Holy Blood, Holy Grail (3 page)

During his stay in Paris, Sauniere also spent some time in the Louvre.

This may well be connected with the fact that, before his departure, he purchased reproductions of three paintings. One seems to have been a portrait, by an unidentified artist, of Pope Celestin V, who reigned briefly at the end of the thirteenth century. One was a work by David

Teniers although it is not clear which David Teniers, father or son.3 The third was perhaps the most famous tableau by Nicolas Poussin, “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’ - “The Shepherds of Arcadia’.

On his return to Rennes-leChateau, Sauniere resumed his restoration of the village church. In the process he exhumed a curiously carved flagstone, dating from the seventh or eighth century, which may have

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had a crypt beneath it, a burial chamber in which skeletons were said to have been found. Sauniere also embarked on projects of a rather more singular kind. In the churchyard, for example, stood the sepulchre of Marie, Marquise d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort. The headstone and flagstone marking her grave had been designed and installed by the Abbe Antoine Bigou - Sauniere’s predecessor of a century before, who had apparently composed two of the mysterious parchments. And the headstone’s inscription which included a number of deliberate errors in spacing and spelling was a perfect anagram for the message concealed in the parchments referring to Poussin and

Teniers. If one rearranges the letters, they will form the cryptic statement quoted above alluding to Poussin and to Sion (see p.26); and the errors seem to have been contrived precisely to make them do so.

Not knowing that the inscriptions on the marquise’s tomb had already been copied, Sauniere obliterated them. Nor was this desecration the only curious behaviour he exhibited. Accompanied by his faithful housekeeper, he began to make long journeys on foot about the countryside, collecting rocks of no apparent value or interest. He also embarked on a voluminous exchange of letters with unknown correspondents throughout France, as well as in

Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Spain. He took to collecting stacks of utterly worthless postage stamps. And he opened certain shadowy transactions with various banks. One of them even dispatched a representative from Paris, who travelled all the way to Rennes-leChateau for the sole purpose of ministering to Sauniere’s business.

In postage alone Sauniere was already spending a substantial sum more than his previous annual income could possibly sustain. Then, in 1896, he began to spend in earnest, on a staggering and unprecedented scale. By the end of his life in 1917 his expenditure would amount to the equivalent of several million pounds at least.

Some of this unexplained wealth was devoted to laudable public works a modern road was built leading up to the village, for example, and facilities for running water were provided. Other expenditures were more quixotic. A tower was built, the Tour Magdala, overlooking the called the Villa

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Bethania, which Sauniere himself never occupied. And the church was not only redecorated, but redecorated in a most bizarre fashion. A Latin inscription was incised in the porch lintel above the entrance:

TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE

(THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE)

Immediately inside the entrance a hideous statue was erected, a gaudy representation of the demon Asmodeus -custodian of secrets, guardian of hidden treasures and, according to ancient Judaic legend, builder of Solomon’s Temple. On the church walls lurid, garishly painted plaques were installed depicting the Stations of the Cross each was characterised by some odd inconsistency, some inexplicable added detail, some flagrant or subtle deviation from accepted Scriptural account. In Station VIII for example, there is a child swathed in a Scottish plaid. In Station XIV, which portrays Jesus’s body being carried into the tomb, there is a background of dark nocturnal sky, dominated by a full moon. It is almost as if Sauniere were trying to intimate something. But what? That Jesus’s burial occurred after nightfall, several hours later than the Bible tells us it did? Or that the body is being carried out of the tomb, not into it?

While engaged in this curious adornment, Sauniere continued to spend extravagantly. He collected rare china, precious fabrics, antique marbles.

He created an orangery and a zoological garden. He assembled a magnificent library.

Shortly before his death, he was allegedly planning to build a massive Babel-like tower lined with books, from which he intended to preach. Nor were his parishioners neglected.

Sauniere regaled them with sumptuous banquets and other forms of largesse, maintaining the life-style of a medieval potentate presiding over an impregnable mountain domain. In his remote and well-nigh inaccessible eyrie he received a number of notable guests. One, of course, was Emma Calve. One was the French Secretary of

State for Culture. But perhaps the most august and consequential visitor to the unknown country priest was the Archduke Johann von Habsburg, a cousin of Franz-Josef, Emperor of Austria. Bank statements subsequently revealed that Sauniere and the archduke had opened

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consecutive accounts on the same day, and that the latter had made a substantial sum over to the former.

The ecclesiastical authorities at first turned a blind eye. When Sauniere’s former superior at Carcassonne died, however, the new bishop attempted to call the priest to account.

Sauniere responded with startling and brazen defiance. He refused to explain his wealth.

He refused to accept the transfer the bishop ordered. Lacking any more substantial charge, the bishop accused him of simony -illicitly selling masses and a local tribunal suspended him. Sauniere appealed to the Vatican, which exonerated and reinstated him.

On January 17th, 1917, Sauniere, then in his sixty-fifth year, suffered a sudden stroke.

The date of January 17th is perhaps suspicious. The same date appears on the tombstone of the Marquise d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort -the tombstone Sauniere had eradicated. And January 17th is also the feast day of Saint Sulpice, who, as we were to discover, figured throughout our story. It was at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice that he confided his parchments to the Abbe Bieil and tmile Hoffet. But what makes Sauniere’s stroke on January 17th most suspicious is the fact that five days before, on January 12th, his parishioners declared that he had seemed to be in enviable health for a man of his age. Yet on January 12th, according to a receipt in our possession, Marie Denarnaud had ordered a coffin for her master.

As Sauniere lay on his deathbed, a priest was called from a neighbouring parish to hear his final confession and administer the last rites. The priest duly arrived and retired into the sick-room. According to eye-witness testimony, he emerged shortly thereafter, visibly shaken. In the words of one account he “never smiled again’. In the words of another he lapsed into an acute depression that lasted for several months. Whether these accounts are exaggerated or not, the priest, presumably on the basis of Sauniere’s confession, refused to administer extreme unction.

On January 22nd Sauniere died un shriven The following morning his body was placed upright in an armchair on the terrace of the Tour Magdala, clad in an ornate robe adorned with scarlet tassels. One by

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one, certain unidentified mourners filed past, many of them Map 2

Rennes-leChiteau and its Environs

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plucking tassels of remembrance from the dead man’s garment. There has never been any explanation of this ceremony. Present-day residents of

Rennes-leChateau are as mystified by it as everyone else.

The reading of Sauniere’s will was awaited with great anticipation. To everyone’s surprise and chagrin, however, it declared him to be utterly penniless. At some point before his death he had apparently transferred the whole of his wealth to Marie Denarnaud, who had shared his life and secrets for thirty-two years. Or perhaps most of that wealth had been in Marie’s name from the very beginning.

Following the death of her master, Marie continued to live a comfortable life in the Villa Bethania until 1946. After the Second World War, however, the newly installed French government issued a new currency. As a means of apprehending tax-evaders, collaborators and wartime profiteers, French citizens, when exchanging old francs for new, were obliged to account for their revenues. Confronted by the prospect of an explanation, Marie chose poverty. She was seen in the garden of the villa, burning vast sheaves of old franc notes.

For the next seven years Marie lived austerely, supporting herself on money obtained from the sale of Villa Bethania. She promised the purchaser,

Monsieur Noel Corbu, that she would confide to him, before her death, a “secret’ which would make him not only rich but also “powerful’. On January 29th, 1953, however, Marie, like her master before her, suffered a sudden and unexpected stroke which left her prostrate on her deathbed, incapable of speech. To Monsieur Corbu’s intense frustration, she died shortly thereafter, carrying her secret with her.

The Possible Treasures

This, in its general outlines, was the story published in France during the 1960s. This was the form in which we first became acquainted with it. And it was to the questions raised by the story in this form that we, like other researchers of the subject, addressed ourselves.

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The first question is fairly obvious. What was the source of Sauni&re’s money? Whence could such sudden and enormous wealth have come? Was the explanation ultimately banal? Or was there something more exciting involved? The latter possibility imparted a tantalising quality to the mystery, and we could not resist the impulse to play detectives.

We began by considering the explanations suggested by other researchers.

According to many of these, Sauniere had indeed found a treasure of some kind. This was a plausible enough assumption, for the history of the village and its environs includes many possible sources of hidden gold or jewels.

In prehistoric times, for example, the area around Rennes-leChateau was regarded as a sacred site by the Celtic tribes who lived there; and the village itself, once called Rhedae, derived its name from one of these tribes. In Roman times the area was a large and thriving community, important for its mines and therapeutic hot springs. And the Romans, too, regarded the site as sacred. Later researchers have found traces of several pagan temples.

During the sixth century, the little mountain-top village was supposedly a town with 30,000 inhabitants. At one point it seems to have been the northern capital of the empire ruled by the Visigoths the Teutonic people who had swept westwards from Central Europe, sacked Rome, toppled the Roman

Empire and established their own domain straddling the Pyrenees.

For another five hundred years the town remained the seat of an important county, or comte, the Comte of Razes. Then, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, an army of northern knights descended on the Languedoc to stamp out the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and claim the rich spoils of the region for themselves. During the atrocities of the so-called

Albigensian Crusade, Rennes-leChateau was captured and transferred from hand to hand as a fief. A century and a quarter later, in the 1360s, the local population was decimated by plague; and Rennes-leChateau was destroyed shortly thereafter by roving Catalan bandits.”

Tales of fantastic treasure are interwoven with many of these historical vicissitudes. The Cathar heretics, for example, were

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reputed to possess something of fabulous and even sacred value which, according to a number of legends, was the

Holy Grail. These legends reportedly impelled Richard Wagner to make a pilgrimage to RennesleChateau before composing his last opera, Parsifal; and during the occupation of 1940-45 German troops, following in Wagner’s wake, are said to have undertaken a number of fruitless excavations in the vicinity. There was also the vanished treasure of the Knights Templar, whose

Grand Master, Bertrand de Blanchefort, commissioned certain mysterious excavations in the vicinity. According to all accounts, these excavations were of a markedly clandestine nature, performed by a specially imported contingent of German miners. If some kind of Templar treasure were indeed concealed around Rennes-leChateau, this might explain the reference to “Sion’ in the parchments discovered by Sauniere.

There were other possible treasures as well. Between the fifth and dynasty, which included King Dagobert II. Rennes-leChateau, in Dagobert’s time, was a

Visigoth bastion, and Dagobert himself was married to a Visigoth princess.

The town might have constituted a sort of royal treasury; and there are documents which speak of great wealth amassed by Dagobert for military conquest and concealed in the environs of Rennes-leChateau. If Sauniere discovered some such depository, it would explain the reference in the codes to Dagobert.

The Cathars. The Templars. Dagobert II. And there was yet another possible treasure the vast booty accumulated by the Visigoths during their tempestuous advance through Europe. This might have included something more than conventional booty, possibly items of immense relevance both symbolic and literal to Western religious tradition. It might, in short, have included the legendary treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem which, even more than the Knights Templar, would warrant the references to “Sion’.

In A.D. 66 Palestine rose in revolt against the Roman yoke. Four years later, in A.D. 70, Jerusalem was razed by the legions of the emperor, under the command of his son, Titus. The Temple itself was sacked and the contents of the Holy of Holies carried back to Rome. As they are