Who the valet was

The record says little about the man before Pignerol. He was entered as Eustache d'Auger or Danger or d'Angers; the ministers used the Christian name alone from 1678 onward ("le nommé Eustache"), which Laloy took to mean a nickname given at his entry into prison and Bernard Caire, after examining the handwriting of the originals, took to mean that Eustache was the surname and "d'Angers" a place of origin. He was a valet, or at least treated as one for thirty-four years, and was arrested by the major of Dunkirk, probably at Calais. He was a Catholic who heard mass and confessed, and was ill in 1669, 1671 and 1687 and "always valetudinary" in 1688. He could serve, and Fouquet found him acceptable for five years. In 1680 he did something with drugs that Louvois found hard to believe possible in a cell. Saint-Mars wrote in 1673 that he said nothing and "lived content". He died after a day's illness in 1703.

Every proposed identification of his master argues from the dates of events near the arrest. The arrest fell in the weeks after the execution of the Huguenot conspirator Roux de Marsilly (22 June 1669), the recall of the abbé Pregnani, an Italian astrologer whom Louis XIV had sent to Charles II's court, from his mission (May to July), and the first exchanges of the secret negotiation between Louis XIV and Charles II that Madame, Henrietta of England, carried and that produced the secret treaty of Dover of June 1670, in which Charles II promised to join France against the Dutch and to declare himself a Catholic. Vauroy was posted at Dunkirk, and the road from Calais is the route from England. The Scottish writer Andrew Lang (1903) made him Marsilly's valet Martin, and the report of Colbert de Croissy, the French ambassador in London, of 1 July 1669 that Martin refused to come to France, followed by the order of Lionne, the foreign minister, of 13 July to drop the matter, dispose of that. Arthur Barnes, a Catholic priest (1908), made him Pregnani, who died in Rome in 1678 or 1679. Maurice Duvivier, in a book of 1932, made him Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, a disgraced nobleman of the right name, and Mongrédien published in 1953 the two letters Cavoye wrote in 1678 and about 1679 from Saint-Lazare, a house of correction in Paris where he had been held since 1668. Théodore Iung (1873) connected him to the poisoners, ten years before the Chambre ardente, the special court that tried the poisoning cases of 1679 to 1682. Petitfils's first book (1970) made him a valet of Colbert hired by Louvois for a poisoning in December 1668, hidden from the King and from Colbert; the King's own signature on the order of 28 July 1669 and Colbert's payment of Vauroy's journey tell against it, and Petitfils had dropped it by 1991. Émile Laloy (1913, pp. 199–200), after abandoning Pregnani, kept the man himself, "à peu près sûrement un prêtre", and put the secret "plutôt dans 'ce à quoi il avait été employé' que dans sa personnalité même"; that is the first statement of the reading followed in this report.

The two hypotheses now in the field are these.

Both theses explain the timing with the same events and the place with the same road, and both are consistent with the one substantive clue the letters give, that the secret was an employment. They differ on whether the secret would have expired. Madame's negotiation had become public policy by 1672, whereas Mazarin's money, on Sonnino's account, implicated the King himself. That is Sonnino's structural advantage and Petitfils's weakness, and Petitfils meets it by saying that the prisoner was hidden "non parce qu'il était connu, mais parce qu'il était inconnu et, au fond, sans importance depuis les années 1680" (Venturino's summary). The letter of 12 May 1681, in which the King moves the two valets as the prisoners "of consequence" and leaves Mattioli behind, is hard to square with a prisoner who no longer mattered. No document names a valet of Picon or a servant of Madame. This report gives the Madame hypothesis about 25 per cent and the Picon hypothesis about 20 per cent, and leaves more than half the probability with an employment the surviving papers do not point to at all. These two figures are judgements about events for which no document survives.

Why thirty-four years

That question contains three: what the state was protecting, why the man was never released, and where the mask came from. The letters describe the kind of secret being protected but never state its content. They also show how a man once imprisoned remained so, and where the mask originated.

What was being protected

The orders of 1669 forbid the prisoner's communication with others and say nothing about his being seen. The dungeon's windows were to give on no approachable place and its doors were to keep the sentries from hearing; Saint-Mars alone was to carry his food; he was threatened with death for speaking of anything but his needs. In March 1670 the precaution is repeated as "ne puisse voir ni estre veu de personne, et ne puisse parler à qui que ce soit". In 1675 he may serve Fouquet, who would never leave, and never Lauzun, who would. In 1678 the King wants to know whether he has told La Rivière "ce à quoi il a été employé auparavant que d'être à Pignerol". In 1679 he is to be withdrawn whenever anyone but Fouquet and the old valet is in the room, and is to "speak to no one in private". In 1680 La Rivière, who "n'ignore pas" Fouquet's secrets, goes into the same room under the same fiction of release. In 1681 the reason for their arrest is not to be written even for the minister. In 1697 Saint-Mars is to explain to no one "ce qu'a fait vostre ancien prisonnier". The consistent object across twenty-eight years is that a valet's account of his own past employment should reach nobody, and in particular nobody who would return to court.

The file also rules three things out. His face was of no concern to anyone until Saint-Mars made it one in 1687. He was treated as a valet throughout, in furniture, clothing and wages. And the ministry did not treat his regime as unique. Louvois sent the prisoner of March 1674 to be treated "de la même façon que le prisonnier que M. de Vauroy vous a amené", and Le Tellier called that one "un fripon insigne qui, en matière fort grave, a abusé des gens considérables". The ministry applied the same regime to at least one other prisoner held for what he knew, and stated the grounds in his case. In a file of more than a hundred letters that gives grounds for other prisoners, no minister gives grounds for Eustache.

Why he was never released

Louis XIV's state prisons had no procedure for releasing a man held for what he knew, and this file shows none being used. Louvois's own letter of 17 December 1669 states the principle: if Saint-Mars removed La Rivière from Fouquet's service, he was to keep him seven or eight months first, "afin que, s'il avoit pris des mesures pour porter des nouvelles de son maître, elles soient si vieilles en ce temps-là qu'elles ne puissent en rien préjudicier". The length of the delay was matched to how long the news would stay useful. Of the state prisoners in Saint-Mars's Pignerol donjon, Fouquet died there in 1680, the Jacobin about 1694, Dubreuil, a spy held since 1676, on the island about 1697, and Mattioli, on the reading given above, on the island in 1694; Lauzun was released because a duchess, the King's cousin Mademoiselle de Montpensier, bought his freedom by settling estates on the duc du Maine, the King's illegitimate son. After Louvois died in 1691 the orders continued unchanged. Barbezieux's first letter asks for the same precautions as before; in 1694 the ministry does not know the name of the prisoner who has died at Pignerol and asks Saint-Mars for it in cipher; in 1697 the standing order is to continue. Whether Barbezieux or Pontchartrain ever knew what the man had done, the letters do not say. And the man's jailer had every reason to keep him. Saint-Mars was paid 500 livres a month at Pignerol and kept that pay at Exilles "moyennant quoi vos appointemens seront aussi forts que ceux des gouverneurs des grandes places de Flandre" (12 May 1681); he received a gratification of 15,000 livres in 1679 and 2,000 écus for his furniture in 1698; his free company, the soldiers raised and paid to guard his prisoners, and his lieutenants went where his prisoner went; and in January 1688 he was advertising his new cells to the minister "pour quand vous auriez des prisonniers à vouloir mettre en toute seureté". This does not require the secret to have remained dangerous, only that no one with authority ever ruled that it was not, and the file records no such ruling. Mongrédien (1952, pp. 194, 200 and 229) added that the reasons for keeping him multiplied inside the prison: after 1675 he had heard Fouquet's confidences, in 1680 he had handled the "drogues", and Lauzun had been told he was gone. Petitfils (1991, 2003) and Caire (1991) both concluded that the original secret "n'est pas aussi important qu'on l'a imaginé" and that Saint-Mars inflated it; Genet's question, why keep a man whose secret had lost its value, is answered by the practice of the prisons rather than by the content of the secret.

Where the mask came from

No minister ordered a mask. The word does not occur in any of the hundred and eighty letters and register entries read for this report from 1669 to 1703 until du Junca's entry of 18 September 1698, where it is Saint-Mars's practice ("lequel il fait tenir touiours masqué"). The documented sequence runs as follows. January 1687: Saint-Mars proposes a chair covered in oilcloth so that no one can see the prisoner, and Louvois leaves the means to him. May 1687: "personne au monde ne l'a vu … chacun cherche à deviner qui peut être mon prisonnier". September 1687: the bishop of Agde's newsletter reports a steel mask in a sedan chair and orders to kill the prisoner if he says his name. January 1688: Provence says he is Beaufort or Cromwell's son. July 1698: Barbezieux, in the King's name, tells Saint-Mars to take his precautions "pour empescher qu'il ne soit veu ny conneu de personne", and in August the King approves the precautions Saint-Mars listed in a letter now lost. September 1698: the prisoner enters the Bastille masked and is kept so, in black velvet, for the walk to mass. 1751: Voltaire turns the velvet into a mask "dont la mentonnière avait des ressorts d'acier". Petitfils and Noone both concluded that the mask was Saint-Mars's device, and this report confirms it 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. Saint-Mars had written in 1687 that his precautions made everyone try to guess who the prisoner was, and the guesses of 1688 were a duke and Cromwell's son. A velvet mask on a prisoner no one in Paris had seen invited the same guessing.

The strongest counter-cases

What would overturn this

What is new here, and what is not

The identification is not new. Jules Lair established it in 1890 from the K 120 letters ("Il était Français, catholique, valet de profession. Tout porte à croire qu'il s'appelait réellement Eustache Danger", t. II, p. 454), Loiseleur had already shown in 1882 that the masked man of 1687 came from Exilles and could not be Mattioli, Mongrédien in 1952 eliminated every Pignerol prisoner but Mattioli and the valet and showed that La Rivière died in 1687, while declining to choose between the two ("Si oui, c'est Dauger, si non, c'est Matthioli", p. 231), Petitfils has defended the valet since 1970, and Noone (1988), Sonnino (2016) and Wilkinson (2021) start from him. The reading of the name as Danger or d'Angers is Lair's and Caire's; the arrest at Calais is Brugnon's (1987); the steel-mask report of 1687 was printed by Azéma (1963) and brought into the debate by Brugnon; the deleted "ce qu'il a vu" in the minute of 23 December 1678 is Caire's find (1987, 1991). 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 Martin, Cavoye and Bulonde belong to Laloy (1913), Mongrédien (1953) and Batiffol (1894). The observation that the secret was an employment rather than an identity is Laloy's (1913, p. 200) and Caire's.

What this report adds is smaller and of three kinds. First, the whole printed record for 1669 to 1703 has been transcribed into one hundred and eighty dated entries with each edition's archive reference and the variants between editions tabulated, so that the chain of custody can be checked line by line rather than trusted; the entries, the candidate file, the script that produces the table and the script that produces the headline and its sensitivity are published with this case. Second, the 1687 identification is reported as an inference with a probability rather than as an established fact. Lair and Petitfils state the identity of the 1687 survivor as a fact, and Mongrédien wrote that he had demonstrated it; here it carries a probability and a published sensitivity, and the Bastille identification is reported at 78 per cent rather than as certain. Nothing in this report is new evidence: no document unknown to the printed editions was found, and the three points that follow are new readings of old evidence. Third, three small points that were not found in the works read, several of which were read only in fragments: the ministers' continuous use of "ancien prisonnier" from Saint-Mars's letter of January 1696 to the orders of 1698 as the answer to Brugnon's thesis of a death in 1693; the letter of 12 March 1680 on the dead valet's wages read as Champagne's wage arrears rather than as a death in 1680, an inference from the surrounding letters rather than a documented exchange; and the variant "ce qu'a fait" against "ce que fait" in the letter of 17 November 1697 flagged as a reading that bears on the argument and that the original would settle. The comparison of the 1669 orders with the 1674 order to treat another prisoner "in the same way" is in Laloy and Ravaisson; its use here, to show that the ministry could state a reason and did not, is this report's.

On the second and third questions the answer is that nobody knows. This report has not identified the valet either. It has measured how far the two current identifications rest on documents, and neither rests on a document that names the prisoner.

What was not read

Sources

Manuscript series (read through the editions below)

Editions of the correspondence

Scholarship

Working files published with this case: the transcriptions and notes, the fixed points and the candidate file, the two scripts (fixed_points.py, which produces the candidate table, and probability.py, which produces the headline and its sensitivity), and the source texts.