Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15)

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Of the life of this remarkable state prisoner in the Bastille we have
more detailed accounts. Dujunca, the chief turnkey of that prison, has
left a journal, which contains the following entry: "On Thursday, the
18th September, 1698, at three o'clock in the afternoon, M. de Saint
Mars, the governor, arrived at the Bastille for the first time from the
islands of Sainte Marguerite and Sainte Honnat. He brought with him in
his own litter an ancient prisoner formerly under his care at Pignerol,
and whose name remains untold. This prisoner was always kept masked, and
was at first lodged in the Basiniere tower.... I conducted him
afterwards to the Bertaudiere tower, and put him in a room, which, by
order of M. de Saint Mars, I had furnished before his arrival."

Throughout the life of this mysterious personage in the Bastille, the
secrecy which had so far environed him was rigidly observed. So far as
is known, no one ever saw him without his mask. Aside from this, and his
detention, everything that could be was done to make his life enjoyable.
He was given the best accommodation the Bastille afforded. Nothing that
he desired was refused him. He had a strong taste for lace and linen of
extreme fineness, and his wishes in this particular were complied with.
His table was always served in the most elegant manner, while the
governor, who frequently attended him, seldom sat in his presence.

During his intervals of ailment he was attended by the old doctor of the
Bastille, who, while often examining his tongue and parts of his body,
never saw his face. He represents him as very finely shaped, and of
somewhat brownish complexion, with an agreeable and engaging voice. He
never complained, nor gave any hint as to who he was, and throughout his
whole prison life no one gained the least clue to his identity. The only
instance in which he attempted to make himself known is described by
Voltaire, who tells us that while at Sainte Marguerite he threw out from
the grated window of his cell a piece of fine linen, and a silver plate
on which he had traced some strange characters. This, however, is an
unauthenticated story.

The detention of this mysterious prisoner in the Bastille was not an
extended one. He died in 1703. Dujunca's journal tells the story of his
death. "On Monday, the 19th of November, 1703, the unknown prisoner, who
had continually worn a black velvet mask, and whom M. de Saint Mars had
brought with him from the island of Sainte Marguerite, died to-day at
about ten o'clock in the evening, having been yesterday taken slightly
ill. He had been a long time in M. de Saint Mars' hands, and his illness
was exceedingly trifling."

There is one particular of interest in this record. The "iron mask"
appears to have been really a mask of black velvet, the only iron about
it being the springs, which permitted the lower part to be lifted.

The question now arises, Who was the "man with the iron mask"? It is a
question which has been long debated, without definite conclusion.
Chamillard was the last minister of Louis XIV. who knew this secret.
When he was dying, his son-in-law, Marshal de Feuillade, begged him on
his knees to reveal the mystery. He begged in vain. Chamillard answered
that it was a secret of state, which he had sworn never to reveal, and
he died with it untold.

Voltaire, in his "Age of Louis XIV.," was the first to call special
attention to this mystery, and since then numerous conjectures have been
made as to who the Iron Mask really was. One writer has suggested that
he was an illegitimate son of Anne of Austria, the queen-mother. Another
identifies him with a supposed twin brother of Louis XIV., whose birth
Richelieu had concealed. Others make him the Count of Vermandois, an
illegitimate son of Louis XIV.; the Duke of Beaufort, a hero of the
Fronde; the Duke of Monmouth, the English pretender of 1685; Fouquet,
Louis's disgraced minister of finance; a son of Cromwell, the English
protector; and various other wild and unfounded guesses. After all has
been said, the identity of the prisoner remains unknown. Mattioli, a
diplomatic agent of the Duke of Mantua, who was long imprisoned at
Pignerol and at Sainte Marguerite, was for a long time generally thought
to be the Iron Mask, but there is good reason to believe that he died in
1694.

Conjecture has exhausted itself, and yet the identity of this strange
captive remains a mystery, and is likely always to continue so. The
fact that all the exalted personages of the day can be traced renders it
probable that the veiled prisoner was really an obscure individual, whom
the caprice of Louis XIV. surrounded with conditions intended to excite
the curiosity of the public. There are on record other instances of
imprisonment under similar conditions of inviolate secrecy, and it is
not impossible that the king may have endeavored, for no purpose higher
than whim, to surround the story of this one with unbroken mystery. If
such were his purpose it has succeeded, for there is no more mysterious
person in history than the Man with the Iron Mask.

_VOLTAIRE'S LAST VISIT TO PARIS._

Never had excitable Paris been more excited. Only one man was talked of,
only one subject thought of; there was no longer interest in rumors of
war, in political quarrels, in the doings at the king's court; all
admiration and all sympathy were turned towards one feeble old man, who
had returned to Paris to die. For twenty-seven years he had been absent,
that brilliant writer and unsurpassed genius, the versatile Voltaire.
His facile pen had given its greatest glory to the reign of Louis XV.,
yet for more than a quarter of a century he had been exiled from the
land he loved, because he dared to exercise the privilege of free speech
in that land of oppression, and to deal with kings and nobles as man
with man, not as reverent worshipper with divinity. Now, in his
eighty-fourth year of age, he had ventured to come back to the city he
loved above all others, with scarcely enough life left for the journey,
and far from sure that power would not still seek to suppress genius as
it had done in the past.

If he had such fears, there was no warrant for them. Paris was ready to
worship him. The king himself would not have dared to interfere with the
popular idol in that interval of enthusiastic ebullition. All Paris was
prepared to cast itself at his feet; all France was eager to do him
honor; all calumny, jealousy, hatred were forgotten; a nation had risen
to welcome and honor its greatest genius, and the splendors of the court
paled before the glory which seemed to emanate from that feeble,
tottering veteran of the empire of thought, who had come back to occupy,
for a brief period, the throne of his old dominion.

The admiration, the enthusiasm, the glory were too much for him. He was
dying in the excitement of joy and triumph. Yet, with his wonderful
elasticity of frame and mind, he rose again for a fuller enjoyment of
that popular ovation which was to him the wine of life. The story of his
final triumph has been so graphically told by an eye-witness that we
cannot do better than to quote his words.

"M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the Academy and at
the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches, to the Academy
besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him pass, and
then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated plaudits and
acclamations. The Academy came out into the first room to meet him, an
honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even to the
foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings.

"The homage he received at the Academy was merely the prelude to that
which awaited him at the National theatre. As soon as his carriage was
seen at a distance, there arose a universal shout of joy. All the
curb-stones, all the barriers, all the windows, were crammed with
spectators, and scarcely was the carriage stopped when people were
already on the imperial and even on the wheels to get a nearer view of
the divinity. Scarcely had he entered the house when Sieur Brizard came
up with a crown of laurels, which Madame de Villette placed upon the
great man's head, but which he immediately took off, though the public
urged him to keep it on by clapping of hands and by cheers which
resounded from all parts of the house with such a din as never was
heard.

"All the women stood up. I saw at one time that part of the pit which
was under the boxes go down on their knees, in despair of getting a
sight any other way. The whole house was darkened with the dust raised
by the ebb and flow of the excited multitude. It was not without
difficulty that the players managed at last to begin the piece. It was
'Irene,' which was given for the sixth time. Never had this tragedy been
better played, never less listened to, never more applauded. The
illustrious old man rose to thank the public, and, a moment afterwards,
there appeared on a pedestal in the middle of the stage a bust of this
great man, and the actresses, garlands and crowns in hand, covered it
with laurels.

"M. de Voltaire seemed to be sinking beneath the burden of age and of
the homage with which he had just been overwhelmed. He appeared deeply
affected, his eyes still sparkled amidst the pallor of his face, but it
seemed as if he breathed no longer save with the consciousness of his
glory. The people shouted, 'Lights! lights! that everybody may see him!'
The coachman was entreated to go at a walk, and thus he was accompanied
by cheering and the crowd as far as Pont Royal."

This was a very different greeting from that which Voltaire had received
fifty years before, when a nobleman with whom he had quarrelled had him
beaten with sticks in the public street, and, when Voltaire showed an
intention of making him answer at the sword's point for this outrage,
had him seized and thrown into the Bastille by the authorities. This was
but one of the several times he had been immured in this gloomy prison
for daring to say what he thought about powers and potentates. But time
brings its revenges. The Chevalier de Rohan, who had had the poet
castigated, was forgotten except as the man who had dishonored himself
in seeking to dishonor Voltaire, and the poet had become the idol of the
people of Paris, high and low alike.

Voltaire was not the only great man in Paris at this period. There was
another as great as he, but great in a very different fashion,--Benjamin
Franklin, the American philosopher and statesman, as famous for common
sense and public spirit as Voltaire was for poetical power and satirical
keenness. These two great men met, and their meeting is worthy of
description. The American envoys had asked permission to call on the
veteran of literature, a request that was willingly granted when
Voltaire learned that Franklin was one of the number. What passed
between them may be briefly related.

They found the aged poet reclining on a couch, thin of body, wrinkled of
face, evidently sick and feeble; yet his eyes, "glittering like two
carbuncles," showed what spirit lay within his withered frame. As they
entered, he raised himself with difficulty, and repeated the following
lines from Thomson's "Ode to Liberty," a poem which he had been familiar
with in England fifty years before.

"Lo! swarming southward on rejoicing suns,
Gay colonies extend, the calm retreat
Of undisturbed Distress, the better home
Of those whom bigots chase from foreign lands;
Not built on rapine, servitude, and woe,
And in their turn some petty tyrant's prey;
But bound by social Freedom, firm they rise."

He then began to converse with Franklin in English; but, on being asked
by his niece to speak in French, that she and others present might
understand what was said, he remarked,--

"I beg your pardon. I have, for the moment, yielded to the vanity of
showing that I can speak in the language of a Franklin."

Shortly afterwards, Dr. Franklin presented him his grandson, whereupon
the old man lifted his hands over the head of the youth, and said, "My
child, God and liberty! Recollect those two words."

This was not the only scene between Franklin and Voltaire. Another took
place at the Academy of Sciences at one of the meetings of that body.
The two distinguished guests sat side by side on the platform, in full
view of the audience.

During the proceedings an interruption occurred. A confused cry arose,
the names of the two great visitors alone being distinguishable. It was
taken to mean that they should be introduced. This was done. They rose
and acknowledged the courtesy by bowing and a few words. But such a
formal proceeding was far from enough to satisfy the audience. The noise
continued. Franklin and Voltaire shook hands. This gave rise to
plaudits, but the confused cries were not stilled; the audience wanted
some more decided demonstration.

"Il faut s'embrasser, a la Francoise" ["You must embrace, in French
fashion"], they cried.

John Adams, who witnessed the spectacle, thus describes what followed:
"The two aged actors upon this great theatre of philosophy and
frivolity, embraced each other by hugging one another in their arms, and
kissing each other's cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry
immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and, I suppose over all
Europe, 'How charming it was to see Solon and Sophocles embrace.'"

A month later Voltaire lay dead, his brilliant eyes closed, his active
brain at rest. The excitement of his visit to Paris and the constant
ovation which he had received had been too much for the old man. He had
died in the midst of his triumph, vanished from the stage of life just
when his genius had compelled the highest display of appreciation which
it was possible for his countrymen to give. As for the church, which his
keen pen had dealt with as severely as with the temporal powers, it
could not well forget his incessant and bitter attacks. That he might
obtain Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the
Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the
proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and
scoffer at all tradition and all conventionality.

Voltaire was deistic in belief, in no sense atheistic. Among his latest
words were, "I die worshipping God, loving my friends, not hating my
enemies, but detesting superstition." Despite the admiration of the
people, the powers of the state could not forget that the man so
enthusiastically received was the great apostle of mockery and
irreverence. The government gave its last kick to the dead lion by
ordering the papers not to comment on his death. The church laid an
interdict on his burial in consecrated ground,--an hour or two too late,
as it proved. His body, minus the heart, was transferred in 1791 to the
Pantheon, and when, in 1864, the sarcophagus was opened with the purpose
of restoring the heart to the other remains, it was found to be empty.
In the stirring days of France the body had by some one, in some way,
been removed.

_THE DIAMOND NECKLACE._

Paris, that city of sensations, was shaken to its centre by tidings of a
new and startling event. The Cardinal de Rohan, grand almoner of France,
at mass-time, and when dressed in his pontifical robes, had been
suddenly arrested in the palace of Versailles and taken to the Bastille.
Why? No one knew; though many had their opinions and beliefs. Rumors of
some mysterious and disgraceful secret beneath this arrest, a mystery in
which the honor of Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, was involved,
had got afloat, and were whispered from end to end of the city, in which
"the Austrian," as the queen was contemptuously designated, was by no
means a favorite.

The truth gradually came out,--the story of a disgraceful and
extraordinary intrigue, of which the prince cardinal was a victim rather
than an accessory, and of which the queen was utterly ignorant, though
the odium of the transaction clung to her until her death. When, eight
years afterwards, she was borne through a raging mob to the guillotine,
insulting references to this affair of the diamond necklace were among
the terms of opprobrium heaped upon her by the dregs of the Parisian
populace.

What was this disgraceful business? It is partly revealed in the graphic
account of an interview with the king which preceded the arrest of the
prince cardinal. On the 15th of August, 1785, Louis XVI. sent for M. de
Rohan to his cabinet. He entered smilingly, not dreaming of the
thunderbolt that was about to burst upon his head. He found there the
king and queen, the former with indignant countenance, the latter grave
and severe in expression.

"Cardinal," broke out the king, in an abrupt tone, "you bought some
diamonds of Boehmer?"

"Yes, sir," rejoined the cardinal, disturbed by the stern severity of
the king's looks and tone.

"What have you done with them?"

"I thought they had been sent to the queen."

"Who gave you the commission to buy them?"

"A lady, the Countess de La Motte Valois," answered the cardinal,
growing more uneasy. "She gave me a letter from the queen; I thought I
was obliging her Majesty."

The queen sharply interrupted him. She was no friend of the cardinal; he
had maligned her years before, when her husband was but dauphin of
France. Now was the opportunity to repay him for those malevolent
letters.

"How, sir," she broke out severely; "how could you think--you to whom I
have never spoken for eight years--that I should choose _you_ for
conducting such a negotiation, and by the medium of such a woman?"

"I was mistaken, I perceive," said the cardinal, humbly. "The desire I
felt to please your Majesty misled me. Here is the letter which I was
told was from you."

He drew a letter from his pocket and handed it to the king. Louis took
it, and cast his eyes over the signature. He looked up indignantly.

"How could a prince of your house and my grand almoner suppose that the
queen would sign, 'Marie Antoinette of France?'" he sternly demanded.
"Queens do not sign their names at such length. It is not even the
queen's writing. And what is the meaning of all these doings with
jewellers, and these notes shown to bankers?"

By this time the cardinal was so agitated that he was obliged to rest
himself against the table for support.

"Sir," he said, in a broken voice, "I am too much overcome to be able to
reply. What you say overwhelms me with surprise."

"Walk into the room, cardinal," said the king, with more kindness of
tone. "You may write your explanation of these occurrences."

The cardinal attempted to do so, but his written statement failed to
make clear the mystery. In the end an officer of the king's body-guard
was called in, and an order given him to convey Cardinal de Rohan to the
Bastille. He had barely time to give secret directions to his grand
vicar to burn all his papers, before he was carried off to that
frightful fortress, the scene of so much injustice, haunted by so many
woes.

The papers of De Rohan probably needed purging by fire, for the order to
burn them indicates that they contained evidence derogatory to his
position as a dignitary of the church. The prince cardinal was a vain
and profligate man, full of vicious inclinations, and credulous to a
degree that had made him the victim of the unscrupulous schemer, Madame
de La Motte Valois, a woman as adroit and unscrupulous as she was
daring. Of low birth, brought up by charity, married to a ruined
nobleman, she had ended her career by duping and ruining Cardinal de
Rohan, a man whose character exposed him to the machinations of an
adventuress so skilful, bold, and alluring as La Motte Valois.

So much for preliminary. Let us take up the story at its beginning. The
diamond necklace was an exceedingly handsome and highly valuable piece
of jewelry, containing about five hundred diamonds, and held at a price
equal to about four hundred thousand dollars of modern money. It had
been made by Boehmer, a jeweller of Paris, about the year 1774, and was
intended for Madame Dubarry, the favorite of Louis XV. But before the
necklace was finished Louis had died, and a new king had come to the
throne. With Louis XVI. virtue entered that profligate court, and Madame
Dubarry was excluded from its precincts. As for the necklace, it
remained without a purchaser. It was too costly for a subject, and was
not craved by the queen. The jeweller had not failed to offer it to
Marie Antoinette, but found her disinclined to buy. The American
Revolution was going on, France was involved in the war, and money was
needed for other purposes than diamond necklaces.

"That is the price of two frigates," said the king, on hearing of the
estimated value of the famous trinket.

"We want ships, and not diamonds," said the queen, and ended the
audience with the jeweller.

A few months afterwards, M. Boehmer openly declared that he had found a
purchaser for the necklace. It had gone to Constantinople, he said, for
the adornment of the favorite sultana.

"This was a real pleasure to the queen," says Madame Campan. "She,
however, expressed some astonishment that a necklace made for the
adornment of French women should be worn in the seraglio, and,
thereupon, she talked to me a long time about the total change which
took place in the tastes and desires of women in the period between
twenty and thirty years of age. She told me that when she was ten years
younger she loved diamonds madly, but that she had no longer any taste
for anything but private society, the country, the work and the
attentions required by the education of her children. From that moment
until the fatal crisis there was nothing more said about the necklace."

The necklace had not been sold. It remained in the jeweller's hands
until nearly ten years had passed. Then the vicious De La Motte laid an
adroit plan for getting it into her possession, through the aid of the
Cardinal de Rohan, who had come to admire her. She was a hanger-on of
the court, and began her work by persuading the cardinal that the queen
regarded him with favor. The credulous dupe was completely infatuated
with the idea. One night, in August, 1784, he was given a brief
interview in the groves around Versailles with a woman whom he supposed
to be the queen, but who was really a girl resembling her, and taught by
La Motte to play this part.

Filled with the idea that the queen loved him, the duped cardinal was
ready for any folly. De La Motte played her next card by persuading him
that the queen had a secret desire to possess this wonderful necklace,
but had not the necessary money at that time. She would, however, sign
an agreement to purchase it if the cardinal would become her security.
De Rohan eagerly assented. This secret understanding seemed but another
proof of the queen's predilection for him. An agreement was produced,
signed with the queen's name, to which the cardinal added his own, and
on February 1, 1785, the jeweller surrendered the necklace to De Rohan,
receiving this agreement as his security. The cardinal carried the
costly prize to Versailles, where he was told the queen would send for
it. It was given by him to La Motte, who was commissioned to deliver it
to her royal patroness. In a few days afterwards this lady's husband
disappeared from Paris, and the diamond necklace with him.

The whole affair had been a trick. All the messages from the queen had
been false ones, the written documents being prepared by a seeming
valet, who was skilful in the imitation of handwriting. Throughout the
whole business the cardinal had been readily deceived, infatuation
closing his eyes to truth.

Such was the first act in the drama. The second opened when the jeweller
began to press for payment. M. de La Motte sold some of the diamonds in
England, and transmitted the money to his wife, who is said to have
quieted the jeweller for a time by paying him some instalments on the
price. But he quickly grew impatient and suspicious that all was not
right, and went to court, where he earnestly inquired if the necklace
had been delivered to the queen. For a time she could not understand
what he meant. The diamond necklace? What diamond necklace? What did
this mean? The Cardinal de Rohan her security for payment!--it was all
false, all base, some dark intrigue behind it all.

Burning with indignation, she sent for Abbe de Vermond and Baron de
Breteuil, the minister of the king's household, and told them of the
affair. It was a shameful business, they said. They hated the cardinal,
and did not spare him. The queen, growing momentarily more angry, at
length decided to reveal the whole transaction to the king, and roused
in his mind an indignation equal to her own. The result we have already
seen. De Rohan and La Motte were consigned to the Bastille. M. de La
Motte was in England, and thus out of reach of justice. Another
celebrated individual who was concerned in the affair, and had aided in
duping the cardinal, the famous, or infamous, Count Cagliostro, was
also consigned to the Bastille for his share in the dark and deep
intrigue.

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