The inspiration for this novel was born in the mountains, valleys, and villages of the Languedoc-Roussillon region. I wondered as I wandered through its ruined citadels and medieval towns, drank its wine, and whispered its language—what if? What if the Cathars were right? What if history just got it wrong? I set about to create my own version of events, draping layers of fantasy over a scaffolding of fact. Well, of history anyway. Fact is something else altogether, isn’t it?
History tells us this: in January 1208, papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered outside the village of Saint-Gilles, on the Provence-Languedoc border. The assassin was identified as an officer of Raymond VI, the Count of Toulouse. The powerful count, who governed much of the region, had been accused repeatedly of harboring sympathies for the Cathars; his second wife was a believer.
Within weeks of Castelnau’s assassination, Pope Innocent III declared war on the heretics, and the Catholic Church launched a religious crusade in the heart of Europe. The enemy wasn’t just the infidel in faraway Levant; it was the heretic within. By 1244, after decades of brutal sieges throughout Languedoc and through the systematic tortures of the Inquisition, the Languedoc Cathars were all but eliminated, making their last stand in the mountain fortification at Montségur.
I have chosen, for the reader’s comfort and to bridge the distance between past and present, to use all modern French place names in the text. Depending upon their country of origin and station in life, medieval characters would have communicated in Latin, in langue d’oïl—the antecedent to modern French—or in langue d’oc. Characters from Catalunya would have spoken a dialect of Occitan known as Aranese. I have assumed, with the grace of fiction, the ease of these characters’ transition between the Aranese and Languedocien dialects. Cathar followers in southern France were known as Albigensians, after Albi, a town northeast of Toulouse. They are now universally known as Cathars. For consistency, I have used Cathar and Catharism throughout the text.
This is a work of fiction. Some of the characters are historical persons, but their portrayals are entirely of my imagination, as are the events depicted here. All of the towns you will visit in In Another Life are real, except the village of Cluet. I have taken liberties with the location, names, and description of some existing sites.
So much of the Cathars’ writings were destroyed during the crusade that little is known of their beliefs and practices; I have not attempted to re-create a Cathar lifestyle here, believing there is often a wide gap between what religion dictates and how people truly live. The Cathars held many beliefs we would consider mystical or paranormal. My imagination was sparked by those Lia explains, resists, and finally accepts as truth: reincarnation and the remembering of lost souls.