CHAPTER ELEVEN

GLIMPSES AND GLANCES: IMPRESSIONS OF SOME CONTEMPORARY RENNES INVESTIGATORS

Qui docet, discit.

If the number of objects it attracts is a measure of a body's gravity, Rennes-le-Château is a veritable black hole among the earth's strange and mysterious places. Writers and artists, historians and archaeologists, journalists and broadcasters, mystics and priests, scientists and prospectors…Rennes draws them all inexorably into her mysterious web.

Perhaps there is also a sense in which Rennes affects all her adherents like a metaphysical mirror. While grudgingly yielding only a grain or two of fact about herself, Rennes holds up a revealing glass which reflects her investigators harshly and starkly.

In his article entitled Fernseed and Elephants, C. S. Lewis illustrated the mortal danger inherent in all attempts at comment and criticism: the commentator or critic never really knows all the facts. He, or she, can never get inside the heart and mind of the subject, can never fully appreciate the circumstances under which the other person worked. Of all Christ's teachings, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” is among the greatest — and is sadly the most neglected! The authors approach this section of the work with some reluctance and hesitation, aware that with the best of intentions they may be doing scant justice to colleagues in the field who have laboured hard and long, and whose only offence is to have arrived at a different conclusion from ours! Where we have made that kind of error, we ask forgiveness in advance.

What follows is only a series of glimpses and glances; where an important contemporary work has not been studied and commented on, we hope to make amends in later editions and revisions.

Perhaps the best place to start the survey is with our old friend, Henri Buthion.

Henri Buthion

When we made our second research visit to Rennes in the 1970's we stayed at what was then M. Henri Buthion's small hotel: the very place where Saunière had lived almost a century before. Henri cooked superbly (the authors still remember the fish!) and looked after us, our expedition photographer, Peter Rice, and our artist friend, Patrick Kirby, very well indeed — in the highest traditions of French hospitality.

On an unforgettable August evening after a strenuous day on the mountains, the four of us sat enthralled as Henri gave us his version of the Rennes mystery. The gist of what he said was that as a child Bérenger Saunière used to say, “Let's go up to Rennes-le-Château to look for the treasure.” Henri himself had heard this from an actual witness, and he went on to say what a bad state of repair the little church was in when Saunière arrived: woodwork was worm-eaten and rotten; plaster statues were crumbling and collapsing; there was no stained glass left in the windows; everything was a wreck and the wind and rain were getting in. Henri asserts strongly — in the face of counter-arguments from some other Rennes experts — that as the result of a visit from a local benefactress, Saunière was able to carry out some preliminary restoration work on the altar, and that during this refurbishment the famous coded parchment scrolls were discovered in or near one of the altar pillars. According to Henri, Saunière examined the documents for about two hours and then ordered his builders to stop work. About two weeks later, Saunière went to visit Abbé Grasseau at St. Paul de Fenouillère because Grasseau was in contact with the hermetic centres in Paris. It was in this way, said Henri, that Saunière made contact with “the Parisian set”.

On his return to Rennes, according to Henri Buthion's version, Saunière pointed to a spot on the church floor and said, “We'll dig here!” At a depth of about half a metre they encountered the Knight's Tombstone (the one that's now on display in the little museum at Rennes). It was lying face down, and they raised it carefully. One of the builders thought he saw something glinting underneath. Saunière said, “It's Sunday tomorrow. We can't have a hole in the middle of the church floor. Stop work now and come back on Monday morning.”

On their return on the Monday morning, the builders lifted the stone at once. “Hey! There's nothing underneath it now,” they exclaimed. They could tell that it had been moved and replaced. “Well, yes, I did it,” Saunière explained. “It was from that time onwards,” went on Henri, “that Saunière began making his journeys abroad taking heavy suitcases with him.” Henri went on to say that the grandsons of the men who had carried the priest's cases for him commented on how heavy they were. Saunière made two or three of these mysterious overseas trips, explained Henri, and then began restoring and rebuilding his church in the Carolingian style. He believes that Saunière chose to make Carolingian style (his words) restorations because it was the ancient Carolingian documents (his words again) that led him to the treasure. Henri also said that there was an ancient genealogy among the parchments, one which said that Sigebert IV, the five year old son of Dagobert II, had escaped from the ambush in which his father was killed. Their descendants became the Counts of Razès. Henri was absolutely certain that the ancient stone dated from the eighth century and that it was meant to depict a horseman leading a child. It was also Henri's view that the stone was once part of the tomb of Sigebert IV and that it was originally immured in the wall where the statue of St. Anthony of Padua stands today. He is a keen and knowledgeable student of church architecture and argues that the external pattern of the church goes back at least to Visigothic or Lombardic times. He comments particularly on the two Carolingian bays and the tower.

Henri believes that certain additions were made by the Blancheforts in the Templar style of architecture, and that there were at one time two tombs built into the walls: one of these was ultimately used to make the stairs which lead up to the present pulpit, but the one on the opposite side was hidden — not by Saunière, but by Bigou. According to Henri, it was also Bigou who moved the contents of that tomb and hid them somewhere in the church before concealing the hole in the wall. He says that this hole was re-discovered in the 1960's when some official excavations were made in the church: but it was then completely empty.

Henri says that there is little doubt that Saunière found at least one very special and valuable prize in a tomb in the centre of the church: a thirteenth century chalice and some gold crowns from the reign of St. Louis (King Louis IX). According to Henri, Saunière gave four such crowns to a family from Carcassonne. “They are extremely rare,” he said. “Only eight are known to exist in the whole world.”

Henri is also convinced that Saunière found treasure of a sacred nature: something infinitely more valuable than gold or jewels, and that in order to capitalise on its unique religious worth he did a deal — or deals — with either the Vatican or the Habsburgs. Henri thinks that this explains what he describes as the frequent visits of Johann Qean) of Habsburg to Rennes-le-Château.

Henri also tells how Sauniere financed missions to Africa and paid for the building of convents and monasteries — as well as the huge sums he spent in Rennes itself. Commenting on Saunière's apparent financial difficulties towards the end of his life, he believes that these were due to the political problems then existing between the French and Austrian Governments, and spying charges levelled against Saunière which would made it very imprudent for him to have been seen receiving money from Austria.

Turning to the subject of Marie Dénamaud, in whose name Saunière had bought all the land, Henri described her as an ordinary peasant girl, very shrewd and intelligent, almost sly according to some of those who knew her. Sadly, after Saunière's death, Henri explained, she failed to keep things in good repair. She kept rabbits and chickens on the estate. She grew flowers in the huge greenhouses where he had cultivated oranges and lemon trees. “The garden turned into a wilderness,” Henri said sadly. “She let everything go.” Even the once exquisitely elegant Villa Bethania fell open to the elements and became uninhabitable. (Authors' note: As previously mentioned, this is where we stayed for a few days during one of our trips to Rennes in the 1970's. Even though M. Corbu — and later Henri himself — had worked wonders of restoration on it by then, there was still something in its atmosphere reminiscent of lines from Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher: “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stem, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.”)

Henri told us that he had taken over the presbytery in 1966. At that time the floorboards were rotten and the staircases were falling down: Marie had abandoned everything, and this neglect had persisted for thirty-five years. Henri tells of how his predecessor, M. Corbu, had taken over from Marie, given her a life annuity, looked after her and treated her kindly. But by the time M. Corbu acquired the estate the library door of the tower was missing — it had been stolen — and the interior had been exposed to the weather. The furniture, however, was very strong and solid and all Saunière's books were still there, including a seventeenth century Bible in twenty-four volumes.

Henri then related how Marie had promised M. Corbu that she would tell him something which would make him rich before she died, but she died following a stroke which left her unable to communicate. He then referred to the episode of the ancient rings which Marie owned. On being asked where the ones she was wearing had come from, she took them off and never wore them again. Henri also says that Gérard de Sède, a pioneer researcher of the Rennes mystery, claimed that in a letter written in the year of her death Marie asked for one of those ancient rings to be sold. Henri uses this data to support the theory that part, at least, of the Rennes treasure was of the traditional kind — gold and jewels of some sort. He then argues very astutely that if the treasure had been only gold, silver and jewels there would have been little difficulty in selling it locally. Certainly Toulouse, Carcassonne or Narbonne would have contained possible buyers. Even Marseilles would have been nearer, safer and more convenient than Austria.

To use Henri Buthion's words: “It must have been something absolutely beyond price.” That very significant comment re-awakens echoes of the old Cathar statement about whatever it was that was smuggled away from the siege of Montségur: pecuniam infinitam— unlimited wealth.

At the end of 1990, Lionel had an opportunity to visit Dr. Arthur Guirdham, the renowned authority on Catharism, to ask what he thought the four heroic mountaineers from Montségur had carried down its precipitous sides under cover of darkness. “Books,” said the doctor, “esoteric manuscripts of some kind. I think that's the most probable answer.”

Could it have been those same books, or the secret knowledge within them, which Saunière discovered six centuries later and possibly sold to Johann (Jean) Salvator, the Habsburg prince? Could such books have contained information which Henri Buthion described as “something absolutely beyond price” or what the Inquisition records called pecuniam infinitam? Or could they have contained information about the whereabouts of something and secret instructions about how to operate it?

Henri Buthion also has interesting ideas about alchemy, transmutation and the mysterious Nicholas Flamel. He believes that transmutation might have been possible, even that Flamel might have known how to do it, but that it was not the source of his wealth. Henri thinks that the important aspect of transmutation is spiritual rather than physical, and that no one has the right to use it to acquire material wealth. In his opinion, Flamel's wealth came because he helped a Jewish community (who had been exiled from Lyons) to recover treasure that was rightfully theirs. Flamel dealt faithfully and honourably with his Jewish friends and was rewarded accordingly. Henri also said that Flamel, although not immortal, did have the secret of some sort of rejuvenating medicine, or elixir of youth, and that he had used it to help the French King — who had shown his gratitude as generously as Flamel's Jewish friends had done.

From the possibility of alchemy, Henri turned next to the mysterious and contentious subject of the so-called Priory of Sion. He thinks that Saunière did contact a secret society to help him decipher the coded manuscripts, but that the priest's association with whatever secret society it was ended at that. Henri also wonders whether Rennes was one of the Priory of Sion's headquarters during the seventeenth century.

He spoke next of the mysterious tombstone codes which he has studied in great depth and on which he is undoubtedly an important authority. Redis, he said, stood for the ancient Visigothic capital, and was carved on the tombs of ancient warriors and nobles whose treasures had been buried with them. The words regis, cellis, arcis, he explained, were understood to mean, in addition: “There is treasure at Rennes in the hiding place of the king in the citadel.”

Henri moved on from these enigmatic local tombstones to the “Arcadian” tomb which Poussin had painted, and its connection with the neighbouring village of arques. The redis, regis, cellis, arcis inscription could also mean: “Go to Rennes to the tomb of the King at Arques”. Henri maintains strongly that there are two versions of Poussin's “Shepherds of Arcadia” in the Louvre, but that the Louvre authorities don't talk about them — which he finds very strange. Only one is on show there. (At this point in our conversation Henri produced a colour reproduction of the version said not to be on show!)

He told us that in Saunière's time only the foundations of the ancient tomb of arques could be seen. According to Henri, this earlier tomb had been pulled down by Colbert — Minister of Finance to Louis XIV—who had also undertaken extensive excavations at Chateau Blanchefort. This can be proved, he says by its inclusion in the report of the Intendent of Languedoc. Henri maintains that the “modem” tomb — the one which we examined closely in the 1970's, but which was recently demolished — was erected by Lawrence over the foundations of the ancient tomb in 1904/1905.

Henri then produced a copy of another Poussin painting showing King Midas bathing in the River Pactol with the water god watching him. In the Languedoc the name for the river which flows by the site of the tomb of Arques is: The River of the King's Gold.

Henri tells his fascinating story quietly, simply, impressively and with great conviction. It is soundly argued and very well worth hearing. Although it appears to answer several of the Rennes questions very satisfactorily, it raises almost as many.

The matter of the Louvre paintings to which Henri refers is a curious one: certainly the letters reproduced in our Correspondence Appendix support his view of the affair. When we wrote to the Louvre asking for information about the second or “hidden” version of “The Shepherds of Arcadia” we received a polite denial of its existence. When Peter Rice, our photographer on one of the early expeditions, called in person one Saturday and asked to see it, he was told that it did exist but that it could not be seen at week-ends: all very curious.

Henri Fatin

Less than a stone's throw from Henri Buthion's home in what was once Saunière's grand estate stands the ancient and mysterious Château Hautpoul — the home of M. Henri Fatin.

Henri (son of the late M. Marius Fatin who bought Château Hautpoul in 1946 and lived there until his death in 1967) has spent the whole of his life in this strange, deeply historic place. Henri is a very talented sculptor and an avid collector. When he and his sister showed us around their unusual and atmospheric home it was an unforgettable experience. As you move from room to stairway, from courtyard to oubliette, from deep Romano-Visigothic foundations to lofty but decaying seventeenth century walls, it is like walking under the lintels of history, moving through twenty centuries in a single afternoon. A serious and knowledgeable student of astronomy, astrology, geology, archaeology and prehistory, Henri showed us a wide range of samples from his amazing collection of pottery, fossils and ancient artefacts found in and around Rennes — and very generously gave us some interesting items to keep. He also showed us a few beautifully illustrated and carefully annotated pages from the hand-produced book about Rennes and Château Hautpoul which he and his father began compiling together, and on which Henri is still working. It was from M. Fatin that the idea of Rennes itself resembling a “Ship of the Dead” bearing a great dead warrior came. This unusual theory of his is significantly reinforced by an extract from the twelfth century Anglo-Latin author, Gervase of Tilbury, given in full in the appendix entitled “Shipping the Dead”.

Gervase, a relative of Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, lived the life of a scholarly adventurer. Despite being a Clerk in Holy Orders he rose to become Marshall of Aries under Emperor Otto IV and married a rich and beautiful young heiress. His contemporary account of mysterious, silent and unmanned “ships of the dead” bearing their cargoes of corpses and treasure down the River Rhone to the cemetery at Aries makes strange and compelling reading. Does it have any connection at all with the enigmatic coded text of the supposed Rennes parchments? “This treasure belongs to King Dagobert II…and he is there dead.”

Not far from M. Fatin's Château and adjacent to the ancient church is the small but excellent museum run by Antoine Captier and his wife, Claire Corbu, daughter of the late M. Noël Corbu who befriended and cared for Marie Dénamaud in her declining years. First class conducted tours are available for museum visitors and the brightly vivacious, effervescent, ever helpful and fluently bilingual Celia Brooke is on hand to help the many English-speaking visitors. It is also possible to meet Antoine's brother, the official Village Guardian, Marcel Captier, who is a gifted artist and illustrator, and is also a very well-informed source of information about the Rennes mystery. The Captier brothers' great grandfather was Saunière's bellringer, and it was he who discovered the mysterious little glass vial hidden in the secret compartment in the old pulpit balustrade which can now be seen in the museum. But, as always with Rennes-le-Château, not only is there some evidence that this balustrade is solid and could not possibly have contained anything at all, but also that it could well be a reproduction installed in Saunière's time!

Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln

The Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln team have also bored pretty deeply into the Rennes mystery, but, unlike Paul Smith, they give the impression that they had a particular objective or conclusion in mind before they began their explorations. That seems to us a great pity. Their love of historical mystery and the intriguing way they build up the suspense in their books makes exciting and entertaining reading — which is why the anticlimax of what we believe to be their very badly mistaken conclusion is so much more of a disappointment. We cannot help thinking that if once they could disentangle themselves from the mare's nest of the Jesus-married-Mary-Magdalen/Merovingian/Priory-of-Sion theories and start looking for an alternative explanation of their extensive research and fascinating clues they could well produce something really startling and significant.

Robert Heinlein, the talented SF author, once wrote a novel called The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. It began brilliantly. The suspense and mystery were genuinely gripping…but it petered out into a mundane ending which did not live up to the promise of the earlier parts of the story. Sadly, there is a Jonathan Hoag quality about the Rennes work of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. The reader is left wishing that it had ended as well as it began.

Henry Lincoln's new book The Holy Place which is currently being released by Jonathan Cape, concentrates on his latest theory, the result of some twenty years' research and reflection on the data, that there exists in the Rennes area an astounding pentacle of mountain peaks and an even more astounding artificial structure which surrounds it! If he is right — and he could well be — his discoveries generate a whole new series of very challenging and fascinating questions. Who built it, and when? How did they do it, and why? What began as a local mystery centred on Bérenger Saunière's inexplicable wealth, grew to include the Jesus-and-Mary-Magdalen theories and the Priory of Sion, codes in paintings, clues in cartography, traces on tombstones and ciphers in parchments, mysterious genealogies and hints of alchemy and black magic. Henry Lincoln's latest researches look as if they may be taking the bounds of the Rennes mystery further still.

Paul Smith

No bloodhound with a nose for truth could ever hope to be in the same league as Paul Smith. If he were an income tax inspector, a Scotland Yard fraud squad superintendent or a district auditor, the careless and the dishonest would cringe and tremble at the sound of his name. Undoubtedly, Paul could also have made a high reputation for himself as an analytical chemist — if chemistry had interested him as much as Rennes does. His appetite for facts is voracious. He devours all the relevant data, cross references it thoroughly, re-checks everything three times and still keeps a question mark handy in case he's overlooked something. Paul goes to war with two battle cries emblazoned across his banner: “Who said so?”, and “Where did he get it from?” His appendix to the present volume, for which the authors and publishers are most grateful, is a mine of tightly compressed, granite hard information.

Stanley James

Stanley James is a weaver of webs; and he does it with immense skill and delicacy. As though by magic, he produces one convoluted thread after another, working them into intricate patterns and complicated designs. He is no stubborn fact-sifter as Paul Smith is; neither does he decide on an answer and deliberately build a subsequent framework of questions in order to reach it. His writing gives the impression that he has the heart of a connoisseur, or a truly sophisticated collector. Yet somewhere in that curator's heart of his, there is a reluctance to discard any piece which might, eventually, be shown to have value or importance. If he were a prophet's disciple he would not only wish to preserve the holy man's left sandal but the grass on which it trod, the soil below that grass and the bird now flying overhead whose fleeting shadow once passed over the sacred turf! He approaches the codes, the ciphers, the symbols and the real and supposed clues in and around Rennes like a wise old Victorian gardener bent on propagation. He grafts an idea here, cross-pollinates a theory or two there, takes a slender cutting of fact, dusts it with his own patent brand of hormone hypothesis powder and watches it lovingly while it takes root. If he has a fault at all, it is that he is too good and subtle a weaver, too skilful and successful a gardener. The reader cannot help but admire his emulation of Adam's ability and Arachne's skill, but is left wondering whether the webs of derivation which he has woven are somehow becoming too heavy and elaborate to be sustained by the slender threads of fact attaching them. to the cavern walls.

Stanley James has the kind of ingenuity which can find the letter A cut into the wall of a cave and deduce: that its apex is pointing in a significant direction; that its cross bar forms an isosceles triangle the bisector of which (if drawn) would mark an important point on the map; that its three sides represent Boudet, Saunière and Bigou in chronological order; that their names lead to their parishes and that we must take measurements from there; that the letter A if laid on the floor of the church at Rennes with its apex towards the altar would indicate two important paintings or statues with its “feet”; that one of these would be a saint with an A in his name and — as A is pronounced like “Aix” in “Aix-les-Bains” — that it is, therefore, probable that the treasure hunter should pay a visit to Aix-les-Bains in Savoie, 15 kilometres north of Chambery, and search the museum there which occupies the site of the old Roman temple…and so on…and so on…

One acceptable definition of intelligence is that it is the ability to see connections — whether Stanley James's theories are right or not, there can be no doubt about the very considerable intelligence that lies behind them. All his ideas are contained in his previously quoted book The Treasure Maps of Rennes-le-Château, which is still available and deserves to be read.

Elizabeth van Buren

Just as it is easy to admire Stanley James's wonderfully woven webs of interconnected derivations — even if they might sometimes seem to cross gulfs which are a shade too wide for them — so it is equally easy to admire Elizabeth van Buren's towering heights of mysticism and imagination. St. Paul once wrote of a man (he may, modestly, have chosen to refer to himself in the third person in this passage) who was “caught up to the third heaven” where he heard “inexpressible things which man is not permitted to tell” (II Corinthians, chapter 12 : 2 et seq.).

Like all gifted and intuitive writers, M. van Buren makes sudden psychic bounds and mystic leaps which are not always easy for the reader to follow, and she also sees connections which, while they are perfectly clear and obvious to her, are sometimes less discernible to the reader who is not used to her style and way of thinking. The extent of her research is vast: the towering edifices of her esoteric thought rest on very broad foundations of knowledge. She is a daring, poetic writer — as most mystics are — and, in consequence, her faith and philosophy are a million kilometres away from the traditional orthodoxy which we defend. Her work combines speculative cosmology, astrology, alternative pre-history, and, almost inevitably, an awesome and ominous eschatology. Through the ever-thinning veil of the observed material universe, M. van Buren sees brief but vivid glimpses of the eternal, invisible world and — as far as the limitations of language will allow — she seeks to share those glimpses with her readers. She writes with the passionate conviction of the pure in heart and those with the gift of spiritual simplicity and directness. She talks freely of cosmic wonders and mysterious multi-dimensional realities with a delightful and disarming frankness and ordinariness: the kind which most people use to discuss such things as dinner menus, the price of petrol, or the best route from Paris to Toulouse.

M. van Buren's finely tuned instincts and exquisitely sensitive intuitions tell her that something of immense importance may be happening at Rennes: she could be wrong, of course, but time will tell…

Émile Saunière

The country families in and around Rennes-le-Château have been there for generations. Bérenger Saunière himself was born in the house behind the Fountain of the Tritons in Montazels. The Saunières belong in the district. émile, who is related to Bérenger, lives nearby, and has written two very useful and authoritative volumes entitled Moi, Bérenger Saunière which throw a fascinating light on his famous kinsman. M. émile Saunière is also closely involved with the “Association Terre de Rhedae” set up in 1989 with the main aim of protecting the domaine and preserving the cultural history of Rennes-le-Château.

Robin, Herrera and Markale

Jean Robin, a master of stylishly elegant French prose, and a thoughtful metaphysical and philosophical writer, has produced two distinguished volumes on the Rennes mystery, in which he refers with particular admiration to the work and thought of René Guénon. Robin writes from an eschatological perspective, and states that we are living in a pre-Apocalyptic age. He believes that France holds the key to this mysterious eschatology — but he does not say this from any spirit of excessive nationalism; rather, he regards France in a very deep and esoteric sense as “the Kingdom of the Grail”. He also accepts and understands that a privileged function of this sort inevitably has its dark side — like The Force in Star Wars— and that this negative aspect has been revealed throughout the centuries in such tragedies as the massacre of the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade, the destruction of the Templars by the odious Philippe le Bel, the Revolution with its accompanying Terror at the end of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic Wars. Robin sees both sides of the coin and says very perceptively: corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best produces the worst; the fallen saint is the worst kind of sinner. (Was Saunière, in that sense, a “fallen” priest? If so what exactly did he tell Abbé Rivière during that last dramatic confession?)

Jean Robin argues very convincingly that Rennes-le-Château has always constituted one of the two poles of these French mysteries for reasons that relate to what he describes as its “sacred geography”: Rennes summarises and encapsulates these two components — the light and the dark side of the mission of France. Robin believes that it is the dark, dangerous and sinister side which currently prevails, but that a final Redemption — the Ultimate Triumph of Goodness and Light — is surely coming. He very strongly recommends Guénon's book, The Reign of Quality and Signs of the Times. The thoughts of this remarkably talented man have taken research into the Rennes mystery an astronomical distance from the simple legend of a poor country priest who found a buried treasure.

In his richly metaphorical prose Herrera describes Rennes-le-Château as the “Doorway into the Dragon”, the “Centre of the World”. In his work on Rennes entitled A Multidimensional Doorway into the Dragon, Herrera refers in depth to Mount Bugarach, which he describes as an extinct volcano, and speculates on the possibility that Saunière and Jules Verne knew one another. He then considers the possibility that Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth actually refers to Mount Bugarach; certainly, he says, Verne has a character called Captain Bugarach in his novel Clovis Dardentor, and there is a farm called “Les Capitaines” at the foot of Mount Bugarach.

Herrera adds his quota to the sinister whispers that circulate in and around the Rennes mystery. He tells of a close friend of his — a regular visitor to the Razès — a man named Daniel Bettex, who was once a senior Swiss security officer. “Don't ask too many questions about the Vatican and its Secular Orders,” Bettex warned Herrera. “They have top secret matters to attend to in this region.” Herrera never saw Bettex alive again. He seems to have died of the same inexplicable cardiovascular lesions which might have killed old Abbé Boudet and his successor at Rennes-les-Bains, Abbé Rescanière.

Herrera never hesitates to invoke the macrocosmic, the metaphysical and the eschatological in his conclusions about the nature of the mystery pervading Rennes-le-Château.

Jean Markale's researches are rather more localised than Herrera's, and the results appear in his book Rennes-le-Château et l'énigme de l'or maudit.

When travelling in the Razès, Markale was fascinated by Montségur, but reported feeling strangely uneasy in Rennes-le-Château itself. He experienced equally curious sensations in the tiny village of Monthoumet near Bugarach, where he said it was “as if the local people were living in another world”. For him it seemed that Rennes-le-Château was almost outside space and time.

His most interesting hypothesis is that Bérenger Saunière was being blackmailed by the local schoolmaster, a man named Jamet, who also worked as secretary at the Mairie. Markale's work indicates that Saunière gave both money and jewels to Jamet, and that the blackmail did not begin until after the murder of Gélis.

Markale also refers to an ancient tradition which relates that the treasure of the Visigoths is buried “between the mountains of Alaric and Alaricou,” which is possibly between Carcassonne and Narbonne.

He argues a firm case for a Templar-Cathar connection and suggests that the former protected the latter and helped them to salvage some of their valuables from the ever encroaching persecution.

Markale also emphasizes some possible links between the ancient and noble family Aniort who befriended the Cathars in 1209 (and were consequently excommunicated and lost their castles), Trencavel le Jeune and the King of France. King Louis IX restored the Aniort castles to them and the excommunication was annulled. For Markale this raises a fascinating question: what price did they pay, or what major secrets did they reveal, in order to gain Louis IX's pardon with such alacrity?

Markale also goes deeply into the connections between Rennes-le-Château and St. Sulpice in Paris; the “Confrérie du Saint-Sacrement,” Nicholas Fouquet and the then Bishop of Alet, Nicolas Pavilion.

Markale argues that it must have been Marie de Nègre d'Ables who had custody of the ancient Aniort documents in 1732 when she married François d'Hautpoul, and that those documents might well have contained evidence for the persistence of the Merovingian line, evidence attested to by no less a witness than Blanche de Castille herself.

Did Bigou, chaplain to Marie de Nègre, conceal those documents — along with some Aniort gold and jewellery — in the church at Rennes before leaving for Spain where he died in exile in 1794?

Markale is also very interested in the role played by the Countess de Chambord (a Habsburg according to some knowledgeable sources) and her gift of 3000 gold francs to Saunière for the renovation of the church at Rennes.

Summary

As we said at the outset, this has been only a series of very brief glimpses at a great many pieces of fascinating contemporary work. It is simply not possible to include more in this present volume — however interesting, and however deserving — but we greatly hope to do so in future revisions.

The bibliography contains a list of the key books by researchers into the mystery. Not all are now readily available, but the serious student is directed to these along with the source documents listed in Rennes-le-Château: A Bibliography by John M. Saul and Janice A. Glaholm.

For a very detailed and extensive survey of the whole subject, there is nothing better than Les Archives du Trésor de Rennes-le-Château by Pierre Jamac. Apart from the authors mentioned earlier in this chapter, the major writers are René Descadeillas, Gérard de Sède, Franck Marie, Jean-Luc Chaumeil, Jean-Michel Thibaux, Claire Corbu with Antoine and Marcel Captier, Pierre Jarnac, Jean Alain Sipra and the team of Claude Boumendil and Gilbert Tappa.