Cavoye referred to was Eustache Dauger is proved by the fact that he also ceased to be a guards officer in 1665, while his two surviving brothers Louis and Armand continued to serve the king.
Soon after the murder of the page, Eustache’s mother died, and in her will declared that Louis Dauger, not his elder brother Eustache, should be the head of the family. She had apparently made this will fourteen months before the murder of the page, so we can only conclude that she already regarded Eustache as a scapegrace. She left him a pension for life of a thousand livres a year. Eustache seems to have been financially secure, and he and his brother Louis shared rooms in the Rue de Bourbon, not far from the Charity Hospital. But in 1668 Louis Dauger found himself in serious trouble. He had been trying to seduce a lady named Sidonia de Courcelles, whose husband objected. Louis fought a duel with him, and was arrested. The war minister Louvois was also interested in Sidonia, and he tried hard to get Louis sentenced to death. The finance minister Colbert saved him; but Louis spent the next four years in the Bastille. When he emerged he continued to rise in the world. But by then his brother Eustache was in Pignerol.
Why? What had Eustache done? Duvivier’s theory is that he had played some part in the infamous “affair of the poisons”, or rather, in a curtain-raiser to it that occurred in 1668. The “affair of the poisons” began in 1673, when the police chief, Nicolas de
la Reynie, heard rumours of wealthy ladies who were admitting in the confessional that they had poisoned their husbands. It took La Reynie four years to uncover an incredible “poisons ring” run by fortune-tellers and priests who practised the black mass. Many ladies of the court were involved, and so (this came as a deep shock to the king) was Madame de Montespan, the king’s mistress. Her aim was to secure the king’s love and to weaken the influence of her rival Louise de la Vallière, and she took part in a black mass, allowing her naked belly to be used as the altar, while a priest named Guibourg slit the throat of a baby. In another ceremony to concoct a love potion for the king, drops of a woman’s menstrual blood were mixed with a man’s sperm – the latter obtained by getting a man to masturbate into a holy chalice. All this so horrified the king that he ordered it to be investigated in the utmost secrecy in a room lit only by candles, known as the Chambre Ardente (lighted room) – and that no hint of it should be allowed to reach the public. Most of the leading figures in the affair of the poisons were burned alive. Mme de Montespan was disgraced.
In 1668, five years before La Reynie heard the first hints about the poison ring, there had been another “poison scare” in Paris, and a “sorcerer” named Le Sage and his assistant, the Abbé Mariette, were charged with witchcraft. There was much talk about love potions, black masses, and ladies of the court. The name of Madame de Montespan was mentioned for the first time, but hastily suppressed. Le Sage was sentenced to the galleys for life, while the Abbé Mariette, who had influential relatives, escaped with nine years’ banishment.
Now in the later affair of the poisons, the Abbé Guibourg admitted that he had been paid to say a black mass at the home of the Duchesse d’Orléans by a surgeon who lived in the St-Germain quarter, near the Charity Hospital, with his brother. This is where Eustache Dauger and his brother lived in 1668. And another piece of evidence from the Chambre Ardente trial referred to a surgeon called d’Auger, who supplied “drugs”. Duvivier speculates that this “surgeon” d’Auger was Eustache, and that it was his involvement in the Le Sage-Mariette affair that led to his banishment. Evidence showed that Eustache Dauger had been arrested at Dunkirk by special order of the king; he was apparently about to flee to England. So Duvivier could be right. Eustache Dauger could be the surgeon d’Auger involved in the sorcery case. But that still fails to explain why the king should conduct the whole affair with such secrecy. After all, the Abbé Mariette was banished, and so had plenty of opportunity to open his mouth about any sinister secrets he knew about the king and Dauger. Somehow Duvivier’s theory that Dauger’s crime was sorcery or selling poisons fails to carry conviction.
There is another and rather more interesting possibility that links Dauger with the mystery of Rennes-le-Château (see Chapter 44). In his book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Henry Lincoln states that Fouquet, the disgraced finance minister, may have been the man in the iron mask. This as we know is impossible; Fouquet died in 1680, twenty-three years before the “ancient prisoner”. But Lincoln also points out that in 1656 Fouquet’s brother Louis was sent to Rome to see the painter Poussin, and that he wrote Fouquet a curious letter about some secret which would give him “through M. Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him”. This secret is assumed to be something to do with the hidden treasure of Rennes-le-Château. Poussin’s painting The Shepherds of Arcady, which contains important keys to the mystery, was acquired by Louis XIV and kept in his private rooms where no one could see it. Is it possible that Fouquet knew the secret of Rennes-le-Château, and that the king had him imprisoned in Pignerol – where he was not allowed to speak to anyone – to try to force him to disclose the secret? There is yet another possibility linked with Rennes-le-Château. Lincoln reveals that an important part of the mystery concerns a secret order called the Priory of Sion, whose aim is to restore the Merovingian dynasty to the throne of France. In the seventeenth century the Merovingians – descendants of King Merovech – were the house of Lorraine. The younger brother of Louis XIII, Gaston d’Orléans, was married to the Duke of Lorraine’s sister, and there was an attempt to depose Louis and put Gaston in his place – which would have meant that Gaston’s Merovingian descendants would have been once more on the throne of France. The attempt failed, but it was still possible that Gaston’s heirs would succeed to the throne, since Louis XIII was childless. Then, as we know, Anne of Austria astonished everyone by conceiving the child who became Louis XIV . . .
Lincoln writes: “According to both contemporary and later writers, the child’s true father was Cardinal Richelieu, or perhaps a ‘stud’ employed by Richelieu . . .”
And who could such a “stud” have been? The obvious candidate is Richelieu’s handsome young captain of musketeers, François Dauger de Cavoye. There are many stories about the conception of Louis XIV – how, for example, Richelieu plotted to bring the king and his queen together, and how Louis took refuge with Anne of Austria during a thunderstorm, as a result of which the child was conceived. It is of course possible that Louis XIV was conceived as a result of one single encounter between the king and queen, but far more likely that Richelieu arranged the encounter so that Louis would have reason to believe the child was his own . . .
Several writers mention the resemblance between Louis Dauger de Cavoye, Eustache’s younger brother, and Louis XIV. This would be understandable if the two were, in fact, half-brothers.
And so at last we have a theory that seems to explain the mystery of the man in the mask. François de Cavoye was the “stud” who made sure that an heir to the throne was born, thus frustrating the aspirations of the Merovingians (and the Priory of Sion). Eustache and Louis Dauger both knew that the king was really their half-brother; this is why Louis became a royal favourite after his release from the Bastille. He could be relied upon to keep a secret. But the ne’er-do-well Eustache was a different story. After his downfall, his resignation from the guards, and the arrest and imprisonment of his brother, he began to talk too much. Perhaps he tried some form of blackmail on the king: release my brother or else . . . That would certainly explain why Louis had him whisked away to Pignerol and kept incommunicado, and why he later made sure that the “ancient prisoner” always accompanied the governor Saint-Mars when he moved to another prison. It is also conceivable that Eustache became involved with the Priory of Sion and the plot to place a Merovingian on the throne of France – after all, what better reason could there be for replacing the king than revealing that he was not the true son of Louis XIII? Fouquet probably knew the secret already, since he also seems to have had connection with the Priory. (Lincoln speculates that this is why Fouquet was arrested and tried; Louis tried hard to have Fouquet sentenced to death, but the court refused.) That is why Eustache was allowed to become Fouquet’s valet. But when another old acquaintance of Dauger’s, the Duc de Lauzun, was imprisoned in Pignerol after an escapade, he and Dauger were carefully kept apart.
This theory could explain many things. It could explain, for example, why the war minister Louvois (who undoubtedly knew the secret) told his mistress that the masked prisoner was the son of the Duke of Buckingham and Anne of Austria. It was not too far from the truth; it explained why the king should want to keep the prisoner’s existence a secret; but it made the prisoner the illegitimate child rather than the king. It would also explain why Dauger was obliged to wear a mask when other people were around: like his brother, he probably resembled the king. It is almost impossible to imagine why a man should be obliged to wear a mask unless his face itself is an important key to his secret.
It must be admitted that there is also one strong objection to this theory. When King Louis XV was finally told the secret of the man in the mask by his regent, the Duc d’Orléans, he is reported to have exclaimed, “If he were still alive I would give him his freedom”. Would the king really have thought it unimportant that his grandfather was the son of Richelieu’s captain of musketeers? Perhaps; after all, his own throne was now secure.
But there is another story of Louis XV that casts rather more doubt on the theory. When the Duc de Choiseul asked him about the mysterious prisoner he refused to say anything except: “All conjectures which have been made hitherto are false”. Then he added a baffling afterthought: “If you knew all about it, you would see that it has very little interest”. If this comment is true – and not simply an attempt to allay the duke’s curiosity – then it suggests that all the thousands of pages that have been written about the man in the iron mask are “much ado about nothing”.
33
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste
On a calm afternoon of 5 December 1872 the English ship Dei Gratia sighted a two-masted brig pursuing an erratic course in the North Atlantic, midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal. As they came closer they could see that she was sailing with only her jib and foretop mast staysail set; moreover, the jib was set to port, while the vessel was on a starboard tack – a sure sign to any sailor that the ship was out of control. Captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia signalled the mysterious vessel, but received no answer. The sea was running high after recent squalls, and it took a full two hours before Morehouse could get close enough to read the name of the vessel. It was the Mary Celeste. Morehouse knew this American ship and its master, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs. Less than a month ago both vessels had been loading cargo on neighbouring piers on New York’s East River. The Mary Celeste had set sail for Genoa with a cargo of crude alcohol on 5 November, ten days before the Dei Gratia had sailed for Gibraltar; yet now, a month later, she was drifting in mid-Atlantic with no sign of life.