A Californian history professor is digging into an intriguing scandal that has daunted investigators for 300 years - the identity of The Man in the Iron Mask.
Sonnino is committed to solving the riddle and explaining why a hapless soul was imprisoned for 34 years on direct orders from King Louis XIV.
Though popular culture and the new Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Man in the Iron Mask, have obscured historical facts by suggesting the prisoner was Louis' twin brother, Sonnino knows better.
'That's absolutely absurd,' Sonnino, 67, said of the creative yarn first developed by Voltaire and embellished by French adventure-writer Alexandre Dumas.
Sonnino has records which date back to the early 1600s to track the activities of Louis XIV's inner circle - the very people who could know the kind of damaging secret that would send a person to the Bastille. He has searched for proof of the masked man's identity since 1989. The quest led to several suspects and painstaking research has cleared all but one.
The likely victim of Louis' rage, according to Sonnino and a number of other scholars, was a valet named Estache Dauger. Historical records suggest Dauger was captured and imprisoned in 1669. He remained confined in various jails across Italy and France until his death in 1703 inside the notorious Bastille.
Interestingly enough, there are no records at all to suggest the long-suffering prisoner ever wore an iron mask.
