Let us come now to the conjectures which have almost hit the truth and have been defended by genuine scholars. Superintendent Fouquet is the solution of the bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix). M. Lair has shown that Fouquet died at Pignerol, of a sort of apoplexy, on March 23, 1680, at the very moment when there was an idea at court of sending him to the waters at Bourbon, as a first step towards his final liberation. François Ravaisson, the learned and charming keeper of the Arsenal library, whose work in classifying the archives of the Bastille we have had the honour to continue, believed for a moment that the celebrated prisoner might have been the young Count de Kéroualze who had fought at Candia under the orders of Admiral de Beaufort. Ravaisson put forth his theory with much hesitation, and as, in the sequel, he was himself led to abandon it, we need not dwell any longer upon it. M. Loiseleur, in the course of his brilliant controversy with Marius Topin, suggested "an obscure spy arrested by Catinat in 1681," and his opponent refuted him in the most piquant manner by discovering Catinat in the very prisoner he was said to have arrested! General Jung published a large volume in support of the claims of a certain Oldendorf, a native of Lorraine, a spy and poisoner, arrested on March 29, 1673, in a trap laid for him at one of the passages of the Somme. The theory was refuted by M. Loiseleur. As M. Lair pointed out, General Jung did not even succeed in proving that his nominee entered Pignerol, an essential condition to his being the Man in the Mask. Baron Carutti urged the claims of a mad Jacobin, a prisoner at Pignerol whose name remains unknown; but this Jacobin died at Pignerol towards the close of 1693.' The recent work of M. Emile Burgaud, written in collaboration with Commandant Bazeries, made a great sensation. He fixes on General Vivien Labbé de Bulonde, whom Louvois arrested for having shown dereliction of a general's duty before Coni. M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison published in the _Univers_ of January 9, 1895, two receipts signed by General de Bulonde, one in 1699, when the masked man was in rigorous isolation at the Bastille, the other in 1705, when he had been dead for two years.