A NEW GUESS AT "THE IRON MASK."
THE latest contribution to the literature of the Iron Mask does not clear up the secret which so many authors—urged, we suspect, mainly by the passion for guessing by rule, which is at once the augur's secret and the secret of gamblers—have struggled in vain to disclose. The writer in the Edinburgh indeed contends that Th. lung, staff officer, who claims to have made the dis- covery, has narrowed the question within a compass which makes discovery possible, but he denies that as yet any complete solution has been obtained. If the reviewer, however, is Mr. Twistleton, who recently placed the identity of Junius and Sir P. Francis, in our judgment, so completely beyond doubt, the secret may yet be told, for its investigation now needs only two things,—an exhaustive analysis of motive, and a complete and most expensive research among archives which a Republican Government in France would be delighted to see thoroughly ransacked. We must confine ourselves to motive, and do so the more readily, because to us the main difficulty of the problem, which, if the Bourbon line has really lost the throne of France, can have only a literary interest, has always been that of discovering a motive strong enough to induce a hard-hearted, con- scienceless tyrant possessed of absolute power to keep alive a man the knowledge of whose existence was dangerous, for at least thirty years, from 1673 to 1703, and five of them in Paris, where the curiosity about the Bastille is known to have been insatiable. That he was so kept, that somebody in a black velvet mask with iron springs was held by Louis Quatorze in such strict ward that the greater part of the life of his most trusted gaoler, M. de Saint-Mars, was devoted to the task that his identity was known to none outside the Royal Family except Saint-Mars, unless Louvois knew it, and yet that be was treated with all honour, is established by documents past all question authentic. The difficulty, however, only begins with the establishment of that fact. Reckoning up the character of Louis X and of his Minister Louvois with all the care the endless memoirs of the period enable anyone to employ, there still remains a nearly insoluble problem to be deter- mined. We have a theory, which is not that of the reviewer, which we will state presently, but we acknowledge that, like every other, it does not meet all the phenomena of the case. Admitting as the reviewer does M. Iung's proof of the existence and the concealment of the Iron Mask, the first point to be
settled is the conceivable motive for his incarceration. Louis XIV., it is certain on the evidence, feared a prisoner in his hands, whom it was yet in his power to slay on any given day. The fear was so great, and assumed so special a form, that as we show subsequently, unheard-of precautions were taken to prevent recog- nition ; and that in the last resort, rather than the prisoner should be recognised, his assassination was ordered in writing, yet the respect was so great that except in that event he was to be treated with every ceremony and kept carefully alive. Now who was there in existence whom Louis XIV. could possibly fear? A man who could be de- manded by a foreign Government ? Certainly not, for the man once dead, no Government could have strongly pressed a demand for compensation on the master of Europe, who repeatedly during his life ran this very risk, having arrested Mattioli, an Italian noble, long supposed to be the Mask, but now shown never to have left Pignerol, and Avediek the Armenian patriarch. A favourite of the Army ? Possibly, and that solution would account in part for the curious supposition which pervades all documents on the subject,—that any one who saw the prisoner would at once recognise him ; but no such person disappeared, nor can there have been any reason for keeping such a person alive. An assassin? That is M. Iang's theory, who displays great research in demonstrating that in 16Th the King was in great danger from a man called the Chevalier d'Harmoises, a Lorrainer, believed to be the chief- of a secret society who had declared war on the Bour- bons, and intended to use poison as their instrument. This society had relations among the Huguenots, and considering the enormous number of families, especially in Holland, whom Louis must have ruined, the astounding state of morals at the time, and the undoubted fact mentioned by Louis XIV. himself, that poison had removed the Queen of Spain, it is not incredible that a secret society bad really been organised for vengeance on the race ; but how could the detention of its chief soothe the fears of Louis XIV., deficient as he was in physical courage? Death would have been a far easier precaution, and would cer- tainly not have affected the King's conscience, or for that matter, anybody's else, provided the evidence of the Chevalier's pur- pose was sufficient. No such chiefahip can account for keeping the man alive, and M. lungs argument by itself falls to the ground.
But suppose that the plot, though undoubtedly it involved the life of the King, involved also a sub-plot infinitely grander and more subtle, a personation of the King by a man so exactly like him that he would be entirely accepted, by the populace at all events, and, as in the case of the false Dmitri in Russia some seventy years before, would have carried out the whole policy of his tutors, who may have been Jesuits, or may have been the demoralised nobles M. Iung suspects, or may have been Huguenot nobles, as we should be rather inclined to believe.
Louis, throughout the whole business, was palpably afraid of a likeness which he knew or suspected would instantly be perceived by common people, even as M. de Saint-Mars, the gaoler, writes, "by the common soldiers," against whose pos- sible curiosity he takes this extraordinary precaution. M. de Saint-Mars having been appointed Governor of the Isles de Sainte Marguerite, had to convey his prisoner. thither from Exiles, the little town on the frontier of Piedmont, but wanted en route to see the Duke of Savoy. He writes, therefore, to Louvois, then Premier : —" I will give such orders for the safe keeping of my prisoner during my absence that I shall be able, Monseigneur, to answer for him ; as also that he shall not have any conversation with my lieutenant, who has been strictly for- bidden to speak to him. If I take him to the islands, I think the safest mode of conveyance would be in a chair covered with waxed cloth, so that he should have enough air, and yet that no one could see or speak to him on the way, not even the soldiers whom I shall select to accompany the chair." Louvois replied :—" I beg of you to ascertain, when in the islands, what may be required for the safe custody of your prisoner. As to the mode of conduct- ing him, the King leaves you free to make use of the movable chair you propose, but you will be responsible for him." The prisoner was thus carried for twelve days, and was so closely screened that he complained bitterly of want of air, and apparently of permanent injury to his constitution. Now is it conceivable that any danger, except a close and ineffaceable likeness to the King, could on any theory have demanded such a precaution ? Whom could those private soldiers have recognised, if it were not a face like or identical with a very exceptional one they had seen on mina? The story of the silver plate thrown out by the Iron Mimic is not tree, belonging really to a Huguenot pastor ; but the face must have been very dangerous, to be so liable to instant re- cognition. ' But what face could have been so like the King's ? Clearly either a brother's, or a face accidentally so like that it-could be used against the King as the Countess de Lamotte's face was used against Marie Antoinette. The former supposition, once universal, is dismissed by the Edinburgh Reviewer a little too curtly. It was rumoured, after the death of Louis XV., who knew the secret, that a twin brother of Louis XIV. was the Man in the Iron Mask, and was spirited away lest there should be any doubt of the succession, an act of which Mazarin was perfectly capable ; and being brought up in Italy and at last discovering the secret of his birth, was arrested and confined, Louis naturally being unwilling to put him to death for no fault of his own. To this the Reviewer replies that the birth of an heir to a Bourbon throne is always witnessed, which is true— as witness the odd incident which is said to have occurred at the birth of the Prince of the Asturias, when witnesses not being pre- pared, the Queen's guard were called in—and would be final, but that a twin brother might have been born some hours afterwards. It is more probable, however, that he was a son of Anne of Austria by Mazarin, whose relations to each other were more than suspected at the time, and in consequence of his likeness in manhood. to the King was equally dreaded, and more likely to have been used as an instrument by conspirators, while the reluctance to put him to death would be almost as great as in the case of the twin brother. On the whole, however; we incline to the suspicion we first mentioned, that a grand and agate plan had been prepared among the Huguenots, or some other considerable body of men, to effect a coup d'itat by killing Louis XIV., and substituting for him a man so like him that the people, at all events, would never be undeceived. They had probably by accident discovered the fitting man—possibly-a bastard Bourbon, of whom there were dozens, possibly also not, the plot being taken, as we have said, from the false Dmitri case, managed in Russia just in that way seventy years before,—and might have carried out their scheme, but that the plot was revealed to Louvois by a priest, who wrote in these terms :—" I hope with all my heart that the man who has been arrested is the execrable chief of the conspiracy, for in that case the sacred person of the King will be safe." There was no safety for the King if the betrayed man was merely the chief of a society of poisoners, while there was every safety, on our theory, if he could be kept in durance, for without their substitute or double the plotters were powerless. They must have their Dmitri, and therefore special orders were issued even to conceal the place of his incarceration. This theory, and we put it forward only as such, confirms many of M. Iung's dis- coveries, is unaffected by any argument of the Edinburgh Re- viewer, if we remember that Louvois in his orders would dwell on the danger to the King only, and keep the likeness religiously secret, and corresponds exactly with the only known utterances of the Bourbon family on the subject. "According to M. Dufay de l'Yonne, Louis XV. said to M. Delaborde Let them go on with their disputes, they will never find out who was the Iron Mask. You would like to know something about this busi- ness; I may tell you what is more than- others know, that the im- prisonment of this unhappy being did no wrong to anyone but himself,'" he being a mere instrument ; while " Berme de Meilhan, an emigre who wrote memoirs towards the close of the last century, said, 'The Dauphin, the father of Louis XVI., spoke to me one day about Voltaire, and of his taste for the marvellous, which was .a blot on his history. The Iron Mask, he said, has been the subject of many conjectures. I replied that this was sufficient to excite the fancies of people. "I have thought so too," said the Dauphin, " but the King told me two or three times that if you knew who the prisoner was you would see that the affair was one of very little interest." The Duke of Choiseul also told me that the King had spoken of the matter in the same way, and as if it were a thing of no importance.' " The matter in fact ceased to be of any moment with the death of the Iron Mask. There remains but one question. If he was a private person with an accidental, but dangerous likeness to a King, why not kill him? Because the priest, Father Hyacinth, who revealed the plot in fear of a Huguenot King, had beard of it first in confession from some repentant Catholic,—not the Mask,—and insisted on keeping his hands free from blood-guiltiness. It is scarcely necessary to add that Louis might remember this plot in his long subsequent action against the Huguenote.
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