Free The Man Behind the Iron Mask by John Noone

he had been asked to decipher eight coded letters printed at the end of the Mémoires of Nicolas Catinat, a Marshal of France in the time of Louis XIV. One of these letters led him to the conclusion that the Iron Mask was a certain general by the name of Vivien de Bulonde.
    In the summer of 1691, when the French were at war with the Savoyards in Piedmont, Catinat assigned to Bulonde the task of capturing the town of Cuneo. Bulonde made his assault on 23 June and, being repulsed, laid siege. He had been told to expect reinforcements, but when news came in of the approach of an Austrian army, he panicked and fled, abandoning his artillery, munitions and wounded. This action compromised the whole campaign; when report of it reached Paris, Louvois is said to have run ‘weeping and in desperation’ to the King. In July, Bulonde was arrested and sent to Pignerol. It was in a coded letter from Louvois to Catinat, where Bulonde’s arrest was ordered, that Bazeries made his discovery: ‘It is not necessary for me to tell you with what displeasure His Majesty has learned of M. de Bulonde’s gross negligence in deciding, against your orders and for no good reason, to lift the siege of Cuneo. Knowing the consequences better than anyone, His Majesty is aware how great a set-back it will be for us not to have taken this stronghold, which will now have to be taken during the winter. It is His Majesty’s wish that M. de Bulonde be arrested, conducted to the citadel of Pignerol and held there under guard, that at night he be kept locked up in a room of that same citadel and in the day be given liberty to walk upon the ramparts with …’
    The next word, represented by the number of 330 , Bazeries for some reason could not decipher. The interpretation most likely to occur would be ‘with a soldier’ or ‘with a guard’, but after consideration Bazeries decided it must mean ‘with a mask’: Bulonde was to be allowed to walk along the walls of the citadel wearing a mask. In fact the French language makes this interpretation unlikely because the usual meaning of the word ‘masque’ in the context of such a sentence would produce an altogether different meaning: not ‘with a mask’ but ‘accompanied by a masked man’. Bazeries, however, had made up his mind and set to work to find corroboration.
    This he turned up eventually in a second letter, written six years after the first, not in code this time, and from the Minister of War to the Iron Mask’s gaoler on Sainte-Marguerite. There the following injunction appeared: ‘You have no other conduct to follow with regard to those who are confided to your charge than to continue to watch over their surety without saying anything to anyone about the past acts of your longtime prisoner.’ Bazeries, examining the original manuscript of this letter, noticed an error crossed out after the words ‘about the’ and claimed that he could distinguish the word ‘gal’ under the crossing-out. Since ‘gal’ was the commonly accepted abbreviation for ‘general’, it seemed to Bazeries very evident that the minister had forgotten himself for a moment and had referred to the mysterious prisoner by his true title. Bulonde was the only general to have been imprisoned at Pignerol, and all the prisoners at Pignerol were moved to Sainte-Marguerite in 1694. Conclusion: the Iron Mask was Bulonde.
    From an unintelligible cipher and an illegible crossing-out, Bazeries felt confident that he had unlocked the state secret kept hidden for more than two hundred years. What he did not seem to appreciate was the fact that Bulonde’s disgrace and arrest had never been a secret from anyone. The affair was reported in La Gazette on 2 September 1691, and one did not need to be a cryptographer to read that. In fact Bulonde was never a prisoner in the state prison of Pignerol; he was merely confined within the