Baluze is covered in detail in The Pujades Affair, but there are some conjectures that need to be explored separately. The French scholar is so highly esteemed by his peers that they are even willing to overlook his plagiarisms because is was a common Baroque practice. Although he inherited the entire collection of de Marca in 1662, which included the documents from Pujades, the Cronica may not have been part of it because it was discovered in 1696 in Rouen. The four volumes show three registrations, 10010 2-5, Baluze 168-171, and Esp. 117-120, which suggests that they may have been fist registered in Rouen, then at the Bibliothèque Royale, and finally at the BnF. There are some theories how they got first to Rouen, which is worthy of a brief exploration:
When Pierre de Marca (1594-1662) left Catalonia and took the manuscripts of Pujades to France,
he became the Archbishop of Toulouse (1652) and Minister of State. In 1654, he hired the talented 22-year old historian Etienne Baluze (seen at left) as his secretary, although some historians mention 1656. Eight or six only years later, in 1662, the year of his death, de Marca (at right) was appointed Archbishop of Paris by Louis XIV, which gave Baluze substantial social standing. It probably relates directly to the suspected Baroque plot that the leading Jesuit scholars Henschen and Papebroch arrived in Paris on August 11, 1662, six weeks after de Marca's death, and "were immediately put in touch" with the "distinguished savants" of Paris. According to the Catholic Online Encyclopedia (Bollandists) they did three months of research in Paris and went straight to Rouen.
If we consider that Pujades exposed a number of cover-ups by the Church, there is a high probability that the Jesuits searched for it, and finally discovered that it was hidden in Rouen. Why the archbishop did not surrender it at the time remains a mystery, and suggests that Francesc Fornes protected the work and entrusted it to confratres. Because Pujades exposed many cover-ups of the Church and even labeled the celebrated Benedictine historian Antonio de Yepes as badly-informed, there is another possible scenario: Baluze impressed the celebrated savants of Paris with rare manuscripts like the d'Odo Ariberti, the Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, and the precious manual de Dhuoda to promote his own career. Even the etymology of Chrétien's GRAAL would be lost today, had not one of these scholars, du Cange, been given access to two Catalan documents from 1010 and 1030 CE for his Glossary! (See Chrétien) The Benedictines -- and visiting Jesuits -- may have persuaded Baluze to remove all references to Pujades from de Marca's Marca Hispanica, and slander both their reputations, which appears to have been quite successful.
This is the kind of Baroque behavior that motivated the Catalan scholar and nobleman Pau Ignaci Dalmases to create in Barcelona the Academy of the Desconfiats at the time -- literally of the "unconfident" or "distrustful" academics (see Amelang article). Dalmases discovered the Cronica in the library of the archbishop in Rouen in 1996, wrote a summary of it, and recommend it highly to Catalan scholars. It was no ordinary archbishop, but Jacques-Nicolas Colbert, the youngest son of the powerful foreign minister under Louis XIV, and a member of the Academy Française. His father had him tutored by a Dominican Jansenist, and he was later himself accused of being "en faveur des protestants" (www.academie-francaise.fr) which supports our hypothesis that several protagonists in the "Pujades Affair" appear to have been sympathizers of the Reformation, including Pujades.