WHO WAS THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK?

The Man in the Iron Mask is a 1998 American action drama film directed, produced, and written by Randall Wallace, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio in a dual role as the title character loosely adapted from some plot elements of The Vicomte de Bragelonne.

The film centers on the aging four musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan, during the reign of King Louis XIV and attempts to explain the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, using a plot more closely related to the flamboyant 1929 version starring Douglas Fairbanks, The Iron Mask, and the 1939 version directed by James Whale, than to the original Dumas book. Like the 1998 version, the two aforementioned adaptations were also released through United Artists. Of course the story was fiction. However, there really was a man who wore an iron mask in France.

During the reign of King Louis XIV, an enigmatic man spent several decades confined to the Bastille and other French prisons. No one knew his identity or why he was in jail. Even stranger, no one knew what he looked like since  the prisoner was never seen without a black velvet mask covering his face. The anonymous prisoner has since inspired countless stories and legends—writings by Voltaire and Alexandre Dumas helped popularized the myth that his mask was made of iron—yet most historians agree that he existed. So who was he?

Hundreds of different candidates have been proposed ranging from a member of the royal family to a disgraced French general and even the playwright Molière. Still, evidence indicates that only two prisoners were in custody during the same timeframe as the “Mask”: Ercole Matthiole and Eustache Dauger. Matthiole was an Italian count who was abducted and jailed after he tried to double-cross Louis XIV during political negotiations in the late-1670s. He was a longtime prisoner, and his name is similar to “Marchioly”—the alias under which the Mask was buried. Even more convincing is that Louis XV and Louis XVI both supposedly said the Mask was an Italian nobleman.

Unfortunately, Matthiole likely died in 1694—several years too early for him to be the man who wore  the  Mask. With this in mind, many to point to the enigmatic Eustache Dauger as the more likely culprit. His 1669 arrest warrant included a letter from a royal minister instructing jailers to restrict his contact with others and to “threaten him with death if he speaks one word except about his actual needs.” Dauger was frequently shepherded between several prisons, and once was transported in a covered chair so that passersby would not see his face. While Dauger is a popular candidate for being the man who wore  rhe Mask, historians still don’t know who he was or if his name was a pseudonym. One theory holds that he was a lowly valet implicated in a political scandal, but he’s also been identified as a debauched nobleman, a failed assassin and even the twin brother of Louis XI.

The iron mask was a very tight fit because it was placed over his head when it was red hot and malleable enough to be banged in shape for it to be a tight fit. It had a very thin slit to look out of the mask and when  his hair continued to grow, he was at stages of near suffocation. 

In July 1669, the Marquis de Louvois sent a letter on behalf of King Louis XIV to the governor of the Pignerol prison, giving him a heads up that a new resident who was en route. According to Britannica, the correspondence named the prisoner as Eustache Dauger, a humble valet arrested on charges that still remains hazy. A specialized cell with extra doors was built for the man to minimize the odds of anyone seeing his face, and his caretaker was given strict instructions only to check on him once per day and, on pain of death, to limit the scope of conversation, essentially, to "you hungry?" and "you good?"

Mysterious? Terribly. And the situation only became more compelling and enigmatic with time, as the prisoner later came to be known as "L'Homme au Masque de Fer," the Man in the Iron Mask. Who was he? What was his crime? Did he really wear an iron mask on his face for 30-plus years? The answer is  hard to say since nobody's sure what the  answer really is.

In any case, the man's identity was a closely kept secret, and curious minds have been launching theories like clay pigeons for hundreds of years, only to see them shot down by people who probably love starting their sentences with the word "actually." Some records point to a real Eustache Dauger who was  a valet who witnessed some embarrassing church-related skullduggery involving either misappropriation of funds or, and this is a stretch, a "black mass" ritual — as the genuine deal, but there's conflicting evidence there.  Dauger may have died either in a separate prison from the Man in the Iron Mask or in a drunken stupor after losing his job.