Holy Blood, Holy Grail Page 4

  Having presented himself to Bieil and Hoffet, Saunière spent three weeks in Paris. What happened during his meetings with the ecclesiastics is unknown. What is known is that the provincial country priest was promptly and warmly welcomed into Hoffet’s distinguished circle. It has even been asserted that he became Emma Calvé’s lover. Contemporary gossips spoke of an affair between them, and one acquaintance of the singer described her as being "obsessed" with the curé. In any case, there is no question but that they enjoyed a close and enduring friendship. In the years that followed she visited him frequently in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château—where until recently one could still find romantic hearts bearing their initials carved into the rocks of the mountainside.

  During his stay in Paris Saunière 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 Celestine V, who reigned briefly at the very end of the thirteenth century. One was an unspecified work by David Tenters—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-le-Château Saunière resumed his restoration of the village church. In the process he exhumed a curiously carved flagstone dating from the seventh or eighth century; and there may have been a crypt beneath it, a burial chamber, in which skeletons were said to have been found. Saunière 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 flatstone marking her grave had been designed and installed by the Abbé Antoine Bigou—Sauniere’s predecessor of a century before, who had apparently composed two of the mysterious parchments. And indeed, 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 (see pp. 33-34); 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, Saunière obliterated them. Nor was this desecration the only curious behavior 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 traveled all the way to Rennes-le-Château for the sole purpose of ministering to Sauniere’s business.

  In postage alone Saunière 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 at least several million pounds.

  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 sheer side of the mountain. An opulent country house was constructed, called the Villa Bethania, which Saunière 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 characterized 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’ body being carried into the tomb, there is a background of dark nocturnal sky dominated by a full moon. It is almost as if Saunière were trying to intimate something. But what? That Jesus’ 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 Saunière 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. Saunière regaled them with sumptuous banquets and other forms of largess, maintaining the life-style of a medieval potentate presiding over an impregnable mountain domain. In his remote and well-nigh inaccessible aerie 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 Hapsburg, a cousin of Franz Josef, emperor of Austria. Bank statements subsequently revealed that Saunière and the archduke had opened a consecutive accounts on the same day and that the latter had made substantial sum over to the former.

  The ecclesiastical authorities at first turned a blind eye. When Saunière’s former superior at Carcassonne died, however, the new bishop attempted to call the priest to account. Saunière 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. Saunière appealed to the Vatican, which exonerated and reinstated him.

  On January 17, 1917, Saunière, then in his sixty-fifth year, suffered a sudden stroke. The date of January 17 is perhaps suspicious. The same date appears on the tombstone of the Marquise d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort—the tombstone Saunière had eradicated. And January 17 is also the feast day of Saint Sulpice. Saunière himself had made something of a cult of Saint Sulpice. It was at the seminary of Saint Sulpice that he confided his parchments to the Abbé Bieil and Émile Hoffet. But what makes Saunière’s stroke on January 17 most suspicious is the fact that five days before, on January 12, his parishioners declared that he had seemed to be in enviable health for a man his age. Yet on January 12, according to a receipt in our possession, Marie Denarnaud had ordered a coffin for her master.

  As Saunière lay on his deathbed, a priest was called from a neighboring parish to hear his final confession and administer the last rites. The priest duly arrived and retired into the sickroom. According to eyewitness 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 Saunière’s confession, refused to administer Extreme Unction.

  On January 22 Saunière died unshriven. 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 one certain unidentified mourners filed past, many of them plucking tassels of remembrance from the dead man’s garment. There has never been any explanation of this ceremony. Present-day residents or Rennes-le-Château are as mystified by it as everyone else.

  The reading of Saunière’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 Noël Corbu, that she would confide to him, before her death, a "secret" that would make him not only rich but also "powerful." On January 29, 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.

  The first question is fairly obvious. What was the source of Saunière’s money? From where 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 tantalizing 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 Saunière 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-le-Chateau 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 mountaintop village was supposedly a town with thirty thousand 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 westward 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 comté, the Comté 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-le-Château 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-le-Château was destroyed shortly thereafter by roving Catalan bandits.4

  2 Rennes-le-Château and its environs

  Tales of fantastic treasure are interwoven with many of these historical vicissitudes. The Cathar heretics, for example, were 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 Rennes-le-Château 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-le-Château, this might explain the reference to "Sion" in the parchments discovered by Saunière.

  There were other possible treasures as well. Between the fifth and eighth centuries much of modern France was ruled by the Merovingian dynasty, which included King Dagobert II. Rennes-le-Château, 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 that speak of great wealth amassed by Dagobert for military conquest and concealed in the environs of Rennes-le-Château. If Saunière discovered some such depository, it would explain the reference to Dagobert in the codes.

  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 treasure of 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 depicted on Titus’ 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 tell 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 Saunière’s unexplained wealth. The priest may have discovered any of several treasures, or he may have discovered a single treasure that had 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 Saunière discovered treasure. At the same time it seemed clear to us that whatever else he discovered, he also discovered a secret—a historical secret of immense import to his own time and perhaps to our own. Mere money, gold, or jewels would not in themselves explain a number of facets of 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 Saunière defied his bishop, or his subsequent exoneration by the 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 Hapsburg archduke to a remote little village in the Pyrenees. 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" that conferred not merely wealth but "power" as well.

  On these grounds we grew increasingly convinced that Saunière’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 a nineteenth-century priest. Whatever it was, it appeared to radiate out from Rennes-le-Château and produce ripples—perhaps even a potential tidal wave—in the world beyond.

  Could Saunière’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 Saunière’s wealth have been his payment for silence?

  We knew that he had received money from Johann von Hapsburg. 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 the other hand, there was one institution that throughout Saunière’s later career seems to have been distinctly afraid of him and to have treated him with kid gloves—the Vatican. Could Saunière have been blackmailing the Vatican? Granted such blackmail would be a 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 Hapsburgs? What if the Archduke Johann were only an intermediary and the money he bestowed on Saunière actually issued from the coffers of Rome?6