The Digital Antiquarian

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Rennes-le-Château enjoyed its first watershed moment as a media phenomenon when Albert Salamon wrote his newspaper articles in 1956. Its second came when a documentary about the village was aired on French television in 1961. And its third arrived in 1967, when the first of the eventual hundreds of books that would be written about François-Bérenger Saunière and matters adjacent was published in France. The book was initially entitled L’Or de Rennes, ou la Vie Insolite de Bérenger Saunière (“The Gold of Rennes, or the Strange Life of Bérenger Saunière”), then republished under the more sensationalized title Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château (“The Cursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château”). By whatever name, it proved very, very popular in France, elevating the story’s profile enormously and also changing its personality in some quite fundamental ways.

The author of the book was Gérard de Sède, one of a succession of mercenary raconteurs who have been hanging about Rennes-le-Château ever since Noël Corbu drove up the hill for the first time; such men make wonderfully entertaining dinner guests, but before you bid them farewell you might be well-advised to check their pockets for any stray pieces of your good cutlery that might have fallen into them. Born in 1921, Sède had, by his own account at any rate, a colorful career in the Second World War as a Resistance fighter, narrowly escaping execution by the Nazis on multiple occasions. After the war was over, he became a tabloid journalist and popular historian of sorts, with a strong penchant for conspiracy theories. In 1962, he wrote a book called Les Templiers sont Parmi Nous (“The Templars are Among Us”), about the Medieval order of chivalry known as the Knights Templar, which he proposed to be not just still extant but the secret hand behind countless global events. Then, in his 1967 book about Rennes-le-Château, Sède began the process of weaving the village into this broader tapestry of myth. Before he came along, the salient aspect of Saunière’s alleged treasure was its value in gold and other precious materials; its origin story was a secondary consideration, almost irrelevant to most of those who came to the Languedoc with greedy stars in their eyes. Afterward, the secret history would come to outweigh the gold itself on this cottage industry in the making’s list of priorities.

I need to warn you now that the trail of clues becomes really, really complicated from here. This is, I think, not entirely by accident, even if the motivation to obfuscate may have been more subliminal than conscious on the part of many sincere believers. For unending layers of complication is one of the ways by which conspiracy theories sustain themselves. The harder they are to hold in the head, the harder are they to refute by skeptics armed with commonsense arguments. I’ll do my best not to fall into the trap of playing whack-a-mole against assertions that do more to obscure than enlighten, but a certain amount of explication is unavoidable, if only to show how ridiculous it all gets. For example, there’s a tendency on the part of even many skeptical writers to leap from the assertion of the existence of a secret code to its solution, whilst barely mentioning the process of solving it that comes in between. Yet I think it’s important to see the process play out in full at least some of the time in order to understand what a rickety intellectual foundation the conspiracy theories actually rest upon.

As I was learning about this stuff, I kept comparing it to the puzzles in computer adventure games (and not only the much-loved Le Serpent Rouge puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3, which directly borrows from much of what follows). Another, perhaps even better point of comparison is an explicitly gamified real-world treasure hunt like the one set out in Kit Williams’s book Masquerade. Indeed, this is my best argument for publishing these articles at all on what is usually a website about gaming: those who were most taken in by the conspiracy theories of Rennes-le-Château tended to treat them as essentially a game, an elaborate puzzle to be pieced together. We’ll connect some of the dots along with them, joining in on some of their fun, even if we must ultimately part company with them about puzzle-solving as a valid way of doing history.

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For the treasure hunters who hovered around Noël Corbu, the Latin documents found inside the Church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine in 1891 had long been the great, looming absence at the heart of the case. Even as he was donning priestly vestments on French television to play Saunière receiving them from a workman, Corbu had never been able to produce them from the cache of papers he inherited from Marie Dénaraud. But in his book, in what could only be described as a bombshell revelation, Sède claimed to have in his possession copies — not the originals — of two of the four documents that were found in the church. He refused to say who had given them to him, only that they reached him in Paris via London in February of 1964. One possible theory was that the originals had been hidden amid the books which Dénaraud sold to a British buyer or buyers after Saunière’s death. Regardless, with no independent verification to hand, Sède’s readers could only trust in the author’s good faith and that of whoever had given him the copies.

Prior to this point, it had been assumed that the documents found by Saunière must have been very old indeed; they had been commonly referred to by initiates as “parchments.” Surprisingly, however, the philologists to whom Sède showed the copies concluded that they hadn’t been written on animal skins even in their original form. They were not so very aged after all. Both consisted of seemingly innocuous passages from the New Testament, into which a variety of secret messages had been inserted.

There was no indication that the Biblical passages themselves were of any relevance to the mystery; they provided only the necessary screen for the secret messages. Yet they do reveal something which, taken all by itself, casts serious doubt on the veracity of these documents. The passages stem from the Vulgate Bible, the first ever complete translation of the book into Latin from the original Hebrew and Greek, a feat accomplished by Saint Jerome near the end of the fourth century. The Vulgate Bible remains to this day the most authoritative source of scripture in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But, importantly, not all Vulgate Bibles are the same. Typos have appeared and disappeared over the centuries, as have more substantive alterations in the text.

The Latin text found on these documents corresponds almost perfectly with a critical edition of the Vulgate New Testament that was published by the Oxford University Press in 1889, under the stewardship of the classicist John Wordsworth; the one change consists of two words that have been transposed, which appears to represent a mistake on the part of the transcriber. No other known edition of the Vulgate Bible from before 1891 — or from before 1967, for that matter — comes close to matching so precisely. There is every probability, in other words, that the source of the passages on these documents stems from four years after Saunière was posted to Rennes-le-Château, albeit two years before he allegedly discovered them inside his church. If he really did find them there, they must have been hidden barely any time at all, having been sneaked into his church after he was already the priest in residence there.

It is an open question whether Sède himself was aware of the problematically late date of the documents’ source material. He doesn’t explicitly point it out in his book, but, as we will see, there may be reason to believe that he was looking for a hedge by which to explain it if it became necessary.

The first and longest of the two documents, which I will refer to from now on as Altar Document 1, is superficially an extract from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus visits the home of Lazarus, whom he has raised from the dead, and has his feet anointed with oil by Lazarus’s sister Mary. Altar Document 2 contains an incident which is related in almost the exact same words in the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, and Luke, in which Jesus gives his hungry followers permission to eat corn on the Sabbath. Sède’s book remains to this day the only source we have for both Altar Document 1 and 2; the originals, presuming they ever existed, have never turned up. Let’s have a look at the copies and see what they might be trying to tell us.

Notice the squiggly figure toward the bottom right of Altar Document 1. We can see the word SION spelled out in reverse there. Sion is the Latin name for Zion, the Jewish homeland. This would seem to be a hint that any treasure the documents point to might indeed be that of the Temple of Solomon.

You can perhaps just barely make out that eight of the letters in the main text of Altar Document 1 are tiny, starting with an “R” tucked away on the second line, continuing with an “E” on the third line, etc. These spell out the Latin epithet Rex Mundi, or “King of the World.” This was a phrase associated by the Cathars with their evil god, him of the Old Testament and the physical realm. In the mainstream Christian tradition, it is often used to refer to the Devil.

Another peculiarity of Altar Document 1 is 140 extra letters that have been inserted, seemingly arbitrarily, into the Biblical passage. The first of these, for example, is an extraneous “V” in the opening Jesus ergo: Jesus eVrgo. Setting all of these together yields 64 letters of gibberish, followed by twelve letters that spell out another Latin phrase, followed by another 64 letters of gibberish. The Latin phrase this time is ad Genesareth: “to Genesareth,” that being an older name for the New Testament’s Sea of Galilee. Sède didn’t know what to do with the other 128 letters at the time he wrote his book.

Altar Document 2 includes two strange devices outside of the main text, one at the top left and one at the bottom right. Sède got nowhere with the former, but came further with the latter. He discovered that this same device, consisting of the letters “PS” not quite enclosed by an oval curlicue, appeared on a gravestone in the churchyard at Rennes-le-Château, alongside some disconnected Latin words and an odd, apparently meaningless jumble of Greek letters. The grave in question belonged to Marie de Nègre d’Ables, the Marquise de Blanchefort. She was the last of a family line who once were big wheels in the Languedoc — they may have built the castle at Rennes-le-Château in the year 1000 — but who had fallen on hard times by the eighteenth century. Marie died destitute in 1781, and the priest who arranged her burial was none other than Antoine Bigou, whose modest “nest egg”, René Descadeillas had recently theorized, may have been the true extent of the treasure uncovered by Bérenger Saunière. Sède definitely wasn’t onboard with that deflating idea, but one didn’t have to accept the one to embrace the other. I’m going to call this piece of evidence Gravestone 1. (Yes, there will be another one…)

But there are complications here, as there always seem to be with matters involving Rennes-le-Château. The gravestone inscription shown above cannot actually be seen anywhere in the churchyard today; nor could it in the 1960s. Sède posited that Saunière had sanded down the gravestone in order to obscure the trail to his treasure. But “what Saunière didn’t know was that he had taken a quite useless precaution. Because before he got rid of them, the significant inscriptions carved on the tomb of the Marquise de Blanchefort had been recorded during excursions by local archaeologists.” Sède said that he had found the rendering above in two separate places. One was an “extremely rare” book written by one Eugène Stübeln and published in 1884, entitled Pierres Gravées du Languedoc (“Engraved Stones of the Languedoc”). The other was a pamphlet put together by a local priest named Joseph Courtauly in 1962.

Again, though, there are complications… always complications. Although a scholarly man named Eugène Stübeln did live in the area from 1832 to 1899, his fields of interest were meteorology and astronomy, not history or archaeology. The book of his that Sède references in his bibliography has never been found in any library, archive, or collection. Courtauly’s 1962 pamphlet, on the other hand, does exist, having been deposited into the Bibliothèque National in Paris in 1966. “The 1884 edition of Eugène Stübeln’s book having become very rare,” Courtauly writes in the preface, “and I perhaps being one of the few people to have it in his library, in order to satisfy the numerous requests of researchers, I owe it to myself to have Plates 16 to 23 reproduced from this book, those concerning Rennes-les-Bains, Rennes-les-Château, and Alet.” He concludes by misspelling his own name, writing it as “Courtaly.” It has never been possible to ask Joseph Courtauly directly about his pamphlet because he died in 1964.

You may have assumed that Sède wanted to see the presence of the “PS” device on both Altar Document 2 and Gravestone 1 as proof that both Altar Documents originated with Antoine Bigou. But not so fast. After appearing to lay down the groundwork for the connection, Sède abruptly announces in his book that he favors a completely different candidate for the author of the documents: Henri Boudet. Boudet was the priest at nearby Rennes-les-Bains between 1872 and 1914, a period preceding and then overlapping with most of the years that Saunière spent at Rennes-le-Château. His arrival on the scene is so otherwise inexplicable that one has to wonder whether Sède was aware that the Biblical passages on the documents could stem from no earlier than 1889 — or became aware of it halfway through the writing of his book — and was looking for a plausible way around that inconvenient fact.

Henri Boudet was an eccentric figure who is known to have had an interest in language and arguably wordplay. In 1886, he published an absolutely bizarre book of etymology. In it, he claimed that all of the world’s languages had sprung from a single ur-tongue — in itself, hardly an extraordinary position for a Catholic priest to take, what with the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel. But then he went on to say that this ur-tongue had been… wait for it… modern English, which had fallen out of use in the mists of the distant past and then turned up again like the proverbial bad penny to plague Francophiles everywhere. He claimed that most of the place names around him in the Languedoc could be understood through this lens. Take the mountain of Cardou: it was a portmanteau of “cart” and “how,” as in how the hell can I go up this steep thing in a cart? The whole concept is so patently ridiculous that one immediately suspects Boudet to have been a sort of French Lewis Carroll, with an even dryer and slyer attitude toward his wordplay, one that never slip the mask slip. Or was he attempting to deliver some sort of painfully attenuated Frenchman’s satire on the growing international dominance of English?

But Sède, who was predisposed to spot conspiracies and hidden meanings everywhere, thought that Boudet must be trying to tell him something far more specific in his book of etymology, even if he couldn’t figure out what it was. Giving up on the book for the time being, he turned to the churchyard at Rennes-les-Bains. He believed that he deciphered a secret message there by piecing together inscriptions found on the various gravestones and monuments. Said message told him to look in a certain direction: precisely the direction of Rennes-le-Château. Boudet must be saying that he had hidden something inside that other church! Of course, for this string of conjecture to match with all of the evidence, Boudet would have had to sneak into Saunière’s church after the latter was already there in order to plant his documents. But stranger things have happened in history, right? Right?

Sède wrote that Saunière had taken the four Latin documents — the two which Sède had copies of and the two which he did not — to Paris and showed them to experts in languages and cryptography. According to Sède, Saunière also enjoyed a “liaison” with Emma Calvé, the foremost Parisian opera diva of the era, the same one who was rumored to have visited him at Rennes-le-Château in later years. And he went to the Louvre and bought copies of three paintings: The Shepherds of Arcadia (1638) by Nicolas Poussin, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1650) by David Teniers the Younger, and a portrait by an anonymous artist of Pope Celestine V, who had served in that office for less than six months in 1294. Sède, it should be noted, never revealed his source for any of this information, nor have the painting in questions ever been found or confirmed to have been brought to Rennes-le-Château. Nevertheless, they represents the point of origin of another conspiratorial trope born in and around the village, that of secret messages encoded in famous works of art — a trend which would reach its apex with Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code.

Sède focused most fixedly on the painting by Poussin, which shows four shepherds gathered around a tomb in the mythical pagan paradise of Arcadia. We know this not only from the title of the painting but because, if we look very closely at the tomb, we can see that it is carved with the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego: “And I am in Arcadia.” Now look again at Gravestone 1 above. It turns out that the Greek letters there spell out this same phrase; it’s a case of Latin written using the Greek alphabet, an unholy union if ever there was one. Surely this is significant!

It must have been, for it was upon his return to Rennes-le-Château, wrote Sède, that Saunière located the treasure. The inscription on Gravestone 1 must have been key to the process in some way. For he “patiently polished” the gravestone afterward in order to ensure that no one else could make use of it, not knowing that Eugène Stübeln had gotten there first — or so Sède asserted.

But then, after attempting to hide his tracks, Saunière turned around and did the exact opposite. Sède was convinced that he embedded clues about the location and the origin of the treasure everywhere in and around his church as part of his renovations. These clues could be extremely abstruse. For example, at the base of the new altar is a phrase in Latin meaning “Jesus, healer of wounds, the one hope of penitence through the tears of Magdalene, wash away our sins.” But it’s written in an odd way.

JÉSU MEDÈLA VULNÉRUM

SPES UNA POENĪTENTIUM

PER MAGDALANAE LACRYMAS

PECCATA NOSTRA DILUAS

The four accent marks in the first two lines are all misplaced — another vital clue, surely! Staring at the inscriptions until his eyes watered, Sède noticed that, if he combined each accented vowel with the consonant before it, he arrived at something that sounded like a French word. JÉ could be jais, meaning the mineral jet in English; DÈ could be dé, meaning a gaming die; NÉ could be nez, meaning “nose”; and NĪ could be nid, meaning “nest.” These words could in turn be pointing to four landmarks that Sède knew of around Rennes-le-Château: a disused jet mine; a large die-shaped stone; another stone that was shaped vaguely like a nose; and the top of Mount Cardou, the highest point in the neighborhood, where eagles might choose to make their nests. Rightly or wrongly, Sède saw echoes of the landscape around Rennes-le-Château everywhere in the church.

But exactly what to do with these points on the landscape was sadly less clear to Sède. The treasure couldn’t be in all of them — nor, for that matter, was it in any of the many he checked. He thus had to present his book as a work in progress and an invitation to further investigation, not as a closed case. Yet those who contemplated joining him in the hunt should be aware that doing so might not be without risk. “I know that you are quite interested in this affair,” Sède quoted one local priest as having told him. “It excites me too. But I have to warn you, it involves some danger.” The accidental death of Noël Corbu in 1968 was perfectly timed to sell even more copies of Sède’s book. Had it really been an accident?

But the growing interest surrounding Rennes-le-Château was still confined to France as the 1960s expired. On the surface, it remained a very French sort of story: the protagonists were all French, the documents were all written in French or Latin, and it was all intimately connected with French history. The rest of the world was still blissfully ignorant of Rennes-le-Château and its supposed treasure. But that was soon to change, because a conspiracy theory as juicy as this one transcends language and national borders.

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Henry Lincoln was a journeyman British screenwriter who provided scripts for Doctor Who and many other television shows. In August of 1969, a chance encounter with Sède’s book changed his life forever.

En route for a summer holiday in Cévennes, I made the casual purchase of a paperback. Le Trésor Maudit by Gérard de Sède was a mystery story — a lightweight, entertaining blend of historical fact, genuine mystery, and conjecture. It might have remained consigned to the post-holiday oblivion of all such reading had I not stumbled upon a curious and glaring omission in its pages.

The “accursed treasure” of the title had apparently been found in the 1890s by a village priest through the decipherment of certain cryptic documents unearthed in his church. Although the purported text of these documents was reproduced, the “secret messages” said to be encoded within them were not. The implication was that the deciphered messages had been lost. And yet, as I found, a cursory study of the documents reproduced in the book reveals at least one concealed message. Surely the author had found it. In working on his book he must have given the documents more than fleeting attention. He was bound, therefore, to have found what I had found. Moreover, the message was exactly the kind of titillating snippet of “proof” that helps to sell a “pop” paperback. Why had M. de Sède not published it?

To see what Lincoln saw, we have to look back at Altar Document 2 above. In particular, look carefully at the line spacing of the individual letters. Do you see how some of them are raised above the level of their companions? There are three of them in the second line (“A,” “D,” “A”), two of them in the third line (“G,” “O”), etc. If we set just these letters together, we end up with a sentence, written not in Latin but in more or less modern French. The only thing missing is accent marks.

A DAGOBERT II ROI ET A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LA MORT.

This translates to “To King Dagobert II and to Sion belongs the treasure, and it is death.” Dagobert II was a Frankish king who took the throne in 675 or 676, part of a royal line known as the Merovingians. He was murdered by palace intriguers in 679.

Lincoln was intrigued enough to visit Sède personally in Paris. “Why didn’t you publish the message hidden in the document?” he asked. Sède revealed all too clearly by his reaction that he had no clue what his visitor was talking about, although he tried to save face after it had been explained to him: “Because we thought it might interest someone like you to find it for yourself.” It seemed much more likely that Sède had overlooked something that had stood out with almost childish obviousness to Lincoln; this was made doubly embarrassing by the fact that the method used to hide the secret message in Altar Document 2 was not at all far removed from the one that he had sussed out in Altar Document 1. As to what the hidden message meant, neither Lincoln nor Sède could say at this point.

In the fall of 1970, Lincoln went to Paul Johnstone, who was the executive producer of a BBC program called Chronicle. Chronicle was an institution of British television for a quarter of a century, broadcasting hundreds of episodes between 1966 and 1991. It was not usually known for trafficking in pseudo-history. The majority of its episodes were serious explorations of archeology and history, full of well-credentialed experts offering up their well-reasoned conclusions. The worst sin of which you could normally accuse the program was that of being a little bit dry at times.

And yet, breaking from sober precedent, Paul Johnstone agreed that it might be worth doing an episode on this Rennes-le-Château affair that had become such a big deal in France. Lincoln hired Sède to become a “consultant” on the episode, although his role would be strangely muted: he would appear in the credits but not in any on-camera interviews. The narrator would never even mention him or his book, the very reason that the episode had come to exist. Henry Lincoln, it turned out, was not a man overly eager to share the spotlight.

Nevertheless, throughout the preparations for the episode Sède was feeding Lincoln fresh information, a slow drip of new discoveries that he claimed to be making in real time. He produced more documents from the Bibliothèque Nationale, containing information that would make it into additional books which he would write during the 1970s.

Most of the documents purported to have been written by an Henri Lobineau of Geneva between 1956 and 1967. A large portion of them consisted of a discursive family tree of the Merovingian line, sprinkled with anecdotes and footnotes. It was stated that the genealogy stemmed from other, older documents brought by a country priest named François-Bérenger Saunière to Paris in 1891. A sheet that was apparently inserted later said that “Henri Lobineau” was a pseudonym; sure enough, no scholar by that name has ever been demonstrated to have lived in Geneva.

According to the genealogy, the Frankish King Dagobert II, whose name Lincoln had so recently unveiled in Altar Document 2, had a son who was unknown to most historians, an infant called Sigebert who was sent to the Languedoc for safe-keeping after his father’s assassination. This boy had become the patriarch of a previously unknown branch of the Mervingian family tree, one that had continued until at least the seventeenth century under the new family name of “Plantard.”

Sède pointed to a weathered stone in the churchyard of Rennes-le-Château that might show a horseman riding away with an infant in his arms. Was this the hiding place where Sigebert had grown up?

The Lobineau papers made cryptic mention of an organization called the Priory of Sion which seemed to have something to do with the Merovingian line; it had been founded in 1188 and was avowedly still in existence as late as 1918. There was a list of 26 Priory “Grand Masters,” which included such storied names as Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, and Jean Cocteau. Even stranger was a collection of poems called Le Serpent Rouge (“The Red Serpent”), full of obscure symbolism tied to the signs of the Zodiac. Nobody knew what to make of this at the time, nor for a long time to come.

Near the village of Arques, just ten kilometers from Rennes-le-Château, Sède found a tomb that he thought was the spitting image of the one depicted in the Poussin painting. Lincoln too rushed out to have a look, and agreed that the painting was “a faithful rendering of the actual site,” despite a lack of evidence in the historical record that Poussin had ever visited the Languedoc, for any purpose. Lincoln consulted our friend René Descadeillas at the municipal archives in Carcassonne, but that reasonable gentleman could find no record of a tomb at this location dating from prior to the twentieth century. Lincoln learned that the tomb currently housed the remains of a pair of American heiresses of French extraction, a mother and daughter named Marie Rivarès and Emily Rivarès Lawrence, who had purchased the estate on which it lay in 1921, then been laid to rest inside it in 1922 and 1932 respectively. The estate had passed out of their family not long afterward. Rejecting the most straightforward explanation, that the Rivarès family had constructed the tomb themselves, Lincoln and Sède concluded that they must have found it sitting conveniently empty and decided to repurpose it.

Shortly after discovering the tomb, Sède dropped an even bigger bombshell: with the help of a team of Army code-breakers and their computer, he had been able to decipher the full meaning of Altar Document 1, a feat that must more than make up for his overlooking the obvious in Altar Document 2. We’ll go through its method of encryption now. Fair warning: it’s pretty hairy.

We begin with the 128 extraneous letters hidden in the Biblical passage, skipping over the twelve in the middle that form a legible phrase.

VCPSJQROVYMYYDLTPEFRBOXTODJLBKNJ

FQUEPAJYNPPBFEIELRGHIIRYBTTCVTGD

LUCCVMTEJHPNPGSVQJHGMLFTSVJLZQMT

OXANPEMUPHKORPKHVJCMCATLVQXGGNDT

These letters were produced by an encryption scheme invented by a French diplomat and alchemist named Blaise de Vigenère during the sixteenth century. The method requires a keyword, which can consist of as many letters as we like. Let’s say that we want to encrypt the English phrase “Saunière is priest of Rennes-le-Château.” We have chosen “brain” as our keyword.¹

SAUNI EREIS PRIES TOFRE NNESL ECHAT EAU

BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN BRA

USVXX GKFRH RKKNH VCGJE VBFKL MPIRT MNV

The first row above contains our message in the clear. The second contains our keyword, repeated as many times as necessary to have the same number of letters as the message. We add the letters in each column of the first two rows together to arrive at our enciphered text in the third row. So, ‘S’ + ‘B’ = ‘U’, etc. If our addition operation takes us past the edge of the alphabet, we just loop back around to the beginning. One final wrinkle here is that we employ a 25-letter alphabet, skipping over “W,” a letter which is never used in native French words. Once the message has been encrypted, anyone who knows the keyword can decrypt it by subtracting rather than adding the letters of “brain.”

Of course, if we are code-breakers rather than mere decrypters, we have to figure out for ourselves what keyword is being employed. In the case of our document, the keyword turns out to be mortepee, being the French words for “death” and “sword” (the latter actually being épée when properly accented) stuck together.  And just how did we come up with that, you ask? Therein lies another tale.

It turns that there were two gravestones associated with Marie de Nègre in the churchyard at Rennes-le-Château. The second is far more reliably documented than the first. A sketch of it appears in an incontrovertibly genuine article published in the journal of La Société d’Ètudes Scientifiques de l’Aude (“The Scientific Studies Society of Aude”) in 1906. (Aude is the French départment that includes Rennes-le-Château.) The gravestone must have been destroyed at some point after that date. If it was Saunière who did so, it is surprising that he waited so long, but we’ll let that go. The sketch in question is shown below. We’ll refer to it as Gravestone 2.

Written in French with the exception of a concluding phrase in Latin, the inscription ought to read, Ci gît noble Marie de Negre d’Ables de Blanchefort, âgée de soixante-sept ans, décédée le XVII Janvier MDCCLXXXI. Requiescat in pace. (“Here lies the noble Marie de Nègre d’Ables de Blanchefort, aged 67 years, deceased January 17, 1781. May she rest in peace.”) But a careless or illiterate stone carver has apparently made a right hash of it. He’s misspelled several words, missed a few letters which he all too obviously filled in later, had trouble with his word-wrapping, and replaced a “C” with an “O” in the Roman numeral marking the year of Marie’s death. The most amusing mistake is his failure to split the Latin Requiescat in pace properly, resulting in the word Catin — an old French term for a woman of the night.

Appalling though this may seem, it’s really not so unusual; similarly botched gravestones can be seen in rural cemeteries throughout Europe. In Rennes-le-Château, however, accidents do not exist. The mistakes in the inscription actually provide the keyword we need to decipher Altar Document 1. We are meant to collect them: the “T” that should have been “I” in Ci, the “M” that’s hanging out by itself instead of joining its companions in Marie, the “R” that should have been a “B” in d’Ables, the “O” that should have been a “C” in MDCCLXXXI, and the three “E”s and a “P” that have been crudely chiseled in after the fact. We go anagram hunting with these eight letters, and find that we can arrange them to produce the French words mort and épée, or our keyword of mortepee. Easy as could be, right?

Now comes a twist: the whole cipher has been executed in reverse. The message was encoded using subtraction rather than addition, and must thus be decoded using addition rather than subtraction.

But even knowing this twist, when we apply the keyword, we still get this:

JRINOHXT JNFSDTQZ DTYMGFCZ CSCGGBSO

SGNZUQOD BFIVKUNJ ZHZCNZXD OJMXBKLI

ZKUXBDZJ XXIIUXYB EZABRCKZ GLCGEHRZ

CMSIUURA DXDJXGPM JZUHHQZQ JGPBLEIZ

It’s 128 letters that spell out… absolutely nothing.

Most code-breakers would assume they were on the wrong track at this point and give up. But we, readers, shall persevere undaunted. What if the message is double-encrypted?

This turns out to be the case. The second keyword has as many letters as the entire message. We get it by taking the entirety of the inscription on Gravestone 2, leaving the errors uncorrected; this gives us 119 letters. We find the last nine letters by returning to Gravestone 1. Specifically, we append the “PS” followed by Præ-Cum. Then, because things can never be too easy, we flip the whole mess around and use it in reverse order. With much excitement, we start to decrypt.

XNLSPANN ASITTIAT EXRRPBTE UCAEENIR

XTGEENDE LORSIAAO ELEFSDQR PEDCUPGX

AIEMUIDO CEJDNMEG MCOCEEPD SHRXAIAD

HATMOAES EBICELER NEEAIEED LVEVULDC

Oh, my. Gibberish. Again.

We have to go through one more stage, my friends, the most absurd one of all. We begin by laying the letters out on two chessboards.

Finding the message in the jumble of letters relies on an exercise known as the Knight’s Tour, which is as well known to students in university mathematics and computer-science departments as it is to chess players. Starting from any square on the board and obeying the standard movement rules for a knight — one square vertically and two squares horizontally, or vice versa — we want to move a chessman so that it visits every square on the board exactly one time, without ever revisiting a square.

The problem is that there are a crazily high number of solutions to the Knight’s Tour, on the order of 33 trillion if we’re allowed to choose any starting square we like, even as no external clue as to how we are meant to proceed has ever been found. The completely arbitrary solution we’re looking for begins at f6 (“B”), then proceeds to e4 (“E”), to d6 (“R”), and onward from there. The one tiny concession the code-makers have deigned to grant us shows up when we start on the second board halfway through the process. Our moves here turn out to be a vertically flipped image of the first sequence, so that we start at f3 (“L”), then go to e5 (“A”), d3 (“C”), etc.

After we’re through traversing both of our chessboards, we end up with a message in rather tortured French: Bergère, pas de tentation, que Poussin Teniers gardent la cléf. Pax DCLXXXI. Par la croix et ce cheval de dieu, j’achève ce daemon de gardien à midi. Pommes bleues. In English, this is more or less, “Shepherd, no temptation, Poussin and Teniers hold the key. Peace 681. By the cross and this horse of God, I finish off this guardian demon at midday. Blue apples.” How do you like them apples?

My apologies for having put you through all of that. The salient point to take away is that this is a literally insoluble puzzle, one that can only be reverse-engineered by someone who already has the solution rather than worked out from the other direction. The combinatorial explosion of the Knight’s Tour alone would exhaust the brute-forcing capabilities of a modern computer, much less the ones of the early 1970s that Sède claimed to have employed. And now consider that we are meant to believe that Saunière and some helpers cracked this code in 1891, with no access to any computer at all. The one possible escape clause here is the claim that there were originally four Altar Documents. It’s just possible that the missing two might have included additional clues for solving the puzzle on this one. But those would have to have been very specific clues indeed to alter the fundamental equation all that much.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that the final message is neither terribly coherent nor terribly grammatical, such that we (or our computer helper) might well throw it out even if we stumbled across it. It’s an old truism in game design that every puzzle is more difficult than its designer thinks it is, but this is ridiculous. Again, this couldn’t possibly be a puzzle that anyone was meant to solve; it was a puzzle reverse-engineered to convey the impression of someone having solved it after the fact, which is a very different thing.

The icing on this cake is that the secret message is actually an anagram of all of the letters on Gravestone 2! It would be far more manageable for a computer, and probably for us as well, to approach it this way than by trying to churn through all of the convolutions above. There is always an element of banality lurking beneath even the most erudite-sounding conspiracy theories.

The only reasonable conclusion is that someone must have been operating behind the scenes to help Gérard de Sède along, just as Sède was in turn dropping hints to Henry Lincoln. The identity of that person will prove to be the real key to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. To his credit, Lincoln realized this after consulting with “cipher experts of British Intelligence,” who told him that “the cipher does not present a valid problem for a computer.” Someone, in other words, must have told Sède what message the documents hid.

Nevertheless, the secret messages convinced Lincoln more than ever that he was on the trail of something potentially earthshaking, even if he wasn’t yet sure what it was. That conviction oozes from every frame of “The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?,” which aired as an episode of Chronicle on February 12, 1972. It was the fourth milestone in the gradual coming-out party of Rennes-le-Château, the first to reach an audience outside of France.

“The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?” is an archetypal exercise in pseudo-history. It repeats claims that are at best highly conjectural, such as the connection of Rennes-le-Château with the Visigoth town of Rhedae, as if they are proven, accepted historical facts. When the known facts don’t fit the preferred theory of the case, explanations are introduced without evidence or comment. For example, we are blithely told that the “penniless” Saunière simply “borrowed” the money he needed to carry out the altar renovations that led to the discovery of the Altar Documents, and then to go off to Paris with them and starting buying art. But who would lend money to someone with no collateral and no prospect of paying it back?

Much is made of a Latin inscription that appears above the entrance to Saunière’s renovated church: Terribilis est locus iste. Lincoln wishes to translate this to “This place is terrible,” but that is an overly literal translation that gives no space for context. A better one is, “This is a place of awe.” (Consider the difference between the English words “awe” and “awful.”) In fact, the Catholic Church’s standard guidelines for church-building and dedicating prescribe Terribilis est locus iste as a perfectly appropriate phrase to inscribe above the entrance. It is to be found on many other churches all over the world.

But despite being so misleading in so many ways, the program is presented in eminently scholarly clothing. We are guided through the hall of mirrors by a dulcet-voiced narrator whose French and Latin roll off his tongue as smoothly as his English. It’s like being told by David Attenborough in one of his nature documentaries that he’s just found Bigfoot. Our first instinct is to believe, because everything about the production seems so trustworthy. This would prove Henry Lincon’s secret weapon going forward. He had a genius for making the crazy seem reasonable.

“The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?” starts from the sturdy foundation laid down by its well-thumbed French inspiration, then expands the scope of the mystery to include the new revelations. King Dagobert II of the Franks and his infant son Sigebert enter the picture, as does the Poussin painting and the local tomb it supposedly depicts. (Any discrepancies in the painted tomb’s appearance are explained away as having been “subtly recomposed to suit the painter’s eye.”) Many questions are raised and comparatively few answers provided, but Lincoln himself appears on camera at the end to reassure viewers that he is still on the case. To top off the conspiracy cocktail, he implies that shadowy forces dogged the film crew throughout the making of the program, tampering with evidence.

Some fourteen months after the episode aired, the BBC received a phone call from a British man who would identify himself only as “Mr. A.” He claimed to have pieced together the many clues and used them to locate the treasure. Now, he wanted to know whether the BBC would like to send a film crew out to capture its unveiling. Rather incredibly, Paul Johnstone did indeed mobilize a film crew and pack it off to France without ever even meeting with Mr. A in person. It was left to Lincoln to have a preliminary chat with the treasure hunter. He found himself cast into the unwonted role of the skeptic when he realized that Mr. A’s conclusions were “a farrago of misconceptions, wishful thinking, and a few impossibilities.” Exactly the same thing can be said about virtually all of Lincoln’s own conclusions about Rennes-le-Château over the years, but it seems that he was too close to his own wishful thoughts to see the parallels.

At any rate, the big unveiling turned into exactly the damp squib that Lincoln had predicted. The team of diggers fumbled around in the mud for several hours, coming up with nothing for their efforts. Lincoln left early for the pub.

Seeking to salvage his investment, Paul Johnstone decided to turn the program into a more generalized follow-up to the first Chronicle episode about Rennes-le-Château. Lincoln was given two days to come up with a shooting script. Inevitably, the end result, which aired on October 30, 1974, under the title of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil,” feels rushed and half-baked; about a quarter of its visuals are repurposed clips from its predecessor. Much time is devoted to decoding Altar Document 1, although there are several errors in the process as it is described. Otherwise, the episode’s new footage largely consists of Henry Lincoln wandering around the French countryside looking various degrees of pensive. The long delay between its filming and airing may well indicate that the show’s producers knew it wasn’t up to snuff.

Still, there are important additions to the growing body of lore to be discerned, the fruit of Sède and Lincoln’s ongoing research. For the first time, the initials “PS,” which stand out so prominently in Altar Document 2 and Gravestone 1, are identified with the Priory of Sion. The roll call of famous alleged Grand Masters of that shadowy organization is duly read out. Was Saunière a member too?

Elsewhere in the program, Lincoln and an obliging professor from the Royal College of Art discover a pentagon hidden in the proportions of Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia. Lincoln spots the same ominous shape in the strange spacing of the lines and letters in Altar Document 2. Combined with Altar Document 1’s scarcely concealed Rex Mundi and a statue of the Devil placed by Saunière in his church, it makes Lincoln wonder whether the Priory of Sion was a cult of Satanists.

Geometry had long been a fixation of the treasure hunters around Rennes-le-Château, but it would become still more prevalent going forward. For Lincoln was now convinced that he was on the hunt for something far more important than any hidden treasure. He now pursued hidden history, an even more exciting proposition.

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Sources: The books Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale; Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château by Gérard de Sède; The Holy Place: Saunière and the Decoding of the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Château by Henry Lincoln; Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L’Enigme de Gisors by Gérard de Sède; Les Mérovingiens à Rennes-le-Château. Mythes ou Réalités. Réponse à Messieurs: Plantard, Lincoln, Vazart & Cie by Richard Bordes; Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to Benedict XVI by Richard P. McBrien; How the Bible Became Holy by Michael L. Satlow. Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004.

Online sources include the websites Rennes-le-Château: Where History Meets Evidence and Priory of Sion.com.

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Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges; when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite history.

— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

Before all of the conspiracies, there was just a village.

Rennes-le-Château sits perched atop a 300-meter-high promontory in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. It has today a permanent population of fewer than 100 souls, who are clustered together on a plateau approximately 200 meters long by 100 meters wide. The only way to reach the village is by walking, cycling, or driving up a single narrow, twisting four-kilometer road that leaves from the closest neighboring town of Couiza (population 1100) and terminates here. But if there is only one physical road to Rennes-le-Château, there are a thousand or more imaginative ones. It is the Rome of the conspiratorial view of history, the place to which all conspiracy theories seem to lead sooner or later. Once you reach the village, whether in person or merely in spirit, there is literally nowhere else to go.

It may feel like a place out of myth, but it is not one without a website. During the high season, at least half of the single access road’s traffic consists of tourist buses. Their windows act as frames for the portraits of their eager passengers, visions of arcane mysteries swirling almost visibly around their heads like halos or thought bubbles, placed there by the guide at the front of the bus who knows perfectly well what stories she needs to recite to butter her bread. When the visitors pour out of their buses at the top of the hill, the villagers greet them with a smile, if sometimes a weary one. Whatever its drawbacks, living in one of the world’s most unlikely tourist traps is an undeniable improvement over the farming or mining by which their parents or grandparents made a living.

Rennes-le-Château owes its place on so many package-tour itineraries to the insatiability of the human appetite to believe weird shit. For every man, woman, and child who lives in the village today, there have been six or seven books published that prominently feature it. If we wind up nuclear-bombing or fossil-fueling or populist-politicking our way back to the Stone Age in the near future, there will still be some of us sitting around in our caves after the apocalypse, prattling on about Mary Magdalene and holy bloodlines and Knights Templar — always Knights Templar — to distract from the wolves howling in the lonely desolation outside. For a really good sinister conspiracy theory is counterintuitively cozy, what with the way it collapses the amorphous mass of real history, where cause and effect are as muddled as are heroes and villains, into a comforting clockwork mechanism of cogs in cogs. Small wonder that pseudo-history tends to thrive best when real life seems most vexed and confusing.

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Rennes-le-Château lies within Occitania, the most southeasterly of the eighteen administrative regions of modern-day France. But for centuries the largest portion of this region, including the one that contains our village, was known as the Languedoc, a name by which it is still colloquially referred to this day. The Languedoc has long been characterized by a stubborn independent streak and an uneasy relationship with the powers that be in far-off Paris. To this day, some of the locals there prefer to speak their own language of Occitan, a direct descendant of the Latin spoken by the Romans who first settled here a century before the birth of Jesus Christ, rather than the language spoken by the rest of France.

Humans have been living in the Languedoc for hundreds of thousands of years; prehistoric cave dwellings have been found in many of the cliff faces that dot this craggy region. When the Romans arrived circa 120 BC, they brought with them bureaucracy, literacy, and in time Christianity in return for the ores and minerals of which the earth of the Languedoc is rich, from iron to copper, lead to gold. They may have built a village on the promontory where Rennes-le-Château stands today, or a villa, or a temple, or a fortress, or most probably nothing at all.

The Romans were eventually displaced by the Visigoths, who were on a tear after sacking Rome itself in AD 410. They evolved a civilization far more sophisticated than their barbarous reputation. Once the most febrile stage of their conquering was over, the Languedoc came to mark the northernmost part of their empire, which otherwise filled most of the Iberian Peninsula to the south. Further north was the burgeoning kingdom of the Franks, the forefather of the nation we know as France.

Some have connected our promontory with a major regional center of the Visigoths, which appears in some of the scant surviving records from the period under the name of Rhedae. But this idea appears to be, like so much about the story of Rennes-le-Château, an example of wishful thinking. Rhedae was supposed to have had a population of up to 30,000 people, meaning it would have had to have sprawled well beyond the promontory itself. Yet there is no trace in the surrounding countryside of the debris a settlement of that size should have left behind. Coins, jewelry, and axe blades should have been regularly churned to the surface by the farmers who have worked the land around here for centuries — not to mention the thousands of amateur archeologists who have descended on the area since Rennes-le-Château became such a nexus of conspiracy theories.

At any rate, the end came for the Visigoths at the beginning of the eighth century, when the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Arab Muslim armies which had crossed the Mediterranean from Africa. The Muslims pressed northward from Iberia, taking the Languedoc and the entire southern half of modern France, until they were finally stopped by the Franks near Poitiers in 732. The Franks then pushed them back roughly as far as the modern border between France and Spain.

Yet the same Frankish kings who had triumphed over the fearsome Muslim armies found the settled inhabitants of the Languedoc a tougher nut to crack. The craggy landscape, it seemed, bred equally craggy souls. The region became a patchwork of small fiefdoms, home to a people who continued to hew to their own culture and language. Even the vaunted Charlemagne was able to fully assimilate the Languedoc into his empire only briefly.

One of the independent lords built a castle — a château in French — along with an accompanying church at the top of our promontory around the year 1000; this marks the first point where we can say with absolute certainty that people had begun to live there year-round. We don’t know precisely who built the castle, or why, beyond noting that high ground like this is always a natural place to fortify. It is likewise unclear by what name the complex was known. The name of Rennes doesn’t appear to have marked the site until the eighteenth century, Rennes-le-Château not until the nineteenth — by which time, ironically, the titular castle was no more than a romantic-looking ruin.

In the middle of the twelfth century, the Languedoc demonstrated its independent streak in the most flagrant possible fashion, when it became the locus of a breakaway sect of Christianity known as the Cathars, one of a succession of “proto-Protestant” groups who predated Martin Luther. In fact, the Cathars’ ideas were much more radical than those of even that radical reformer. Borrowing from the texts of the ancient Gnostic Christians, they thought that Jesus Christ had been an angel, an ethereal being whose physical form was only an illusion, who by his very nature could not have been physically killed and brought back to life, who had only created the illusion of these events. As if that wasn’t heretical enough, they also believed that there were two gods rather than one, an evil God of the Earth who was the protagonist of the Old Testament and a loving God of the Heavens who had announced his arrival in mortal affairs through the angel Jesus. They believed that the popes in Rome were the servants, wittingly or unwittingly, of the bad god rather than the good.

Of course, such a slate of beliefs was a recipe for trouble in Medieval Europe, and trouble the Cathars soon got. Pope Innocent III declared a Crusade against them in 1208. Savage warfare consumed the Languedoc for decades; whether and in what capacity the castle at Rennes was involved is unknown. Matters finally came to a head in 1243, when the heart of the Cathar army was besieged at the Château de Montségur, just 35 kilometers west of Rennes. On March 12, 1244, the starving remnants of the Cathar defenders embraced their martyrdom willingly, marching out of their castle’s gate with linked arms to face grisly death at the hands of the papist antichrist’s minions.

But it has long been said that, before they did so, they managed to sneak some great treasure past the enemy and hide it away somewhere. Some say it was the treasure of Solomon’s Temple, which was stolen from Jerusalem and taken to his own capital by the Roman general Titus in AD 70, then stolen again and brought to the Languedoc by the Visigoths. Some say the treasure might include the Holy Grail that was used to catch some of Jesus’s sacred blood at the crucifixion. (The fact that the Cathars didn’t believe that Jesus had a physical form from which to bleed real blood seems to have bothered remarkably few of the seekers of this “Cathar Treasure” over the years.) There is a legend about a Languedoc shepherd boy who in 1645 fell down into a hole while searching for a lost lamb; there he found skeletons surrounded by great heaps of gold. He filled his hat with gold and returned to his village, only to be stoned to death as a thief. (Justice was apparently even harsher than we imagine it to have been in that century, and the normal spirit of human curiosity strangely lacking.) This, then, is the original would-be treasure of the Languedoc. Rest assured that there will be others.

With the crushing of the Cathars, the Languedoc was firmly incorporated into the kingdom of France for the first time. From here, its history becomes a part of the history of France, much though some of its people may resist that notion. At the risk of offending these folks, we shall skip forward now, all the way to the late nineteenth century, by which time the castle on our promontory has been long abandoned and the rest of the misnamed Rennes-le-Château is a tidy if nondescript village of farmers and miners, population about 300 people, enough to support a Catholic priest of their own in their little Church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine. (This church may or may not be the one that was first built in the year 1000 or earlier; a fifteenth-century map of the local diocese shows two churches on the promontory, the other one being known as the Church of Saint Pierre. Even if it is the newer of the two, however, the Church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine is still at least 700 years old, because it is mentioned by name in an inventory dating from 1185.)

In 1885, Rennes-le-Château was assigned a 33-year-old priest named François-Bérenger Saunière, a native of the Languedoc who had been ordained in Carcassonne, the nearest cathedral town. Initially, he seemed to serve his flock faithfully and unremarkably enough. For six years after his arrival, nothing untoward occurred.

Then, in 1891, he took it upon himself to repair the high altar of his church. Inside one of the altar’s pillars, workers found some hollow wooden tubes containing documents written in Latin. They took them directly to Saunière, he being the only person in the village with the ability to read them.

Not long afterward, Saunière launched a new program of building and renovation, on a scale dwarfing the repair of a single altar. He remodeled the interior of his church in a striking and often jarring Gothic style, built a new chapel in the cemetery, laid out a decorative grotto, built a water tower for his parishioners, and graded the road still used by all of those tourist buses of today. The crowning glory was an elegant Mediterranean-style residence which Saunière dubbed the Villa Béthanie. Behind its high fence could be found a dramatic garden running right up to the edge of the promontory, an ornate orangery, and a neoclassical observation tower offering gorgeous views. In the base of this latter structure, which Saunière named the Tour Magdala, was to be found his library, housing his impressive collection of occult books.

The villagers would continue to talk about the salad days of Saunière for decades after the priest was no longer with them; some of their descendants continue to talk about them today. It is said that opera divas, high-ranking members of the French cabinet, and scions of the Habsburg dynasty came to stay in the villa. Saunière himself was frequently away from home, on jaunts that seemed to span the width and breadth of Europe. No one knew for sure where the money for all of this was coming from, but the rumor mill had it that the priest must have found a hidden treasure somewhere close to the village. The money certainly wasn’t coming from the Catholic Church, whose representatives were as flummoxed by what was going on in Rennes-le-Château as everyone else.

In 1910, the bishop of Carcassonne demanded that Saunière tell him plainly how he was funding all of this construction. Saunière flatly refused to do so. As a result, he was defrocked by an ecclesiastical court on December 5, 1911, temporarily at first and then permanently, once it had become clear that he intended to remain obdurate on this issue.

But Saunière simply refused to leave Rennes-le-Château in the aftermath of the verdict. He set up an altar inside his house and held Masses there for any who wished to come, in competition with the new priest who performed the same service inside the church that Saunière had remodeled so audaciously. He stayed a squatter on the territory of the Catholic Church until his death in 1917. When he was lying on his deathbed, a priest grudgingly agreed to come in from a neighboring parish to hear his Confession and administer the Last Rites. Real or purported witnesses have said that this priest came out of the sickroom looking visibly shaken, muttering that Saunière’s sins had been so immense that he had been unable to give the dying man the absolution he required to enter the Kingdom of God.

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The foregoing have been the broad historical facts surrounding Rennes-le-Château, to whatever extent we are able to discern them. The story of how these facts evolved — some might say, were twisted — into one of the most prominent conspiracy theories of modern times is in some ways even more interesting. This tale begins less than three decades after the death of Bérenger Saunière, with the arrival in Rennes-le-Château of an inveterate dreamer, schemer, and chancer named Noël Corbu.

A venturesome streak ran through the Corbu family; Noël’s older brother Pierre had been an aviator who disappeared while trying to fly from Paris to New York in an experimental aircraft, just weeks before Charles Lindbergh became one of the most famous men in the world by accomplishing the feat in reverse. (So thin is the line between historical oblivion and eternal fame.) Born in Paris in 1912, Noël Corbu invested in airlines rather than becoming a pilot himself, then ran a pasta factory and tried his hand at writing detective novels. During the Nazi occupation of France, he started a black-market-smuggling operation in the Languedoc town of Perpignan, providing luxury goods to the Germans and French alike, whoever could afford to pay him. Alas, what he had seen as nothing more nefarious than a business opportunity primed for the taking got him tarred as a collaborator once the Nazi-installed Vichy regime was toppled. In 1945, he and his wife and two children made a hasty exit to the town of Bugarach, just twelve kilometers from Rennes-le-Château.

His new neighbors told him some of the rumors that swirled around the tiny but imposingly situated village and its former priest — rumors which were at this time still local to the area. If Bérenger Saunière’s will was to be believed, he had died penniless, except for the beautiful residence in which he had expired. This he had willed to, of all people, his housekeeper, a woman named Marie Dénaraud who, it was rumored, may have done more for him in his bedroom than wash the rugs, drapes, and linens. If Saunière had found a treasure, his home was surely the most logical first place to look for the booty, or at least for a clue as to its current whereabouts. Dénaraud was still living in the villa in 1945. Thoroughly intrigued, Noël Corbu decided to go and see her.

One glance at the Villa Béthanie was enough to tell him that, if there was treasure still hidden inside its walls, Marie Dénaraud hadn’t figured out how to make it liquid. She had sold the priest’s occult library to an antiquarian bookstore in Britain well before the war, but she hadn’t been seen hawking any gold or jewels. The place was in serious disrepair: the garden overgrown with weeds, the shutters falling off the windows, the once-gleaming steel frame of the orangery now more rust than metal. The woman who answered his knock on the front door was in no better condition. Dénaraud was a slatternly scarecrow who looked like she hadn’t eaten a decent meal in years.

Negotiations ensued between the two, about which we know sadly little. Was the savvy black marketeer played by the even savvier old woman, who could surely sense his mercenary motives? Did she drop hints about what might lie hidden somewhere inside the falling-down house? Maybe. Or maybe there was more mutual understanding and affection than that cynical interpretation allows for. At any rate, Corbu became a regular caller at the house, and on July 22, 1946, the two signed a contract. In it, Dénaraud gave the Villa Béthanie to Corbu outright, in return for a pledge from him that he would allow her to remain living there for the rest of her days.

If Corbu had signed the contract in the hope that Dénaraud would then let him in on some lucrative secret, that hope was frustrated soon after, when Dénaraud suffered a stroke which left her unable to speak. Corbu did find a substantial quantity of documents in the house: bills and work orders for the many construction and renovation projects, account books, legal records of Saunière’s difficulties with his bishop, even some personal journals. But none of it seemed to explain where his money had come from; nor did it have anything to say about any treasure that might still be hidden somewhere. If the Latin documents that had been found in the altar’s pillar were among the ones in the house, Corbu was not enough of a scholar to recognize them for what they were.

More years went by, during which the villa only grew more dilapidated. Dénaraud seldom poked her head out of doors, and Corbu too was rarely around, being engaged with business ventures that took him as far away as Morocco, where he made and just as quickly lost a small fortune in the sugar industry. In 1953, Marie Dénaraud died. She was buried next to Bérenger Saunière in the churchyard in accordance with the terms of her will, prompting a fresh round of tongue-wagging from the village old-timers.

Dénaraud’s death came shortly after Corbu’s Moroccan sugar disaster. Perhaps not coincidentally — on either point — he now began to take a serious commercial interest in her old residence for the very first time. He brought teams of workmen in to clean the place up, intending to turn it into a restaurant and hotel. But Corbu needed an angle compelling enough to make people drive up the twisting road that dead-ended here. He needed a reason to put Rennes-le-Château on the map, as it were. He turned to the same reason that had caused him to knock on Marie Dénaraud’s door for the first time eight years earlier. For if it had worked on him, he reasoned, it ought to work just as well on others.

He bought himself a tape recorder and recorded a précis of the strange case of Bérenger Saunière and his mysterious riches. His operative theory at this point was that the treasure Saunière had uncovered had once belonged to the French crown. In 1248, just a few years after the Cathar movement had been decapitated and the Languedoc incorporated firmly into the kingdom of France, King Louis IX had invaded Egypt at the head of the Seventh Crusade. He had left his mother, Blanche of Castile, to look after things in Paris while he was away. But the city had been plagued with unrest during this period, being stuffed to the gills with wayward noblemen who couldn’t see their way to being ruled by a woman. Corbu now concluded that Blanche must have emptied the royal treasury to keep it out of unfriendly hands, sending the whole kit and caboodle to the war-ravaged Languedoc, the part of the kingdom that was farthest from its capital in both geography and spirit. Who would think to look for it there? No one, it seemed, until Saunière had found some record of it hidden inside his church.

But in order to connect these two dots, Corbu had also to explain why the treasure had never been recalled to Paris after Louis IX had returned to the capital and things had settled down there. By way of doing so, he noted that Blanche had died in 1252, two years before her son’s return. (The hapless fellow had gotten himself captured by the Egyptians and spent four years as their hostage before he was ransomed.) Amidst the shuffle of regents and monarchs, the royal family had just plain forgotten where they’d put the treasure, in the same way that I can never figure out what drawer my wife has put the batteries in when she goes off to a conference and leaves me all alone at home.

It was a theory anyway. Corbu set great store by the fact that Philip IV, king of France from 1285 to 1314, had been infamously cash-poor, to the point of having to counterfeit money to keep his government from collapsing. Surely this was because silly Blanche had misplaced most of his inheritance a few decades earlier. No mention of the confusion appeared in any historical documents because the whole mess was just too embarrassing to talk about.

Based on no particular evidence, Corbu declared confidently that the royal treasure found by Saunière consisted of 18.5 million gold coins weighing 180 tons, plus countless jewels and religious objects; together it would be worth 4 billion francs in 1950s money. For all practical purposes, the store of wealth would have been inexhaustible. The primary purpose of Saunière’s many foreign trips had been to turn Medieval coinage into present-day francs, by melting the coins down and selling the lumps of raw metal that resulted. “A person from Carcassonne who is still alive assured me that he saw in the priest’s house a chest full of gold ingots,” Corbu insisted. Who could doubt such ironclad testimony?

In 1954, Corbu opened his restaurant. His taped story of Bérenger Saunière and the royal treasure was played to all of the diners during their meals. “Thus in this quiet village with its magnificent view and glorious past, there is one of the most fabulous treasures in the whole world,” he said at the end of the tape. Tell your friends! Don’t they deserve to bask in the mystery too?

The restaurant did well enough that Corbu could afford to convert the Tour Magdala into a hotel the following year. Meanwhile he continued to look for ways to get the word out to folks beyond the immediate vicinity of Rennes-le-Château. He hit pay dirt in January of 1956, when he lured in Albert Salamon, a journalist for the newspaper La Dépêche du Midi (“The South of France Dispatch”). Under the banner headline “The Fabulous Discovery of the Priest with Billions!”, Salamon laid it on thick. The trilogy of articles he wrote for his newspaper opens like a Gothic horror story, more Bram Stoker than Edward R. Murrow.

Dusk was advancing rapidly over the countryside as my friend’s cantankerous car carried us with steady rhythm along the steep winding road to the “high place” of Rennes-le-Château. At the top of the hill, the car was swallowed up among the centuries-old stones of an ancient queenly citadel, and then the tower appeared, a black shadow on the starry background.

The aim of the nighttime excursion? To answer an invitation to meet with M. Noël Corbu, founder and proprietor of the Hôtel de la Tour at Rennes-le-Château. I was eager to make the acquaintance of the brother of the test pilot Pierre Corbu, who died in 1927 with his comrade Lacoste on the Bluebird while he was trying for the third time to cross the Atlantic.

Mme. Corbu served us a meal of chicken, accompanied by fine wines. In the dining room, my curiosity was aroused by a portrait of a priest with a piercing gaze. “A relation, M. Corbu?”

A thick file was placed before me. The diary of the priest, plus hundreds of letters, bills, plans, estimates… and the story began.

These last words would prove true in a more all-encompassing way than Salamon could ever have dreamed at the time. For the media story of Rennes-le-Château really does begin precisely here. He was the first in a long line of credulous or calculating writers — the jury is still out for many of them — who have spun yarns around the little village that are as exciting and enticing as any avowedly fictional thriller. Seen in this light, it feels only fitting that the process culminated almost 50 years after Salamon’s articles in a bestselling, zeitgeist-defining novel and blockbuster movie.

For now, though, Salamon left the Villa Béthanie with a head stuffed full of mythical imaginings.

It is one o’clock in the morning. The ghosts that sat down at the host’s table in the course of this thrilling story have kept secret right to the end the mysterious hiding place whose “open sesame” the abbé had stumbled upon. And when the door of the Hôtel de la Tour was opened onto the night, and I held out my hand to M. Corbu in au revoir, there seemed to me to be shining, where a moment ago there were stars, millions of golden pieces of the fabulous treasure…

It seems to have been the imagination of Salamon rather than the equally prodigious one of Corbu which added a new twist to the story, one that would become very important in the course of time. At the very end of his third and last article, Salamon mentioned the longstanding legends about “Cathar treasure, including the famous Holy Grail” being hidden somewhere in the Languedoc. Might it actually have been this treasure rather than that of the French crown that Saunière had stumbled upon? It did seem more plausible in some ways. Corbu too would gradually adopt this theory of the case.

Over the years that followed Salamon’s articles, Corbu’s Hôtel de la Tour marked the center of a slowly expanding circle of curiosity and greed. The phenomenon was nothing like what it would become, but it was sufficient to support a hospitality business in this rather far-flung location. The smoky air inside Corbu’s restaurant was filled with the speculations and arguments of mystics, cranks, and dreamers.

By 1960, the circle had expanded enough to reach the Parisian headquarters of the ORTF, France’s national broadcasting service. A film crew came to Rennes-le-Château to shoot a television documentary about the village and the mystery; these were quite possibly the first moving images ever captured in the place. The program aired throughout France in April of 1961, under the name of La Roue Tourne (“The Wheel Turns”). As far as I have been able to determine, only a single clip has survived, just 40 seconds in length. It reenacts of the discovery of the mysterious Latin documents inside a pillar next to the church’s altar. Corbu has gamely put on priestly vestments to play the role of Saunière as the documents are handed to him by a member of the work crew.

Outside of this clip, we have only a handful of newspapers reviews to fall back on. These serve to remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. One of them, which appeared in L’Indépendant, mentions a “hypnotist” cum treasure hunter named Domergue, who “based on the revelations of his medium, thinks that the famous treasure is actually contained in fourteen barrels, but that one of them has been emptied by the abbé. Even if only thirteen remain, however, their discovery would still cause a considerable stir around the marble escarpment of Rennes-le-Château.” (This is an understatement!) Our friend Domergue is sanguine about his prospects of success: “I’ll be resuming my excavations in June. I’m not very far away from my target, and before the end of the summer I’ll have reached the gallery leading to the barrels of gold.” The journalist chronicling all of this wonders, a little plaintively, “Will the secret and the mystery which surround the treasure be resolved one of these days?” The naïve fellow has no idea that “the secret and the mystery” are just getting off the ground.

The documentary caught the attention of at least one sober-minded historian as well. René Descadeillas had lived most of his 53 years in Carcassonne, whose municipal library he had headed since 1950. He knew the area’s past and present intimately. In December of 1962, he deposited into his library’s archives the results of a careful factual inquiry into Bérenger Saunière’s controversial tenure in Rennes-le-Château. In some ways, his investigation still stands as unique, in that it was undertaken early enough that some of the events in questions were still within living memory. Trolling through the documents of the period and interviewing witnesses and their descendants, he uncovered some interesting facts and testimony that cut against more fantastical interpretations of the case.

He learned, for example, that Saunière had already conducted some renovations of the church before 1891, for which he had paid the more than piddling sum of 518 francs, which was itself far beyond the means of his modest priestly stipend; he must, in other words, have had some alternative source of money even before the discovery of those Latin documents. Further, there were reports that Saunière had been explicitly asked by the village mayor what said documents were about, and had replied that they dealt strictly with technical details of the construction of the church. He could have been lying, of course, but his manner hadn’t struck anyone present at the time as particularly suspicious.

Descadeillas put forward a freshly prosaic explanation for Saunière’s sudden influx of cash after 1891, assuming he had been the beneficiary of one at all. It involved a windfall discovery of a sort, but one of a more modest scope and scale than our hypnotist friend’s fourteen barrels full of gold, much less Corbu’s 180 tons of the stuff. During the chaos of the French Revolution a century before Saunière’s arrival, when atheism had briefly become the order of the day throughout the country, an elderly village priest named Antoine Bigou was reported to have “buried his savings at the same time as the religious objects that he wished to preserve for the future.” As Descadeillas described it, “this was not a ‘treasure’ in the usual sense of the word, but a nest egg.” He actually talked to a still-living stepsister of Marie Dénaraud, who was “adamant” that Saunière had found “a pot of gold pieces” — but only the single pot — during the renovations of 1891. This fortuitous find could easily have planted the seed for the rumors of a lost treasure — rumors which would only grow in the telling, as such things inevitably do.

Still, the fact remained that such a comparatively modest quantity of gold couldn’t have paid for all of Saunière’s construction projects. Descadeillas strongly suspected that the rest of Saunière’s wealth came from criminal enterprises rather than from buried treasure. His younger brother Alfred had also been a priest, a known corrupt one who had gotten himself excommunicated in 1904 for stealing from his flock and fathering a child with one of them; he had then drunk himself to death the following year. An intriguing letter from Saunière to his lawyer described this brother as his “middle-man for generous deeds.” Descadeillas was convinced that one part of the brothers’ mutual activities had been “the selling of the Mass,” a way for people who were living less than righteous lives — such as gangland operators, perhaps? — to buy absolution for themselves; family members of the newly deceased unrighteous could likewise pay the priests to buy their relatives a ticket into Heaven. Descadeillas tracked down a postal worker in Couiza who remembered Saunière stopping in almost every day to pick up and deliver suspicious little envelopes — envelopes full, Descadeillas was certain, of money going one way and certificates of absolution going the other way. This sort of thing, known historically as the selling of “indulgences,” had once been accepted practice in the Catholic Church, had in fact been the proximate cause of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. Now, however, it was known as simony, one of the gravest sins which a member of the clergy could commit. The old story about the priest who went to deliver the Last Rites to Saunière, only to come out of the sickroom looking shocked to the very core of his being, suddenly made a lot more sense in this light.

But it seemed unlikely that even simony would have paid well enough to fit all of the facts of the case. The brothers must have been up to other sorts of corrupt dealings; of this Descadeillas was sure, even if he couldn’t prove it. He noted one more piece of circumstantial evidence: Saunière’s financial situation seemed to have taken a dive during the years after his brother’s death in 1905. He had funded little to no new construction after that point, and he had even had to take out a substantial bank loan in 1913 just to maintain his villa. Was this due to the loss of his “middle-man?” It seemed that he might truly have died as penniless as his will had claimed. The bank had finally forgiven the loan after Saunière’s death, when it decided that Marie Dénaraud had no realistic means of paying it back. Bankers usually have a sense about such things.

Much remained unexplained, but Descadeillas believed that the explanations, should they ever come, would prove to have more to do with everyday corruption and criminality than any centuries-old treasure trove. “The treasure of Rennes does not exist,” he wrote in conclusion. “But the secret of the priest of Rennes is real. And it is there that the mystery resides.”

All of this was perfectly reasonable and sensible, but it was always going to be doomed to have a tough time competing against tales of a grandiose Cathar treasures hoard. It didn’t help that René Descadeillas was a quiet, scholarly man by nature, content to write his report, drop it into his library’s archive for posterity, and move on to the next project. No film crews came around to get his side of the case. That said, we haven’t heard the last of Descadeillas, a rare and therefore invaluable voice of reason in the story of Rennes-le-Château.

For the time being, though, life went on as usual at the Villa Béthanie. The treasure hunters streamed through, each of them leaving empty-handed but full of new esoteric theories about where to dig next time. They became a nuisance for the local landowners, who were constantly finding new holes in the most likely and unlikely of places, as if their holdings had been infested by giant moles. In 1965, the municipal government issued a decree: no more excavations allowed without a permit. That helped somewhat, but the most dedicated seekers just took to digging under the cover of night. It was more atmospheric at night anyway.

That same year, Noël Corbu sold the Villa Béthanie to a man named Henri Buthion. Restless serial entrepreneur that he was, Corbu had set up a side business making ladies’ fans and lampshades in the villa’s orangery. It was going pretty well; he wanted to expand it, but there just wasn’t enough space to do so in such a little village. Meanwhile much of the fun of running a hotel and keeping the mystery of Bérenger Saunière alive through year after year in which nothing concrete was discovered had run its course for him and his wife. So, he sold out and went on to the next adventure. Sadly, though, the adventure of life was almost over for him: he was killed in a car accident in 1968.

But the ball that Corbu had set rolling now had an unstoppable momentum of its own. Buthion continued to run the Hôtel de la Tour pretty much as his predecessor had, albeit with slightly less dramatic flair. He would be the witness and benefactor rather than the instigator of the next chapter of the saga of Saunière’s treasure. The whole thing was about to get a massive injection of plot inflation from a couple of new voices on the scene. This shit was about to get a whole lot weirder.

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Sources: The books Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner; The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved by Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood; The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend by Richard Barber; Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze; The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger; Rennes-le-Château et l’enigme de l’or maudit by Jean Markale. Skeptical Inquirer of November/December 2004; La Dépêche du Midi of January 12, 13, and 14 1956; L’Indépendant of April 22 1961.

Online sources include the websites Rennes-le-Château: Where History Meets Evidence and Priory of Sion.com