I have some shocking news for you. The man in the Iron Mask was not Leonardo DiCaprio. And anyway, he didn’t wear an iron mask. I mean, just think this thing through. The first time you drool in your sleep in an iron mask, you would be rusted in shut. 
It was a velvet mask. And he was not the twin of King Louis XIV or any other Louie. Who he was seems to have been mixed up in what is called “The Affair of the Poisons” which is a morality tale of a cute little love-sick tramp with the affinity for “inheritance powders”, and her amoral boyfriend. 
Throw in the King’s mistress for a little spice, and you have a recipe for what Alexis de Tocqueville called “L’Ancien Regime”, and what in modern terms we would call a soap opera of the rich and infamous. It leaves me wondering why the French waited so long to start chopping off heads.
It was a velvet mask. And he was not the twin of King Louis XIV or any other Louie. Who he was seems to have been mixed up in what is called “The Affair of the Poisons” which is a morality tale of a cute little love-sick tramp with the affinity for “inheritance powders”, and her amoral boyfriend. Throw in the King’s mistress for a little spice, and you have a recipe for what Alexis de Tocqueville called “L’Ancien Regime”, and what in modern terms we would call a soap opera of the rich and infamous. It leaves me wondering why the French waited so long to start chopping off heads. We begin in 1659, with a little tramp named Marie Madeleine Margherite D’Aubray Brinvillers. We’ll call her Maire for short. I don’t think she’ll mind. Marie was a tiny pixie-doll of a woman with sparkling blue eyes who seems to have committed no major public sins until she was about thirty. 
That was when her husband (above) introduced her to a handsome cavalryman named Godin de Sainte-Croix, to whom the husband owed a whole bunch of money. Hubby had to move out of the country to avoid his other creditors, and he left Marie behind as a sort of payment on account for Sainte-Croix. Marie didn’t seem to mind the arrangement, and neither did Sainte-Croix. Except, as much fun as Sainte-Croix had with little Marie, she wasn’t making him any richer. Where, oh, where was Sainte-Croix going to find enough money to live in the style to which he wanted to grow accustomed to?
That was when her husband (above) introduced her to a handsome cavalryman named Godin de Sainte-Croix, to whom the husband owed a whole bunch of money. Hubby had to move out of the country to avoid his other creditors, and he left Marie behind as a sort of payment on account for Sainte-Croix. Marie didn’t seem to mind the arrangement, and neither did Sainte-Croix. Except, as much fun as Sainte-Croix had with little Marie, she wasn’t making him any richer. Where, oh, where was Sainte-Croix going to find enough money to live in the style to which he wanted to grow accustomed to?Sainte-Croix developed a multi-step plan. Step one was to encourage Marie to do some charity work. Step two was for Sainte-Croix to make the acquaintance of certain people with a knowledge of chemistry, such as a man known only to history by the name of “Auguer”.
Now, in the days before CSI the only way to prove poisoning - as opposed to just an unhygienic cook - was to catch the suspect pouring poison on the food, or to get him or her to confess. 
This is why torture was so popular for so long. It never failed. No matter who you arrested, ten minutes with them on the rack and you could get them to admit almost anything.
Of course, if your suspect was too connected to be tortured, the only alternative was to lock him up while you slowly collected evidence. That might take decades. And during that time witnesses could be bought off, killed off, or just die of natural causes. People dropped dead all the time in 17th century France. The staggering death toll made for the convoluted plots of some very popular French novels and plays.
This is why torture was so popular for so long. It never failed. No matter who you arrested, ten minutes with them on the rack and you could get them to admit almost anything.Of course, if your suspect was too connected to be tortured, the only alternative was to lock him up while you slowly collected evidence. That might take decades. And during that time witnesses could be bought off, killed off, or just die of natural causes. People dropped dead all the time in 17th century France. The staggering death toll made for the convoluted plots of some very popular French novels and plays.So when poor people started dropping dead at the hospital where Marie had volunteered as a nurse, nobody took notice. They were poor people. In 17th century France the streets were littered with dead poor people. It was the perfect time and place for little Marie to practice her new trade.
When Marie had perfected the formula she had gotten from Sainte-Croix, which she did in 1666, she had no compuction about slipping the poison into her father’s lunch. He died suddenly. And his little darling inherited a little money, which she and Saint-Croix quickly burned through.
When Marie had perfected the formula she had gotten from Sainte-Croix, which she did in 1666, she had no compuction about slipping the poison into her father’s lunch. He died suddenly. And his little darling inherited a little money, which she and Saint-Croix quickly burned through.Then in 1670 Marie shed more tears when her two brothers suddenly dropped dead. Marie inherited a little more money. By now, all the heirs in the Brinvillers family were getting nervous. But still nobody suspected the little elf, the little pixie, Marie Brinvillers. She was too cute. Cute people can’t be serial murderers.
And just when the homicidal little pixie was about to knock off her own mother for another load of cash, Gordin Sainte-Croix, the greedy mastermind of the entire slaughter, unexpectedly fell ill and dropped dead himself. Mon Dieu! Cele semble suspecte?!
And just when the homicidal little pixie was about to knock off her own mother for another load of cash, Gordin Sainte-Croix, the greedy mastermind of the entire slaughter, unexpectedly fell ill and dropped dead himself. Mon Dieu! Cele semble suspecte?!The cops were brought in. They uncovered a hand written confession by Sainte-Croix (Why do upper crust muderers always feel the need to become authors?). And it seems he even left a list of names of satisfied customers who he had directed to the mysterious chemist, Msr. Auger. 
The list included included Madame de Montespan, who was Louis XIV’s mistress – which in pre-revolutionary France was almost a cabinet position - and the Duchesse of Orleans, Louis’s sister-in-law (above), and...Marie Brinviller. Marie panicked. The cops were not going to torture the King’s mistress, but they would have no hesitation about putting a lower level nobility cutie like Marie on the rack. She ran off to seek protection with her husband in exile. But she was now infamous and hubby wanted nothing to do with her. So Marie signed herself into a convent in Liege, Belgium.
The list included included Madame de Montespan, who was Louis XIV’s mistress – which in pre-revolutionary France was almost a cabinet position - and the Duchesse of Orleans, Louis’s sister-in-law (above), and...Marie Brinviller. Marie panicked. The cops were not going to torture the King’s mistress, but they would have no hesitation about putting a lower level nobility cutie like Marie on the rack. She ran off to seek protection with her husband in exile. But she was now infamous and hubby wanted nothing to do with her. So Marie signed herself into a convent in Liege, Belgium.This placed the pious nuns running the convent in a moral bind. They were sworn to provide sanctuary to all who asked for it and who sought forgivness for their sins, but, on the other hand, how do you solve a problem like Marie? How do you catch a cloud of suspicion and pin it down? The good sisters consulted scripture and after due deliberations decided to rat out their guest.
They allowed a cop disguised as a priest to enter the convent and while offering solace to the trouble little lady he escorted Marie right out the front gate, where she was immediately arrested.
It is not a happy ending for our little heroine. Marie was brought back to Paris in chains, tortured for a confession (i.e. waterboarded), tried in secret, and on July 16, 1676 she was forced to drink eight pints of water (more waterboarding)… and then mercifully she was beheaded. And just to be sure, they then burned her corpse. And that is how you solve a problem like Marie.
It looked like all hell was about to break loose in France. The cops had Marie's confession and Sainte-Croix's list, and just before the case broke wide open...Louis XIV (above) ordered all further investigations to cease. And being the King, his orders were obeyed. He shut it down. Nobody ever asked Madame Montespan or the Duchesse of Orleans how their names came to be on a list of people who had bought “inheritance powders”. Or if they had ever used them.
It looked like all hell was about to break loose in France. The cops had Marie's confession and Sainte-Croix's list, and just before the case broke wide open...Louis XIV (above) ordered all further investigations to cease. And being the King, his orders were obeyed. He shut it down. Nobody ever asked Madame Montespan or the Duchesse of Orleans how their names came to be on a list of people who had bought “inheritance powders”. Or if they had ever used them.And shutting down the investigation also left unanswered another set of unpleasant questions: who was Msr. Auger, really? And what did he know? And more importantly, did he have any plans to write his biography or maybe a 'how to' book? And what does any of this have to do with Leonardo DiCaprio?
Nothing: like I said, the “Man in the Iron Mask” was really the “Man in the Velvet Mask” and velvet just sounds too fey for a novel. But if you are of a novel mind set you might ask yourself a few questions.
Nothing: like I said, the “Man in the Iron Mask” was really the “Man in the Velvet Mask” and velvet just sounds too fey for a novel. But if you are of a novel mind set you might ask yourself a few questions.Why would the King of France keep someone locked up in one prison after another for decades? What secret could be so big that the prisoner was required to wear a mask at all times in front of strangers? What secret could be kept secure by ordering a prisoner to never speak to anyone, not even with his jailers? Could such a plan even hope to work?
It’s too complicated. James Bond villains have simpler plans than that. Why not just kill the prisoner? You don’t even need a trial, let alone a secret trial. In the middle of the 17th century the one thing France had a surfeit of besides starving peasants, was a criminal nobility. Louis could have knocked off every royal mass murderer from “Auger” to the Marquis de Sade and nobody would have said “Boo”. If you ask me this story is mostly a fantasy invented by Alexande Dumas. And wasn’t the truth just as entertaining as the myth? Not to Marie's relatives, of course, but it was for me.
- 30 -
Each summer at the turn of the century, steam ships would leave the docks at South Haven, their holds crammed with peaches, apples and blueberries. Not wanting to return empty, the shipping lines promoted South Haven as “The Catskills of the Midwest”.
The Eastland was built to fit the Black River. She was 265 feet long and only 28 feet wide. “Fully pumped out” she drew only 10 feet of water. Once christened in May of 1903, she quickly became the “Speed Queen of the Great Lakes”, able to slice through the water at over 20 knots. Speed was profit because it allowed the Eastland to make two transits a day between Chicago and South Haven.
And then, in April of 1912, the Titanic sank. One thousand and five hundred people died because there were not enough life boats on board. In America the legislative response was the Seaman’s Act of 1915, requiring a life jacket and a seat aboard a life boat for every single passenger. Installed on the Eastland, the new life boats and rafts added 14 tons to the upper decks.
Over the next half hour, as 50 passengers a minute boarded the Eastland, the ship began to list, first to starboard and then to port. Each time water was pumped into starboard and port side ballast tanks to right the vessel. At seven A.M. the tug boat Kanosha cast a bow line to the Eastland. Five minutes later the Eastland’s engines were started. At ten minutes after seven the gang plank was closed. The Eastland had on board her full compliment of passengers, 2,400 souls. 
At eighteen minutes after seven the operator of the Clark Street draw bridge informed the Captain of the Eastland that he was ready to raise the structure. The captain ordered the stern line cast off. At twenty minutes after seven minutes the ship began to list so strongly to port that water began to pour into the ship. The Captain ordered the engines stopped. A crewman hit an alarm whistle. At twenty-eight minutes after seven A.M. the Eastland rolled over onto her port side. Her bow was still tied to the dock. 845 passengers, men, women and children were trapped below decks and drowned in 20 feet of water 20 feet from the dock.
Jack Woodford watched from an office building across the river. Years later he wrote in his biography; “As I watched in disoriented stupefaction a steamer large as an ocean liner slowly turned over on its side as though it were a whale going to take a nap…lashed to a dock, in perfectly calm water, in excellent weather, with no explosion, no fire, nothing. I thought I had gone crazy.”
Miss Ina Roseland told one of the Chicago newspapers, “My brother Karl and I were standing near the rail on a lower deck when the Eastland tipped over. I lost Karl as the boat carried me down, until I felt the muddy bottom….Then I began to rise...As I touched the slippery wall that was about me, my hand struck something soft…I screamed and felt myself fainting, but…(I) heard an answering shout. I could not believe my ears. It was my brother's voice. He told me to be brave; that he had come up in the state room next to me….
"Several bodies, all of them women or little girls, would keep knocking against me, however much I tried to climb higher. Then I heard the hammering and cluttering as the men worked to cut away the plates. As a piece came away a little light filtered through and as I started a prayer of thankfulness, it was choked in my throat, for it fell on the upturned staring faces about me…Brother Karl was there urging them on as I was pulled outside.”
"I knew that the only thing to do was to shake him off…I came up behind him and hit him in the neck. He became unconscious and I swam to shore with him, where spectators on the dock helped me get him out of the water. Next I pulled out a young lady dressed in a pink suit. A patrol boat then came along and a man on it yelled to me that a young lady had just gone down for the third time at a certain spot. I dived, got her and took her to shore, where she, too, was revived…
"I swam to the Eastland and worked my way up on top of the hull, where I assisted four firemen in taking bodies out of apertures that had been chopped through several places. We took out at least fifty bodies, mostly women and children, although there were about a dozen men.”
In 1915 a Coroner Juries’ inquest came to the conclusion that, “…the steamship Eastland was both improperly constructed for the service employed, and improperly loaded, operated and maintained…”. The jury recommended that, “…the state's attorney and grand jury investigate carefully the condition of the construction of this boat, to ascertain if there can be found legal methods by which those responsible can be held accountable.” Eventually it was decided there were none.
In Sudbury Mr. Savage’s diary recorded six days of “fair and pleasant “weather. The merchant Samuel Phillips of Weston, Massachusetts, observed that the air was remarkably “thick” with vapors and mists. “The sun rises and sets very red”, he wrote. And others in New England say the waning moon was blushed, and odd fogs rose from the frozen north facing slopes of the White Mountains. But these odd atmospheric phenomena proved merely the setting stage for the morning of Friday, May 19, 1780.
About 11:00 that morning the darkness was so thick the laborers in Lancaster could not see to dig. A ship’s captain 200 miles southeast of Boston reported that at the same hour, under a light rain, the day was so dark he was obliged to steer by candle light. In Ipswich Hamlet, Mass, several amateur scientists noted that at half past “…in a room with three windows…all open toward the southeast and south, large print could not be read by persons of good eyes. About twelve o'clock…a candle cast a shade so well defined on the wall, as that profiles were taken…” And on Boston Common a nervous crowd had gathered when a man rushed up shouting that the tide in the harbor had “…ceased to flow.” A panic almost ensued from this declaration, but for a Mr. Willard who calmly drew his pocket watch and dryly observed, “So it has…for today. It is past twelve o’clock.” 
At Harvard, Professor William’s recorded a light rain had begun to fall “..thick and dark and sooty”. Noted a Maine observer, “... fowls went to their roost. Cocks crowed in answer to one another…Woodcocks…whistled as they do only in the dark. Frogs peeped. In short, there was the appearance of midnight at noonday”. In Ipswich the amateurs noted that “About one o'clock…the darkness was greater than it had been for any time before…We dined about two…two candles burning on the table.” Attempting to explain the blackness at midday, one man pleaded, “I could not help conceiving, at the time, that if every luminous body in the universe had been shrouded in impenetrable darkness, or struck out of existence, the darkness could not have been more complete.”
Approaching two o’clock now the darkness grew even blacker. Samuel Savage could no longer read his watch. A man riding through the wooded hills above Penacook, New Hampshire suddenly found himself amongst black clouds so thick he could barely breathe. Mr. Sammuel Tenny noted that a sheet of paper “…held within a few inches of the eyes was as black as velvet.”
John Greenleaf Whittier was inspired to write, “'Twas on a May day of the far old year Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell, Over the bloom and sweet life of the spring,Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon, A horror of great darkness... All ears grew sharp, To hear the doom blast of the trumpet shatter, The black sky... Meanwhile in the old Statehouse, dim as ghosts, Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut, Trembling beneath their legislative robes. 'It is the Lord's great day! Let us adjourn,' Some said; and then, as with one accord, All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport” Meanwhile in Boston Reverend David Hall noted, “People came flocking to the Meetinghouse requesting my presence (to guide them in prayer)." You could almost hear the reverend smile as he added,"The people were very attentive.”
When the superfluous night fell the full moon was due to rise at nine, but did not appear, high in the sky, until 1:00 A.M., and blood red. Shortly afterward dim stars began to appear. Then, “About three o'clock the light in the west increased, the motion of the clouds [became] more quick, their color higher and more brassy…There appeared to be quick flashes…not unlike the aurora borealis.... About half past four our company (of amateur scientists), which had passed an unexpected night very cheerfully together, broke up.”
With the dawn on Saturday, May 21, 1780, the world returned to normal. The day was light and the night was dark. And a great many people spent a great deal of time and energy attempting to explain the Great New England Darkness of 1780. But the workmen in Lancaster, New Hampshire merely returned to their work, and by the 26th of July, they were able to raise the frame for Jonas Wilder’s new home, now called The Wilder-Holton House.
That home, now a museum, still stands (along with the words of Abraham Davenport) as testament that the best of us continue to build for the future, even when the futility of our brief exsistance seems as black as the night, right before our eyes.
