The Man Behind the Iron Mask Read Online Free PDF Page B

monastery in Crete. Neither killed, captured nor kidnapped at the siege of Candy, Beaufort the vanquished crusader had turned his back on war and become a monk in the Orthodox Church. What vision transformed his character on the battlefield and what angel led him from it alive remained a mystery; but those who nevertheless saw sense in the hagiography found supporting evidence for his sudden transformation in the passionate remorse he had shown after killing his own brother-in-law seventeen years before. Apparently at that time he had talked of entering a Carthusian Monastery to expiate his crime.
    Beaufort as monk and Iron Mask was the final shape of the argument reached in 1960 by Dominique de La Barre de Raillicourt. According to his scenario, French secret service agents kidnapped Beaufort from the monastery in Crete two years after his disappearance. They had planned and even attempted to kidnap him during the expedition to Candy, but he had escaped and gone into hiding. What motivated the decision to have him live out the rest of his life in prison was the realization that he possessed a secret dangerous to Louis XIV and could not be relied upon to keep it. Presumably Louis XIV had only discovered the secret himself on or after his mother’s death in 1666. His father, he had been thunderstruck to learn, was not Louis XIII but Beaufort. One may easily imagine his horror and alarm at the news, but, unhappily for the hypothesis, imagination is not enough. That Anne of Austria had tender feelings for Beaufort and that he was passionately devoted to her is a fact recorded in numerous contemporary memoirs, but never was it said by anyone that they were lovers. Moreover, at the time of Louis XIV’s conception, Anne of Austria was under house-arrest at the Louvre and Beaufort like all her favourites and admirers was not allowed to visit her.
    To give the hypothesis its due, however, Beaufort’s face was so well known to the common soldier and the ordinary man, both of Paris and of Provence where his family had estates, that if he had been secretly held a prisoner on Sainte-Marguerite and in the Bastille a mask would have been necessary to hide his identity. Also, for what it is worth, there are points of similarity between the description of the Iron Mask as given by Voltaire and the known behaviour of Beaufort during his imprisonment at Vincennes: his pleasure in fine clothes and good food and the fact that he played the guitar. Beaufort, like Voltaire’s Iron Mask, was ‘admirably well-built’ and being the grandson of Henri IV he would have been treated by his gaolers with the greatest respect. However, at the time of the Iron Mask’s death in 1703, Beaufort would have been 87 years old and though such longevity was possible in a man of such robust health, it seems hardly likely when his last thirty years and more had been spent cooped up in prison.
    The most serious single argument against the whole hypothesis is provided by a letter written on 8 January 1688 by Saint-Mars, the Governor of Sainte-Marguerite, to Louvois, the Minister of War, in which he declared: ‘Throughout the province some say that my prisoner is M. de Beaufort and others that he is the son of the late Cromwell.’ Both names were clearly meant by Saint-Mars to be amusing examples of error and ignorance. The mysterious prisoner, one must therefore assume, was not the Duc de Beaufort, and Lamotte-Guérin was not revealing inside information confided to him as an officer on Sainte-Marguerite, but merely repeating a false rumour which anyone could have picked up anywhere in the region.
    As a footnote to the facts and figments of Beaufort should be mentioned the ‘timid conjecture’ made by François Ravaisson in the preface of his Archives de la Bastille published in 1879. For him there seemed a possibility that the Iron Mask was Beaufort’s aide-de-camp, the Comte de Kéroualle. He offered the conjecture