Description

Print version available on Amazon.

Sarah Madry has written a bold and revelatory answer to those who have said the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask will never be solved. The masked prisoner, arrested by lettre de cachet personally dictated and signed by Louis XIV, was named Eustache Dauger. The king kept Dauger in prison for thirty-four years from 1669 to his death in the Bastille in November 1703. No one knows why he was arrested, why he was never killed but instead treated compassionately and kept for life in the most secure prison cells ever created in the Ancien Régime.

Sarah Madry spent fifteen years analyzing the cold case and traveled to France eight times to look at handwritten manuscripts, sixteenth century medical encyclopedias, old primers on poison, and testaments of kings and princes. She used old French maps to direct her to remote farmhouses in the countryside, queried French departmental archivists, interrupted the afternoons of curators of the Museum of the History of Paris, and waited for church services to end before walking up the aisle to ask the priest about what was buried in the crypt. Her theories are entirely different from anything before written because her interdisciplinary approach brought the history of medicine and the culture of seventeenth-century France to help untangle the many clues in the original documents that were always available, but never seen as useful.

Finally, Second Son is about the salvation, by any means necessary, of a royal dynasty that had ceased producing heirs. If Madry’s theory that Queen Anne of Austria’s plot to secure the continuation of the Bourbon dynasty succeeded, when kings and armies could not, is correct, historians will have much to reconsider.

Contents

• Introduction – The Case For The Panoramic View

Part One THE WHITE BLACKBIRD

• The Arrest Of Eustache Dauger
• The King’s Search For Eustache Dauger
• Leaks, Speculations, And Suspicions
• The Valet

Part Two SQUIRRELS, LIZARDS, AND SNAKES

• Fouquet And Colbert
• The Jailers: Louvois And Saint-Mars
• The Prisoners
• Pignerol And Exilles
• Sainte-Marguerite And The Bastille

Part Three THE HABSBURGS, THE MEDICI, THE BOURBONS

• Queen Anne Of Austria And Cardinal Jules Mazarin
• Louis XIV
• Louis XIII: A Medical Examination
• Secondary Plan Of Nature
• The Case For The White Blackbird
• The Clue Of The Missing Apostrophe
• Oger The Dane
• Madame De Sévigné’s Clues
• Beaulieu And The Lhoste

Part Four IT WILL BE BY THE LADY, NO DOGS WILL BARK

• A Footed Bowl
• Philippe D’Orléans
• Medical/Clinical References
• History, Sociology, Cultural References
• Endnotes

Sarah Brandes Madry attended the Cours Charles de Foucauld in Neuilly-sur-Seine and obtained an undergraduate degree in French and a masters in education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She was an editor for internal publications and radio producer, graphic artist, and web designer for the General Electric Company and the University of North Carolina. She travels frequently in Europe with her husband, especially in Burgundy where her husband has done archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork since 1978. She is the author of Well Worth a Shindy (2004), a survey of round landscape architecture and garden design in Renaissance and English eighteenth-century gardens.