Holy Blood, Holy Grail (4 page)

- 25 -

depicted on Titus’s triumphal arch, these included the immense gold seven-branched candelabrum so sacred to Judaism, and possibly even the Ark of the Covenant.

Three and a half centuries later, in A.D. 410, Rome in her turn was sacked by the invading Visigoths under Alaric the Great, who pillaged virtually the entire wealth of the Eternal City. As the historian Procopius tells us,

Alaric made off with “the treasures of Solomon, the King of the Hebrews, a sight most worthy to be seen, for they were adorned in the most part with emeralds and in the olden time they had been taken from Jerusalem by the

Romans.”5

Treasure, then, may well have been the source of Sauniere’s unexplained wealth. The priest may have discovered any of several treasures, or he may have discovered a single treasure which repeatedly changed hands through the centuries passing perhaps from the Temple of Jerusalem, to the

Romans, to the Visigoths, eventually to the Cathars and/or the Knights

Templar. If this were so, it would explain why the treasure in question “belonged’ both to Dagobert II and to Sion.

Thus far our story seemed to be essentially a treasure story. And a treasure story even one involving the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem is ultimately of limited relevance and significance. People are constantly discovering treasures of one kind or another.

Such discoveries are often exciting, dramatic and mysterious, and many of them cast important illumination on the past. Few of them, however, exercise any direct influence, political or otherwise, on the present unless, of course, the treasure in question includes a secret of some sort, and possibly an explosive one.

We did not discount the argument that Sauniere discovered treasure. At the same time it seemed clear to us that, whatever else he discovered, he also discovered a secret an historical secret of immense import to his own time and perhaps to our own as well. Mere money, gold or jewels would not, in themselves, explain a number of facets to his story. They would not account for his introduction to Hoffet’s circle, for instance, his association with Debussy and his liaison with Emma Calve. They would not explain the Church’s intense interest in the matter, the impunity with which Sauniere defied his bishop or his subsequent exoneration by the

- 26 -

Vatican, which seemed to have displayed an urgent concern of its own.

They would not explain a priest’s refusal to administer the last rites to a dying man, or the visit of a Habsburg archduke to a remote little village in the Pyrenees. The Habsburg archduke in question has since been revealed as Johann Salvator von Habsburg, known by the pseudonym of Jean

Orth. He renounced all his rights and titles in 1889 and within two months had been banished from all the territories of the Empire. It was shortly after this that he first appeared in Rennes le Chateau.

Said officially to have died in 1890 but in fact died in Argentina in 1910 or 1911. See Les

Maisons Souveraines de L’Autriche by Dr. Dugast ROulIIe, Paris, 1967, page 191. Nor would money, gold or jewels explain the powerful aura of mystification surrounding the whole affair, from the elaborate coded ciphers to Marie Denarnaud burning her inheritance of banknotes. And Marie herself had promised to divulge a ‘secret’ which conferred not merely wealth but ‘power’ as well.

On these grounds we grew increasingly convinced that Sauniere’s story involved more than riches, and that it involved a secret of some kind, one that was almost certainly controversial. In other words it seemed to us that the mystery was not confined to a remote backwater village and nineteenth-century priest. Whatever it was, it appeared to radiate out from

Rennes-leChateau and produce ripples perhaps even a potential tidal wave in the world beyond. Could Sauniere’s wealth have come not from anything of intrinsic financial value, but from knowledge of some kind? If so, could this knowledge have been turned to fiscal account? Could it have been used to blackmail somebody, for example? Could Sauniere’s wealth have been his payment for silence?

We knew that he had received money from Johann von Habsburg. At the same time, however, the priest’s ‘secret’, whatever it was, seemed to be more religious in nature than political. Moreover, his relations with the

Austrian archduke, according to all accounts, were notably cordial. On later career, seems to have been distinctly afraid of him, and to have treated him with kid gloves the Vatican. Could Sauniere have been blackmailing the Vatican? Granted such blackmail would be a

- 27 -

presumptuous and dangerous undertaking for one man, however exhaustive his precautions. But what if he were aided and supported in his enterprise by others, whose eminence rendered them inviolable to the church, like the French Secretary of State for Culture, or the Habsburgs? What if the Archduke Johann were only an intermediary, and the money he bestowed on Sauniere actually issued from the coffers of Rome?s

The Intrigue

In February 1972 The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?” the first of our three films on Sauniere and the mystery of Rennes-leChateau, was shown.

The film made no controversial assertions, it simply told the ‘basic story’ as it has been recounted in the preceding pages, Nor was there any speculation about an ‘explosive secret’ or highlevel blackmail. It is also worth mentioning that the film did not cite smile Hoffet the young clerical scholar in

Paris to whom Sauniere confided his parchments by name.

Not surprisingly perhaps, we received a veritable deluge of mail. Some of it offered intriguing speculative suggestions. Some of it was complimentary. Some of it was dotty.

Of all these letters, one, which the writer did not wish us to publicise, seemed to warrant special attention.

It came from a retired Anglican priest and seemed a curious and provocative non sequitur.

Our correspondent wrote with categorical certainty and authority. He made his assertions baldly and definitively, with no elaboration, and with apparent indifference as to whether we believed him or not. The ‘treasure’, he declared flatly, did not involve gold or precious stones. On the contrary, it consisted of ‘incontrovertible proof’ that the Crucifixion was a fraud and that Jesus was alive as late as A.D. 45.

This claim sounded flagrantly absurd. What, even to a convinced atheist, could possibly comprise ‘incontrovertible proof’ that Jesus survived the

Crucifixion? We were unable to imagine anything which could not be disbelieved or repudiated which would not only comprise ‘proof’, but

‘proof’ that was truly ‘incontrovertible’. At the same time the sheer

- 28 -

extravagance of the assertion begged for clarification and

elaboration. The writer of the letter had provided a return address. At the earliest opportunity we drove to see him and attempted to interview him.

In person he was rather more reticent than he had been in his letter, and seemed to regret having written to us in the first place. He refused to expand upon his reference to “incontrovertible proof’ and volunteered only one additional fragment of information. This “proof’, he said, or its existence at any rate, had been divulged to him by another Anglican cleric,

Canon Alfred Leslie Liney.

Liney, who died in 1940, had published widely and was not unknown.

During much of his life he had maintained contacts with the Catholic Modernist

Movement, based primarily at Saint Sulpice in Paris. In his youth Liney had worked in Paris, and had been acquainted with Emile Hoffet.

The trail had come full circle. Given a connection between Liney and Hoffet, the claims of the priest, however preposterous, could not be summarily dismissed. Similar evidence of a monumental secret was forthcoming when we began to research the life of Nicolas Poussin, the great seventeenth-century painter whose name recurred throughout Sauniere’s story. In 1656 Poussin, who was living in Rome at the time, had received a visit from the Abbe Louis Fouquet, brother of Nicolas Fouquet,

Superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV of France. From Rome, the abbe dispatched a letter to his brother, describing his meeting with Poussin.

Part of this letter is worth quoting.

He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever rediscover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.?

Neither historians nor biographers of Poussin or Fouquet have ever been able satisfactorily to explain this letter, which clearly alludes to

- 29 -

some mysterious matter of immense import. Not long after receiving it, Nicolas Fouquet was arrested and imprisoned for the duration of his life. According to certain accounts, he was held strictly incommunicado and some historians regard him as a likely candidate for the Man in the Iron Mask. In the meantime the whole of his correspondence was confiscated by Louis XIV, who inspected all of it personally. In the years that followed the king went determinedly out of his way to obtain the original of Poussin’s painting, “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’.

When he at last succeeded it was sequestered in his private apartments at

Versailles.

Whatever its artistic greatness, the painting would seem to be innocent enough. In the foreground three shepherds and a shepherdess are gathered about a large antique tomb, contemplating the inscription in the weathered stone: “ET IN ARCADIA EGO’. In the background looms a rugged, mountainous landscape of the sort generally associated with Poussin. According to

Anthony Blunt, as well as other Poussin experts, this landscape was wholly mythical, a product of the painter’s imagination. In the early 1970s, however, an actual tomb was located, identical to the one in the painting identical in setting, dimensions, proportions, shape, surrounding vegetation, even in the circular outcrop of rock on which one of Poussin’s shepherds rests his foot. This actual tomb stands on the outskirts of a village called Arques -approximately six miles from Rennes-leChateau, and three miles from the chateau of Blanchefort. If one stands before the sepulchre the vista is virtually indistinguishable from that in the painting. And then it becomes apparent that one of the peaks in the background of the painting is Rennes-leChateau.

There is no indication of the age of the tomb. It may, of course, have been erected quite recently but how did its builders ever locate a setting which matches so precisely that of the painting? In fact it would seem to have been standing in Poussin’s time, and “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’ would seem to be a faithful rendering of the actual site.

According to the peasants in the vicinity, the tomb has been there for as long as they, their parents and grandparents can remember. And there is said to be specific mention of it in a memoire dating from

- 30 -

1709.8 According to records in the village of Arques, the land on which the tomb starts belonged, until his death in the 1950s, to an American, one Louis

Lawrence of Boston, Massachusetts. In the 1920s Mr. Lawrence opened the sepulchre and found it empty. His wife and mother-in-law were later buried in it.

When preparing the first of our BBC films on Rennes-leChateau, we spent a morning shooting footage of the tomb. We broke off for lunch and returned some three hours later.

During our absence, a crude and violent attempt had been made to smash into the sepulchre.

If there was once an inscription on the actual tomb, it had long since been weathered away. As for the inscription on the tomb in Poussin’s painting, it would seem to be conventionally elegiac Death announcing his sombre presence even in Arcadia, the idyllic pastoral paradise of classical myth.

And yet the inscription is curious because it lacks a verb. Literally translated, it reads: AND IN ARCADIA I .. .

Why should the verb be missing? Perhaps for a philosophical reason to preclude all tense, all indication of past, present or future, and thereby to imply something eternal? Or perhaps for a reason of a more practical nature.

The codes in the parchments found by Sauniere had relied heavily on anagrams, on the transposition and rearrangement of letters. Could

“ET

IN

ARCADIA EGO’ also perhaps be an anagram? Could the verb have been omitted so that the inscription would consist only of certain precise letters? One of our television viewers, in writing to us, suggested that this might indeed be so and then rearranged the letters into a coherent Latin statement. The result was:

I “FEGO ARCANA DEI

(BEGONE! I CONCEAL THE SECRETS OF GOD)

We were pleased and intrigued by this ingenious exercise. We did not realise at the time how extraordinarily appropriate the resulting

- 31 -

admonition was. 2 The Cathars and the Great Heresy

We began our investigation at a point with which we already had a certain familiarity the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and the crusade it provoked in the thirteenth century. We were already aware that the Cathars figured somehow in the mystery surrounding Sauniere and Rennes-leChateau. In the first place the medieval heretics had been numerous in the village and its environs, which suffered brutally during the course of the Albigensian

Crusade. Indeed, the whole history of the region is soaked in Cathar blood, and the residues of that blood, along with much bitterness, persist to the present day. Many peasants in the area now, with no inquisitors 1o fall upon them, openly proclaim Cathar sympathies. There is even a Cathar church and a so-called “Cathar pope’ who, until his death in 1978, lived in the village of Arques.

We knew that Sauniere had immersed himself in the history and folklore of his native soil, so he could not possibly have avoided contact with Cathar thought and traditions. He could not have been unaware that RennesleChateau was an important town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and something of a Cathar bastion.