 The newspaper "Sud-Ouest" revealed a month later that de l'Astran had never existed—except as the subject of an article in the French Wikipedia.Historian Jean-Louis Mahé discovered that de l'Astran was fictional after a student, interested by Royal's praise of him, asked Mahé about him.Mahé's research led him to realize that de l'Astran did not exist in any archives, and he traced the hoax back to the Rotary Club of La Rochelle.