France · Pignerol, Exilles, Sainte-Marguerite and the Bastille, 1669 to 1703
Who was the masked prisoner who died in the Bastille on 19 November 1703, who had he been before his arrest in 1669, and why was he kept for thirty-four years?
What happened. On 18 September 1698 the new governor of the Bastille, the royal fortress-prison in Paris, arrived with a prisoner whose face was covered by a mask; the governor, Bénigne de Saint-Mars, had guarded state prisoners for the crown since 1665, in the Alps and then on an island off Cannes. Étienne du Junca, Louis XIV's lieutenant at the Bastille, who kept its entry book, wrote that the man's name "is not said". The prisoner died there on 19 November 1703, "always masked with a mask of black velvet", and was buried the next day under a false name, Marchioly, with his age given as forty-five or thereabouts. No paper of the Bastille says who he was.
Why it is a mystery. The writer Voltaire made the mask iron in 1751 and hinted in 1771 at a brother of Louis XIV, Alexandre Dumas made the prisoner the King's twin in a novel of the 1840s, and some fifty identifications have been offered since 1745 (the historian Jean-Christian Petitfils counts fifty-two): a royal brother, a diplomat from Mantua, the playwright Molière, the musketeer d'Artagnan, the disgraced finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. The evidence is the correspondence from 1669 to 1703 between Saint-Mars and the ministers who had charge of the state prisons (Louvois, the King's war minister, from 1691 his son Barbezieux, and Pontchartrain for the Bastille), kept while Saint-Mars held his prisoners, Fouquet among them, at Pignerol, a French fortress in the Alps (now Pinerolo, in Italy), at Exilles, a smaller fort in the same mountains, and on the island of Sainte-Marguerite off Cannes; the letters, first printed in 1801 by Pierre Roux-Fazillac, a former member of the revolutionary Convention, say where each prisoner was moved and when, never say why this one was held, and are missing at the one point where a name is needed, since in January 1687 one of two unnamed prisoners died at Exilles and the letter that said which is lost. Most historians who have worked from the letters since Jules Lair, Fouquet's biographer, in 1890 (Georges Mongrédien, a historian of the seventeenth century, in 1952, who narrowed the choice to two men and would not decide; Petitfils in 1970 and 2003; the writer John Noone in 1988; the American historian Paul Sonnino in 2016; the biographer Josephine Wilkinson in 2021) hold that the masked man was a prisoner the war minister called "only a valet", a manservant, arrested in July 1669 and brought to Pignerol that August; the nineteenth century's answer, from Roux-Fazillac to Frantz Funck-Brentano, who catalogued the Bastille's papers, in 1894, was that diplomat from Mantua, Ercole Antonio Mattioli, seized by the French in 1679, whose name the burial register nearly reproduces; and the popular answer, from Voltaire to the film-maker Marcel Pagnol, is a brother or twin of the King, for whom no document exists. Those who accept the valet still disagree on who he had been (Petitfils: a servant of Henrietta of England, Louis XIV's sister-in-law, known at court as Madame, during her secret negotiation of 1669 to 1670 with her brother Charles II of England; Sonnino: a valet of Antoine-Hercule Picon, the man who managed the fortune of Cardinal Mazarin, the King's chief minister until his death in 1661) and on why he was kept for thirty-four years.
How it was judged. Every letter and register entry of the correspondence printed between 1801 and 1953 was read, 180 entries in all, with the variants between editions recorded: the letters of Saint-Mars and of the war ministers, Louvois and from 1691 his son Barbezieux, with those of Pontchartrain, the minister who had charge of the Bastille as secretary of state for the King's household, the Bastille registers and the burial entry of the parish of Saint-Paul. Seven dated facts about the man's custody, the fixed points, were taken from them, each resting on a named letter or register entry (arrest 1669, service to Fouquet 1675, confinement with Fouquet's other servant, La Rivière, 1680, move to Exilles 1681, death of one of the two 1687, entry to the Bastille 1698, death 1703), and twenty candidates were tested against the seven; only the valet of 1669 passes every documented point. The undocumented point, which of the two Exilles prisoners died in 1687, is argued from two later letters and the subject matter of the whole file (the ministers' letters from 1669 to 1680 are about the valet, and La Rivière appears in them only as Fouquet's servant) and given a probability, as is the thesis of Stanislas Brugnon, an archivist who reconstructed the island's prison register, that the island prisoner died in 1693 and never reached the Bastille; three links in the chain of custody, put at 99%, 93% and 85%, multiply to the headline of 78%, printed with a table of how it moves as each weight changes. Saint-Mars's lost letter of 5 January 1687 announcing the death, or any Exilles account naming the prisoner who died, would settle the identity either way.
The prisoner was the valet whom Captain de Vauroy, an officer of the Dunkirk garrison, handed over at Pignerol in August 1669, entered in the ministers' letters as Eustache Dauger, Danger or d'Angers: 78%. Who he had been before July 1669 nobody knows, and no minister ordered a mask.
Which of the two Exilles prisoners died in January 1687 is decided by inference rather than by any document, so the headline is a product of three judged weights, printed with its sensitivity. Petitfils 2003 and Sonnino 2016, the two books that defend the current identifications, were not read in full, and no original manuscript was consulted.
The 78% is the product of three judgements, each argued from named letters: that the Bastille prisoner of 1698 was the man Saint-Mars brought from Sainte-Marguerite (put at 99%); that the island prisoner was the man brought from Exilles in 1687 (93%, against Stanislas Brugnon's thesis that the island prisoner died in 1693); and that the survivor of Exilles was the 1669 valet rather than La Rivière (85%, on Barbezieux's "depuis vingt ans" (for twenty years) of 13 August 1691, his "ce qu'a fait vostre ancien prisonnier" (what your old prisoner has done) of 17 November 1697, and the subject matter of the whole file). Change one weight and the headline moves: read the 1691 "twenty years" as a loose round number (60%) and the valet falls to about 55% with La Rivière at about 37%; give Brugnon even odds and the valet falls to about 42%. All of these figures are conditional on the weights chosen, and the weights are judgements about the documents.
La Rivière, the only other man who could have survived the pair held at Exilles in 1687, takes 14%. Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli, whose name the burial register echoes, takes 3%: the burial name is his one strong point, and against it he is excluded by the custody chain of 1681 to 1698 and, on the reading every editor since Lair has given it, by Barbezieux's letter of 10 May 1694 on "the valet of the prisoner who has died". Someone else, a prisoner brought from Pignerol in 1694 or a man the printed record never names, takes 5%. The royal brother of Voltaire and Dumas has no document behind it and fails on the only ground available: the man of 1669 was "un valet" whose furniture was to be cheap, whom Saint-Mars in 1672 offered as a servant to Lauzun, a courtier held beside Fouquet at Pignerol from 1671 to 1681 whose release was expected, who served Fouquet from 1675 to 1680, and whose bed was sold for thirteen écus in 1687.
Who the valet was before July 1669 nobody knows. Jean-Christian Petitfils makes him a servant of Madame carrying letters in the negotiation that produced the secret treaty of Dover in 1670 (about 25%); Paul Sonnino makes him a valet of Antoine-Hercule Picon (about 20%); an employment the surviving papers do not point to at all takes the rest (about 55%). Both hypotheses are inferences from the same silence, and both authors say as much in their own terms: Petitfils writes that the prisoner's life in prison "nous prouve que son affaire, quelle qu'elle ait pu être, n'était pas vraiment de la plus haute importance" (proves that his affair, whatever it may have been, was not really of the highest importance), and Sonnino writes that he found no Auger or Dauger among the Picons' servants. On the thirty-four years, the letters say the secret was something he had been employed at or had done before 1669 ("ce à quoi il a été employé auparavant que d'être à Pignerol", what he was employed at before being at Pignerol, 1678; "ce qu'a fait vostre ancien prisonnier", 1697), and that every order had one object: that he never speak of it, above all to Lauzun. The mask was Saint-Mars's practice from 1687, and in August 1698 the King approved, in general terms, whatever precautions Saint-Mars had proposed for the journey to Paris. The detention is the ordinary working of Louis XIV's state prisons, which had no procedure for releasing a man held for what he knew and in this file used none, under a minister (Barbezieux) who inherited the precautions and a jailer whose pay and career were built on the prisoner.
The four shares are the three-link product and what is left over; the script that prints them and the sensitivity table is published with the case. Read the 1691 "twenty years" loosely (60%) and the valet falls to about 55 with La Rivière at about 37; give Brugnon's 1693 death even odds and the valet falls to about 42. The royal brother of Voltaire and Dumas has no document behind it and takes no share above the residue.
Every letter and register entry of the correspondence between Bénigne de Saint-Mars, the jailer who held the prisoner from 1669 to 1703, and the ministers who had charge of the state prisons, printed between 1801 and 1953, was read: 180 entries in all, with the Bastille registers and the Saint-Paul burial entry. No original manuscript was consulted; six letters were checked against photographs. The two books that defend the current identifications, by the historians Jean-Christian Petitfils (2003) and Paul Sonnino (2016), were read only in short passages, plus their reviews in full; Georges Mongrédien's book of 1952 in page-numbered snippets; Noone, Wilkinson and the writers Harry Thompson and Roger Macdonald in fragments only.
Seven dated facts about the man's custody, the fixed points, were taken from the letters, each resting on a named letter or register entry: the arrest of 1669, the permission of 1675 to serve Nicolas Fouquet, the disgraced finance minister, the confinement with Fouquet's other servant La Rivière in 1680, the move to Exilles in 1681, the death of one of the two in 1687, the Bastille entry of 1698 and the death of 1703. Twenty candidates were tested against the seven by a script; one documented elsewhere, or dead, at any of those dates fails.
Figure 1 shows the four outcomes with their weights: the valet of 1669 at 78 percent, La Rivière at 14, Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli, a diplomat from Mantua whose name the burial register echoes, at 3, and someone else at 5. Table 1 sets the twenty candidates against the seven fixed points, with the decisive document in each row: only the valet of 1669 passes every documented point, and the 1687 column, the death no letter settles, is marked open for him and for La Rivière.
The undocumented point, which of the two Exilles prisoners died in 1687, is argued from two later letters of Barbezieux, war minister from 1691 (the "twenty years" of 13 August 1691 and "what your old prisoner has done" of 17 November 1697), and from the subject matter of the whole file, and put at 85 percent. The two other links in the chain of custody, that the Bastille prisoner of 1698 was the man from Sainte-Marguerite and that the island prisoner was the man from Exilles, are put at 99 and 93. Multiplied, the three give 78 percent that the masked man was the valet of 1669.
The figures are judgements about the documents, and the report prints how the headline moves as each weight changes. Read the "twenty years" of 1691 as a loose round number and the valet falls to about 55 percent; give even odds to the thesis of Stanislas Brugnon, an archivist who reconstructed the island's prison register, that the island prisoner died in 1693, and the valet falls to about 42. Saint-Mars's lost letter of 5 January 1687 announcing the death, or any Exilles account naming the prisoner who died, would settle the identity either way. No minister ordered a mask; it was the jailer's practice from 1687.
| Candidate (principal proponents) | a 1669 | b 1675 | c 1680 | d 1681 | e 1687 | f 1698 | g 1703 | Decisive document |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The valet of 1669, "Eustache Dauger" (Lair 1890; Lang 1903; Laloy 1913; Mongrédien 1952; Petitfils 1970, 2003; Noone 1988; Sonnino 2016; Wilkinson 2021) | pass | pass | pass | pass | open | pass | open (age) | Louvois 19 July 1669; 8 April 1680; Saint-Mars 25 June 1681; Barbezieux 13 Aug. 1691, 17 Nov. 1697; du Junca 1698, 1703 |
| La Rivière, Fouquet's valet (no author; the only alternative survivor of 1687) | fail | n/a | pass | pass | open | open | open | Louvois 8 April 1680, 16 April 1684; Barbezieux 13 Aug. 1691 |
| Ercole Antonio Mattioli (Heiss 1770; Roux-Fazillac 1801; Delort 1825; Topin 1869; Funck-Brentano 1894) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | name fits, age 62 | Saint-Mars 25 June 1681; Barbezieux 10 May 1694 |
| The Jacobin, a Dominican friar arrested in 1674 (Topin 1883 for the 1691 letter; Iung and Delort for the 1687 death) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | open | Louvois 8 April 1680; Barbezieux Jan. 1694 |
| Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, a disgraced nobleman of the same name held at Saint-Lazare in Paris from 1668 (Duvivier 1932; Furneaux 1954; Thompson 1987) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail (66) | His letters from Saint-Lazare, 20 June 1678 and c. 1679 (Mongrédien 1953); Louis XIV 17 Aug. 1678 |
| Vivien Labbé de Bulonde, the general who raised the siege of Cuneo in 1691 (the cryptographer Étienne Bazeries and Émile Burgaud 1893) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | The marquis de Dangeau's court journal, 11 Dec. 1691; receipt of 28 Nov. 1705 and death 1709 (shown by the archivist Louis Batiffol, 1894) |
| Nicolas Fouquet himself, his death of 1680 being a fiction (pamphlet 1789; Lacroix 1836; Arrèse 1970; Dabos 2025) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail (88) | Louvois 8 April 1680; burial register of the Visitation Sainte-Marie convent, Paris, 28 March 1681 (Lair II, 472–474) |
| The Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son, executed in London in July 1685 (Saint-Foix 1768) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | The dispatches of Barrillon, the French ambassador in London, June to July 1685 |
| The comte de Vermandois, Louis XIV's son by Louise de La Vallière, born 1667 (anon. 1745; Griffet 1769) | fail (aged 2) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | The letters of the marshal d'Humières and of Boufflers reporting his death at Courtrai, Nov. 1683 |
| The duc de Beaufort, lost at Candia in 1669 (Lagrange-Chancel 1759; the Provence rumour of 1688) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail (87) | Brodart's report of his loss at Candia, 27 June 1669; "un valet" |
| A twin or elder brother of Louis XIV (Voltaire 1771; the abbé Soulavie 1790; Alexandre Dumas; Marcel Pagnol 1965) | fail | fail | open | open | open | open | fail (65) | "un valet"; the 1675 service; birth records of 1638 |
| James de la Cloche, who presented himself at Rome in 1668 as a natural son of Charles II (Carey 1904; Barnes 1908) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | The Naples will and death, Aug. 1669 (Laloy pp. 35–37) |
| The abbé Prignani, an Italian astrologer sent to Charles II's court in 1669 (Barnes 1908) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | In Rome 1675–78; death 1678/9 (Laloy p. 101) |
| Molière, the playwright (Loquin 1883; Diamant-Berger 1971) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | The register of La Grange, the actor of his company, recording his death, 17 Feb. 1673 |
| Avedick, the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople whom the French abducted in 1706 (Taulès 1825) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | In Constantinople until 1706 (Topin pp. 168–170) |
| Henri II de Lorraine, duc de Guise (Bartoli 1978, 2012) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | Died 1664 |
| The "unknown of Provence", Kéroualze (Ravaisson 1879) | fail | open | open | open | open | open | fail | Louvois 26 March 1670 ("le major de Dunkerque"); Laffilard's register |
| Louis de Oldendorf, arrested 1673 (Iung 1873) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | open | Louvois 8 April 1680; Laloy pp. 122–127 |
| D'Artagnan, the captain of musketeers (Macdonald 2005) | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | fail | Killed at Maastricht, 25 June 1673 |
| Martin, valet of the Huguenot conspirator Roux de Marsilly, who was executed in Paris in June 1669 (Lang 1903) | fail | open | open | open | open | open | open | Colbert de Croissy, the French ambassador in London, 1 July 1669; Lionne, the foreign minister, 13 July 1669 (Laloy pp. 285–287) |
Already established by others. Jules Lair (1890) first identified the masked man with the valet of 1669, and Loiseleur had already shown in 1882 that the masked man of 1687 came from Exilles and could not be Mattioli. Georges Mongrédien (1952) eliminated every Pignerol prisoner but Mattioli and the valet, argued that La Rivière died at Exilles in 1687, and declined to choose ("Si oui, c'est Dauger, si non, c'est Matthioli", if so it is Dauger, if not Mattioli, p. 231); Petitfils (1970, 2003), John Noone (1988), Sonnino (2016) and Josephine Wilkinson (2021) decide for the valet. The arrest at Calais, on the Channel coast, is Brugnon's finding (1987); the reading of the name as Danger or d'Angers is Lair's and that of Bernard Caire, who examined the original letters in the 1980s; the deleted words "ce qu'il a vu" (what he has seen) in the ministry's draft, the minute, of 23 December 1678 are Caire's find; the reading of the mask as the jailer's device is Noone's and Petitfils's, and the judgement that the secret was small is Caire's and Petitfils's. The refutations of three other candidates, Martin (a valet of the Huguenot conspirator Roux de Marsilly), Eustache Dauger de Cavoye (a disgraced nobleman who bore the valet's name) and Bulonde (a general), belong to Laloy (1913), Mongrédien (1953) and Batiffol (1894), and the observation that the secret was an employment rather than an identity is Laloy's and Caire's.
What historians have said. Jules Lair (1890) first identified the masked man with the valet of 1669. Georges Mongrédien (1952) reduced the choice to Mattioli or the valet and declined to choose; Petitfils (1970, 2003), John Noone (1988), Paul Sonnino (2016) and Josephine Wilkinson (2021) decide for the valet. Who the valet was is disputed between Petitfils's servant of Madame and Sonnino's valet of Picon. Against or aside: Funck-Brentano (1894) held for Mattioli, the writer Harry Thompson (1987) for Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, a disgraced nobleman who bore the valet's name, the writer Roger Macdonald (2005) for d'Artagnan, and Sarah Madry, in an article of 2016, argues that the word "valet" in the 1669 letter cannot be relied on. The royal brother of Voltaire (1771) and Dumas has no document behind it.
The verdict reaches the man most historians have reached since Lair, at a lower confidence than they give, because one link in the chain, the death of one of two unnamed prisoners at Exilles in January 1687, is decided by inference rather than by any document; Mongrédien treated the point as settled and Petitfils does not discuss it as a difficulty. On the valet's earlier life the verdict declines to choose between Petitfils and Sonnino. On the secrecy it follows Noone and Petitfils, the mask as the jailer's device, with one qualification: the King approved in August 1698 whatever precautions Saint-Mars had proposed for the journey, so the mask, if it was among them, had the King's general sanction from then on.