How the people of Provence saw the Man in the Iron Mask
Almost 320 years ago, an incident occurred in the Provence town of Grasse that proved once and for all that The Man in the Iron Mask was fact not fiction.
Eight Italian porters were carrying on a litter through the town, best known today for its perfume factory, a secret prisoner so
important that he was guarded by almost fifty heavily armed men. Although the date was 28 April 1687, the weather proved particularly fine that spring; shortly after midday, in the main square, the sun bore down ferociously on the litter, which was covered completely by an oilskin. The prisoner’s jailer, Saint-Mars, lifted a corner of the cover and could see immediately that his prisoner was almost at the point of suffocation. He had no option but to remove the oilskin and allow his charge some air. As Saint-Mars’s company moved the curious spectators back, the local priest dallied deliberately, and was rewarded in dramatic fashion with a view of the prisoner. For from beneath the cover a gasping man emerged whose face was covered completely by a steel mask.
Afew months later the priest’s eye-witness account appeared in
a clandestine newsletter, circulated among those clergy
who wanted greater local autonomy from the Catholic
church. It also quoted an unguarded remark by Saint-Mars, who gave a clue to the identity of his prisoner when he said: “All the people one believes to be dead are not.” The prisoner, accordingly, was someone well known and who had supposedly died but in reality had been secretly imprisoned, his face hidden behind a metal mask. His journey had begun ten days before at his previous prison at Exilles, an obscure fort in the Hautes-Alpes close to the Italian frontier. The man in the mask travelled to Grasse via Briançon, and from Grasse to Mougins, Le Cannet and Cannes, then a tiny fishing village. His destination lay just beyond, a short boat ride away, the island of Sainte- Marguerite.
An elaborate new cell block was constructed on the island inside Fort Royal especially for the prisoner. Judged by the standards of the day, his spacious cell was more like a luxury bedroom across the water on the Croisette in Cannes. It measured twenty feet by fifteen feet and had both a fireplace and a privy. The floor was tiled to prevent tunnelling and the window of his cell was protected by three separate sets of bars. In any event, below the window was a sheer drop of one hundred feet into the sea.
Fort Royal and the Mask’s cell can still be visited on Sainte- Marguerite, a pleasant excursion from Cannes’ harbour, a journey of about twenty minutes, followed by a stiff walk up a steep hill to the coastal fort. The walls of the cell itself have recently been replastered and painted, for no apparent reason, rather spoiling the effect. Whatever furniture the Mask possessed, has long since disappeared.
Huge precautions were taken to avoid the prisoner sending out a message. His candles were bought in Turin, because Saint- Mars discovered some of those in the prisoner’s possession concealed tiny sheets of writing paper, disguised as a wick. His dirty linen was also checked thoroughly to make sure nothing had been written on it.
Twice, however, the prisoner did succeed in communicating with the outside world. Abarber on the prison staff looking for shelfish by the shore found a white bundle floating in the water beneath his cell, which proved to be a fine linen shirt, covered in line after line of writing. He handed it to Saint-Mars and two days later the barber was found dead in his room at the barracks. Soon afterwards a lone fisherman from Cannes saw a small dish that had been thrown through the cell’s bars, and was floating in the sea. Hoping for some reward, he took it to Saint-Mars who saw that a message was scratched on the plate and told the fisherman to count himself fortunate that he could not read.
The prisoner remained on Sainte- Marguerite for twelve years, until in 1698 Saint-Mars was given the plumb job of Governor of the Bastille and took the masked man with him to Paris. When he died, after more than thirty years in jail, Louis XIV ordered his cell walls to be stripped, his meagre possessions thrown into the
latrines. The servants of the Sun King had to make sure there were no loose ends.
How to get to Cannes by air
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Drive from Calais to Cannes 1190km (approx. 11 hours)
From our September 2005 newsletter
