# French encoded message

A friend of mine gave me this enigma. As I am pretty bad with enigma, I am asking for your help. Here it is

LEEN¤¤RAOPI¤¤ADEUS¤DC¤HQODCEOEL¤A¤T¤¤LNUEA¤PMPASNIG

Under it ther is a big illuminated wax stamped R, I don't know if it is part of the enigma.
I used symbol ¤ where my friend put separators.

It seems this enigma is in French.

• As it seems to be an engimatic puzzle, appropriate tag such as engimatic-puzzle can be put against this one. – Mea Culpa Nay Oct 6 '17 at 8:52
• @MeaCulpaNay it's clearly a cipher of some sort, so that doesn't apply here. enigmatic-puzzle is not just for puzzles that seem enigmatic. – boboquack Oct 6 '17 at 10:16

The encoded message is:

Le roi du chocolat ne mange pas de lapin de Pâques.
(The king of Chocolate doesn't eat Easter bunny.)

The message ...

... is a transposition cipher. If you look at the letter distribution, you will see that it matches the frequency of letters in French, more or less. As in English, the predominant letter in French is E. All other vowels are present. (The message is in capital letters and it is common to remove accents from capital letters in French, so the Â is represented by just A.)

The actual encoding looks a bit like an inverted pyramid. First take every other letter, starting from the first letter. (That the first letter is an L, which starts all definite articles in French, is another hint that this might be a transposition cipher.) Then, take every fourth letter, starting from the first letter that wasn't used (namely the second), and so on:

    LEEN..RAOPI..ADEUS.DC.HQODCEOEL.A.T..LNUEA.PMPASNIG

L E . R O I . D U . C H O C O L A T . N E . M A N G
E   .   P   A   S   .   D   E   .   L   A   P   I
N       .       D       E       .       P
A               Q               U
E                               S


• Every letter goes on the row of the power of 2 in it's factorization. Cool! – LeppyR64 Oct 6 '17 at 16:26
• Yes, that's a more succinct and therefore better way to put it. When I said it looks like an inverted pyramid, I should have said it looks like an upside-down binary tree. – M Oehm Oct 6 '17 at 16:40