ABSTRACT
In the early 1890s, the great French cryptologist Commandant Etienne Bazeries joined the crowd of sleuths with a new theory. His was based on cryptology, which had never before been invoked to solve the mystery. It began when a fellow officer who was studying the campaigns of one of Louis XIV’s greatest marshals, Nicolas de Catinat, found a number of Catinat’s coded messages in the French military archives. He asked Bazeries to solve them. In doing so, Bazeries read a message of Louis to Catinat dated 24 August 1691. It stated that the king was displeased at the raising of the siege of the Italian town of Coni by one of his generals, Vivian Labbé, seigneur de Bulonde (sometimes Bullonde), and directed Catinat that “His Majesty desires that you immediately arrest General Bulonde and cause him to be conducted to the fortress of Pignerol, where he will be locked in a cell under guard at night and permitted to walk on the battlements during the day with a 330 309.” ose two codegroups occurred only that one time in the Catinat correspondence, which totaled 11,125 groups. eir solution could therefore not be confirmed by other appearances. But Bazeries verified that Bulonde’s conduct in raising the siege had been cowardly and that he never again held a command in the royal army. He therefore concluded that 330 stood for masque and 309 for a full stop. In 1893, he published Le Masque de fer, declaring that General Bulonde was the man in the Iron Mask.
