Five years later, after one day’s illness, November 19, 1703, this prisoner died in the Bastille.* His end was so rapid that he did not receive the solace of the sacrament; the chaplain ‘exhorted him a moment before he died.’ As dusk fell on the next afternoon the drawbridge was lowered, and a sorry funeral passed out, which took its way to the graveyard of the church of St Paul: behind a rude coffin, two turnkeys of the prison. A furtive, perfunctory burying, scarcely even decent;* into his hasty grave, probably by lantern-light, the turnkeys unknown lowered the unknown dead, and that was the end. On the church’s register was inscribed the name of Marchioly.* In the Bastille they had known him as the prisoner from Provence.
* Lieutenant Étienne du Junca, Saint-Mars’s second-in-command at the Bastille, kept a meticulous private journal (like his contemporary, Samuel Pepys) in which he recorded the passing of the masked prisoner. According to du Junca, ‘the unknown prisoner’ never removed his velvet mask and was wearing it when he died.
* For most of his captivity, the masked man was kept comfortable and treated with marked courtesy. But something changed in March 1701. The prisoner began to be shunted around the Bastille to make room for new arrivals, and even shared a cell with a wild nineteen-year-old servant boy. Perhaps King Louis, whose attention was now completely engrossed in his plan to make Europe’s powers acknowledge his grandson Philip as King of Spain, felt that whatever hold or value the man in the Bastille had once possessed was no longer of such concern. See The War of the Spanish Succession.
* Hopkins saw in this confirmation that Mattioli was the masked prisoner; the clerk’s spelling was always shaky (he misspelt his own superiors’ names) and Saint-Mars tended to write ‘Mattioli’ as Martioly anyway. However, there is a strong probability that Mattioli never left Fort Royal: a prisoner there who had his own personal valet died there in April 1694, and Mattioli was by then the only inmate with a manservant. It was, moreover, state policy to bury political prisoners under a pseudonym; Saint-Mars seems to have enjoyed dreaming them up, rather like Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist. Perhaps ‘Marchioly’ was another red herring — just as Eustache Dauber de Cavoye (1637-late 1680s) was the name of a poor wretch committed to the asylum of St Lazaire sometime in or before 1668, where he died some twelve years later.
