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.
No comments:
Post a Comment