Re: The Royal Cipher

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	Somewhat off topic, but I can't resist!  A long time 
ago, I read an "Unsolved Mysteries" book which I can no
longer find.  One of the mysteries described was that
of "The Man in the Iron Mask".  Kahn and Singh both
discuss Bazieres' breaking of the Royal Cipher around
1890.  They both discuss how this might bear on the
mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask (Kahn (pp. 860-862)
and Simon Singh (pp. 57-58) ).  

	In Kahn's account, Bazieres decrypted a passage
wherein the King ordered Nicholas de Catinat to arrest
Vivien Labbe', Seigneur du Bulonde, [a general who had
disappointed the King] and "to conduct him to the
fortress of Pignerol, where His Majesty desires that he
be guarded locked in a cell of that fortress at night
and having the liberty during the day of walking on the
battlements with a 330 309".  The group 330 309 appears
no where in the Royal Cipher, and Bazieres, knowing
about the mysterious prisoner at Pignerol, guessed that
330 meant "mask" and 309 was a stop.  However, Bulonde
was still alive five years after the mysterious
prisoner's death.  So there are problems with that
theory.

	[Singh retells this story, but he doesn't mention the
330 309 cipher group; he just says 'mask' with no
qualifications.  Nor does he mention the problems with
identifying Bulonde as the Mask.]

	According to the "Unsolved Mysteries" book, the French
Revolutionaries went looking in the royal archives for
dirt to further discredit the monarchy.  They finally
found that the Man in the Iron Mask was one Eustache
d'Auger de Cavoye, a dishonorably discharged
cavalryman.  He, in turn, had been in the circle of the
Marquise de Brinvilliers.  

	de Brinvilliers was a sort of French Elizabeth
Bathory.  She was very intelligent and beautiful, but
she killed her father and her two brothers and almost
succeeded with her husband.  

	To effect this, she used a slow poison, most likely an
arsenic compound.  Arsenic is ideal for slow poisoning,
since it has no taste, accumulates slowly in the body,
and the resulting death resembles that from a prolonged
illness.  I've heard that people used to take small
doses of arsenic as a stimulant -- fine so long as you
don't use so much that it accumulates!  In King Louis'
day,  and, of course, there were no methods of chemical
analysis to betray a poisoning.  [Nothing new about
this.  Read Robert Graves' *I, Claudius*.]  

	The nobility of the time poisoned each other on a
massive scale.  Here again, that age had no method to
produce pure arsenic compounds.  Therefore, a few
commoners would usually be poisoned first as a test. 
Knowing what problems would arise if all this were
publicly known, Louis formed a secret court, the
Burning Chamber, to try such cases.  

	However, in addition to the poisoning cases, de
Brinvilliers also arranged Black Masses, an evil parody
of the Catholic Mass, to people wanting to gain success
at court.  Louis drew the line at this, and had her
submit to the water torture for several hours.  She was
sentenced to be beheaded.  

	For more, see

http://www.litrix.com/madraven/madne016.htm

http://cweb.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/brinvilliers.html

	d'Auger, according to the files unearthed by the
Revolutionaries, had also been involved in the Black
Masses.  Yet he was not burned or beheaded.  He was
imprisoned, but he received exceptional kind treatment
for that era.  He was not chained to the wall and was
given musical instruments.  Louis constantly asked
about his health.  The prisoner was only told to
maintain absolute silence about his person.  He wore a
mask when outside or being moved from one jail to
another.  

	For a little more about D'Auger, see

http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/7545/legends/IronMask.html

	There are some obvious problems with the story as told
by "Unsolved Mysteries".  Alexander Dumas wrote his
novel "The Man in the Iron Mask 1848-1850.  In the
1830's an opera was written about the Mask.  Finally,
Bazieres did his decipherment in 1891.  If the
Revolutionaries had indeed found documents linking
d'Auger to the Black Masses, then all these people
writing decades later about the Mask should have known
about it.  

	But the real mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask
remains. If the Mask either held some terrible secrets
or was a possible pretender to the throne, why wasn't
he just killed, instead of held in secrecy like this?  

	I've often wondered whether the VMs isn't comparable
to this.  The VMs contains a terrible, occult Secret
that the Hidden Powers That Be fear, but, due to the
occult nature of the Secret, they cannot simply destroy
the VMs.

;-)

Dennis