Note 117 — Chapter VI

In the preceding chapters we have made no mention of a Mémoire de M. de Saint-Mars sur la Naissance de l’Homme au Masque de Fer, published in vol. iii. of the Mémoires de Tous (Levasseur, 1835, 8vo). According to this document, “copied by M. Billiard from the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” M. de Saint-Mars had been the governor of the mysterious son of Anne of Austria, whose high origin was carefully hidden from him. But this brother of Louis XIV. having discovered it, was sent to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, the command of which was then (in 1687) confided to his governor. If we have not spoken of this document, it is because its authenticity has already been completely disproved. It is nothing else than a copy of the apocryphal narrative of Soulavie, which we have transcribed and refuted in the first part of our work (see page 15). The author of this copy has contented himself with substituting Saint-Mars for the “anonymous governor of the unfortunate prince.” He did not think that he thereby added a fresh impossibility to those contained in the narrative of Soulavie. For how could Saint-Mars, before 1687, have been the governor of a brother of Louis XIV., when a hundred despatches establish the fact that, from 1664, he was successively governor of the donjon of Pignerol and of Exiles? As to the presence of this document in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there is no reason for astonishment. It is explained, like the presence of so many other documents in our archives, by the seizure of the papers of great personages after their deaths, or, more commonly, by having been transmitted by some ambassador inhabiting the country in which these apocryphal writings circulated freely. But the place where they are found gives them no authenticity. At all periods, and to-day even, ambassadors send to the Government copies of anonymous memoirs, pamphlets, and different papers, which remain joined to their despatches, but to which no historical value can be ascribed. It has been the same with this pretended Mémoire de Saint-Mars, of which, in addition, a mere perusal demonstrates the untruth to any one acquainted with the usual style of the illiterate governor of the Isles Sainte-Marguerite. One sometimes hears it related—and this fact has been repeated to ourselves—that a great personage of a former Government introduced one of his friends, with much precaution, into the galleries of the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and there showed him a document which contained the secret of the Man with the Iron Mask. It is doubtless the document attributed to Saint-Mars that is referred to in this anecdote.