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cahnMore diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
The Man in the Iron Mask: Eustache as valet with a secret
Date: 2022-08-06 05:25 pm (UTC)The initial letter from Louvois (written on behalf of Louis) to Saint-Mars says Eustache is "only a valet." He could be lying! But this is the documentary evidence we have.
We also have, as Fouquet's and Lauzun's valets keep getting sick and dying off, Saint-Mars writing repeatedly, "I can't find any volunteers in the town to replace these valets! How about that prisoner you said was a valet?" More precisely:
It was almost impossible to find a replacement, he wrote to the minister. None of his own valets would do the job if he paid them a million: "They have seen that those I have placed with M. Foucquet never come out."
In other words, not only do you give up your freedom to be in prison while you're serving as valet to an imprisoned noble, but prison conditions are far from healthy.
Louvois refuses to allow Eustache to serve the more dangerous Lauzun, but eventually allows him to serve Fouquet, on the condition that Eustache not be allowed to talk to anyone else.
All the security precautions that Louis and Louvois insist on, from even before Eustache is captured, have to do with keeping him from talking, not from being recognized. "Kill him if he talks about anything but his basic needs." "Make Fouquet promise not to tell anything he learns." "Don't let Eustache be alone with anyone." Etc. There are no masks until very, very late in the game, and no records of anyone above Saint-Mars ordering any masks.
At one point, Louvois writes a letter to Fouquet saying, in effect, Louis wants to know if Eustache has said anything in front of Fouquet's other valet about "
strike what he has seenhow he has been employed" before prison.It's hard to say what Louvois was thinking when he struck out the one phrase, but it seems like he instinctively wrote down the actual thing he and Louis were concerned about, and then crossed it out and wrote something more generic that wouldn't give as much away. Unfortunately, Wilkinson doesn't say anything about how legibile the phrase after being struck out--would Fouquet have been able to read it and figure out the real thing everyone was worried about, or was this the result of modern research? She does say it's clear Fouquet knew something about Eustache and it was guaranteed he would keep quiet about it, but it's not clear if he knew the full story.
Only once Fouquet assures Louvois that his other valet knows nothing about Eustache's secret, is Fouquet allowed to write regular leters to his family in 1679. (Letters which still have to be read by Louvois to Louis and approved before being sent on.)
But in 1680, after Fouquet dies, things change. Fouquet's other valet, La Rivière, who is not a prisoner, should be allowed to go free. But, evidence has emerged that he might have learned Eustache's secret. Plus he didn't tell anyone about the hole Lauzun dug between his chimney and Fouquet's. So La Rivière is kept locked up until his death, partly to keep Eustache's secret from getting out.
Interestingly, part of the reason Fouquet himself was locked up in a top-secret prison instead being allowed to go into exile, like many nobles who fell out of favor did, was because he had been privy to secret treaty negotiations for Louis (ones so secret Louis didn't even trust his ambassadors), as well as the secret workings of French finances, and Louis didn't want that information falling into the hands of his enemies.
As for why not just kill Eustache, Wilkinson writes:
Marcel Pagnol has argued though that Louis could simply have hanged Eustache rather than spend good money to maintain him in prison. However, executions did not just happen in the ancien régime. Not even Louis was above the law, and he was not able to break the law. Had this not been the case, Foucquet would never have been sent to Pignerol, but would have been executed on the Place de Grève instead.
That last sentence refers to something Wilkinson reminds me of that I had learned from Schultz but forgotten: Louis tried *really hard* to get a death sentence for Fouquet, but couldn't. The sentence was exile, and Louis changed it to life imprisonment. Could he have done what FW did to Katte and change it to death? Presumably, but either way, it's at least precedent for Louis not judicially murdering someone that he wanted dead. A high-ranking noble, admittedly! Not a valet. And as
But in my mind, it at least says that it wouldn't have been out of character for Louis to decide to imprison someone for knowing too much, even if he had the ability to have them killed. Especially since the same thing happens to La Rivière, who was himself a valet who learned too much. He was not killed, he was locked up.
As for whose valet Eustache was (assuming he was a valet), Minette is indeed one of the candidates! But for the opposite reasons that Selena speculated:
In July 1669, with the negotiation with Charles well underway, Louis suddenly and inexplicably fell out with Henriette. This was an unexpected development since the two had previously been very close, and it did not go unnoticed. On July 23, Henriette withdrew from Saint-Germain to go to Saint-Cloud to prepare for the birth of her child. Three days later, on July 26, Ralph Montagu wrote in her defense to Lord Arlington:
She is the most that can be beloved in this country by everybody but the King and her husband. She has too great a spirit I believe ever to complain, or to let the King her brother know of it, but I tell your Lordship of it, that you may take all the occasions wherein the King can, of putting his Majesty upon supporting her, both as his sister, and as a sister that deserves it from him by her real concern in everything that relates either to his honor or interest.
Some weeks after this, Henriette wrote to Lord Arlington about some “suspicions” she had, which were:
founded on reasons of which I informed the King some time ago by a Page of the Backstairs to the Queen. He may have told you of them, and I gave some credence to them, because at the same time I had perceived a coldness in the feelings of the King of France for me, which made me think that, fearing that I might discover that he was not acting in good faith, he wished to remove me from the business [of the negotiations], for fear that I might warn the King my brother of it, as assuredly I should have done.
What had caused this coldness is not known. Hartmann thought it stemmed from Louis’s belief that Henriette was favoring Charles’s interests over those of France.
Henriette’s biographer, Jacqueline Duchêne, believed that Henriette, a former lover of Louis’s, was jealous of Madame de Montespan, who was expecting the king’s child. While either of these suggestions is plausible, Petitfils had suggested a third, which is that Louis’s coldness toward Henriette originated with some indiscretion on the part of one of her servants, which threatened to compromise relations between Louis and Charles. Had Eustache been that servant, it would explain his arrest and subsequent imprisonment without trial in July 1669. Petitfils points out that Louvois, having announced Eustache’s imminent arrival at Pignerol to Saint-Mars on July 19, waited until July 23, the date Henriette left Saint-Germain, to set a trap for Eustache with a view to having him arrested at Calais.
It's also worth mentioning, re Eustache's job title, that Saint-Mars told Louvois that when people would ask about Eustache, he (S-M) would make up "fairy tales" to make fun of them and lead them off the track. Saint-Mars is thus extremely likely to be behind a bunch of the rumors about Eustache's identity.
Re: The Man in the Iron Mask: Eustache as valet with a secret
Date: 2022-08-09 05:00 am (UTC)However, executions did not just happen in the ancien régime. Not even Louis was above the law, and he was not able to break the law.
Wow... really? Like, couldn't you just get a corrupt judge to order an execution? (Jean Calas would like a word...) Or is that only a post-ancien régime thing? (Which seems implausible to me?)
Re: The Man in the Iron Mask: Eustache as valet with a secret
Date: 2022-08-09 05:19 am (UTC)Meanwhile, Calas was every day judical and police corruption, religious hatred (partly thanks to Louis revoking the Edict of Nantes, btw), and no one other than his family cared about his death in a provincial town until Voltaire got interested. And, of course, it happened a near century later. But I still doubt many people would have gotten upset if Louis had Eustache executed on a trumped up charge if he’d wanted to do that, and his NOT executing Fouquet doesn’t prove to me he had too many scruples to (unjustly) kill in general.
Thinking of legal cases with and without the death penalty in Louis’ life time, well, there was the Affair of the Poisons, and it was certainly execution time for La Voisin but not so much for Madame de Montespan, though the extent of her involvement is still contested, and the Marquise de Brinvillieres did die. My point being that death sentences for non-nobles were way easier and faster to get.
Re: The Man in the Iron Mask: Eustache as valet with a secret
Date: 2022-08-09 01:34 pm (UTC)Re: The Man in the Iron Mask: Eustache as valet with a secret
Date: 2022-08-13 04:34 am (UTC)But Mildred, thanks for pointing out that he also locked up Fouquet's other valet instead of having him killed, that seems more convincing to me too (that is, that he wouldn't have killed Eustache, as you say).