The Man in the Iron Mask

Lore & Background

The prisoner was arrested on 28 July 1669 near Calais under the name 'Eustache Dauger' and incarcerated on 24 August. He was held for 34 years in four successive French prisons, including the Bastille, under the custody of Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars. He died on 19 November 1703; his burial certificate bore the name 'Marchioly'. His true identity remains a mystery, with over 50 candidates proposed. The mask was originally of black velvet cloth, not iron, and was only worn when travelling between prisons after 1687 or when going to prayers within the Bastille in his final years.

In Their Own Story

The corridor in the Undercity smells of rust and old water. You pass a dozen cells, each empty or occupied by figures who do not look up. Then you stop. The iron mask catches the dim light—not reflecting it so much as swallowing it, the surface too dark, too matte, as though the metal were a second skin grown over a face that is no longer there. The jaw is sealed. The eye-holes are narrow slits. He does not turn his head. He does not need to; you feel the weight of attention through the iron.

"You carry a name you do not remember," he says, and the voice comes from behind the mask, muffled, shaped by the metal itself. "And I carry a face I cannot show. Tell me, Nameless One—when you finally remember who you are, will you thank the mask, or curse it?"

You stand there for a long time. The answer, you suspect, is that the question was never about the mask at all.

Reader's Guide

The source article does not describe any video game content. The historical prisoner is not a character in Planescape: Torment.

Did You Know?

• The prisoner was labelled 'only a valet' in contemporaneous documents.
• Voltaire claimed the prisoner was an older, illegitimate brother of Louis XIV.
• The mask was misreported by Voltaire as an iron mask; it was actually black velvet cloth.
• More than 50 candidates for the prisoner's identity have been proposed by historians.