The Man Behind the Iron Mask Read Online Free

just speaking, who had been used as a trusted agent by Saint-Mars for certain matters, often told his son that he had gone to the prison at midnight to get the corpse and had carried it on his shoulders to the burial spot. He thought it was the prisoner himself who was dead; it was, as I have just said, the person who served him, and that was why a woman was sought to replace him.
    Nine years after the publication of Papon’s book, the Bastille fell to the people and from those who had read the various accounts of the masked prisoner published to that date, including the extracts from Du Junca’s journal reproduced by Griffet, the sensational stories of finding a skeleton in an iron mask abandoned in some forgotten dungeon drew not the slightest attention. Their interest was riveted on the story that something else had not been found. In the great prison register, two hundred and fifty folio-sized pages in a locked portfolio of morocco leather, page 120 was missing, and that was the very page on which, according to the date recorded by Du Junca, the registration of the prisoner should have appeared. An official committee, set up to collect and examine all the papers of the Bastille, published their findings in instalments during 1789 and 1790. The best they were able to produce for the missing page was a separate record made in 1775 by the then major of the Bastille, a man called Godillon Chevalier, whose information could have been taken entirely from Griffet’s book. Chevalier was quoted as saying that the original page had not been removed in any attempted cover-up. On the contrary, the page was missing precisely because of a government attempt to elucidate the affair. It had been in the prison files until 1775 when an official inquiry had been ordered into the existence and identity of the mysterious prisoner. The page had then become part of a special government dossier in which all records relative to the prisoner were gathered together. What had become of the dossier, however, no one knew, nor unfortunately could anyone find out.
    NOTES
    1 .    Marquis d’Argens : Jean Baptiste de Boyer, 1704–1771. French writer who had a position of influence at the Prussian Court where Voltaire stayed from 1750 to 1753 while writing his Si cle de Louis XIV.
    2 .    François-Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois , 1639–1691. Minister of War under Louis XIV from 1662 to 1691.
    3 .    Racine : Jean, poet and dramatist, 1639–1699.
    4 .    Conti : junior branch of the House of Condé which was itself a branch of the Royal House of Bourbon.
    5 .    Samuel Bernard : Comte de Courbet, 1651–1739. French banker and financier through whom and from whom Louis XIV raised enormous loans.
    6 .    Monastery of Lérins : on the island of Saint-Honorat.
    7 .    Mougins : village close to Cannes.

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    MORE FACES
    I f the name ‘Marchiali’ is an anagram of ‘hic amiral’, it could be applied equally well to another candidate: the predecessor of Vermandois as Grand Admiral of France, François de Vendôme, Duc de Beaufort. His candidature was first canvassed by Lagrange-Chancel in his letter to Fréron in 1758 and though at the time few people were prepared to take the proposition seriously, it has been argued again as recently as 1960.
    Beaufort had the same royal grandfather as Louis XIV, his father Cesar de Bourbon, Duc de Vendôme, being the eldest son of Henri IV. 1 Vendôme was older than Louis XIII by seven years, but illegitimate, being one of three royal children, two boys and a girl, born to Gabrielle d’Estrées, Duchesse de Beaufort. Vendôme also had three children, two boys and a girl, of whom Beaufort was the youngest. Big and brawny with long blond hair, Beaufort looked like a Viking and his looks did not belie him. Having been raised in the country with an education limited to the arts of combat and