" 'I just remembered something,' he [Hal] said. 'I know why you three seem so familiar...I didn't read it, of course,
but there was some information about you in the file about the Snicket fires.' "
- HH 70
The Baudelaire file: "All thirteen pages of the Snicket File have been removed from the Library of Records
for official investigation."
Page thirteen of the Snicket file: "there was just one photograph stapled
into place, below one sentence of type...there were four people in the photograph...it was 667 Dark Avenue...the first person
in the photograph was Jacques Snicket...standing next to Jacques was a man who was turned away from the camera, so the children
could not see his face, only one of his hands, which was clutching a notebook and a pen, as if the obscured man were a writer
of some sort....standing next to these two people...were the Baudelaire parents"
-HH 108
The inscription: "Because of the evidence discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may
in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown" (HH 109)
The Snicket file is "the last piece of evidence that could send us to jail" says Olaf (CC 9).
So who is the survivor? It's Lemony!
- We know the children's father is dead as of SS 335: "indeed, the grown men in the Baudelaires' lives
who were dead, such as Jacques Snicket, or the children's father, were never going to rise up."
- as mentioned above and in VV, Jacques is dead
- if Beatrice is the Baudelaires' mother, she is definitely dead
- the fourth figure is probably Lemony, since "Snicket rarely shows his face" (see above) and is "turned
away from the camera,"; he appears to be "a writer or some sort" as well. In UA Lemony was a writer for The Daily
Punctilio who got the boot; we also know him as the writer of SUE, of course!
- MM, biographical page - "His trial has been delayed, so his is free to continue researching
and writing the tragic tales of the Baudelaire orphans for Harper Collins."
I have wondered if the Unauthorized Autobiography was the Snicket File, but as the file seems
to contain information about setting fires (that's what I gather from SS, anyway, i.e., I don't see any proof that would send
Olaf to jail), I now doubt my original theory. I do still strongly believe that the survivor is Lemony--although Quigley's
comment that there is a survivor (being himself) in SS is a tantalizing but what I would call misleading answer to the real
question. I think also has to do a lot with the timeline of SUE (which I will be working on later). Needless to
say, I'm just about positive that it has to be Lemony in that picture, since he is always on the run (the survivor's "whereabouts
are unknown"), and the evidence that could send Olaf to jail is that Lemony did NOT set the fires that seem to have slandered
him and broken his engagement to Beatrice. Does this mean that Lemony and the Baudelaire's will eventually meet up with
one another? See my page about the "Timeline" (in progress).
