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E R E N N E S – L E – C H Â T E A U T H E M E
P A R K PAGE 2 “T H E S A U N I E R E E P I S O D E” W H O W R O T E
I T? |
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PAGES (Just click on the page you wish to go to): Page 1—Abandon
All Hope: Introduction to a Hermeneutical Hell Page 2—“The
Saunière Episode” Who Wrote It? Page 3—The
Plantard Subplot Page 4—The
Lincoln Story & Its Aftermath Page 5—
Puzzling Pieces of the Story Page 6—Summing
Up Page 7—Links
& Sources All pages are best viewed by monitors set to
1024 X 768 resolution. |
[Introductory note: The matter written on this page
below and the following pages was originally written before 2000, and although
updates have changed some of the details, the argument is essentially the same,
that the fraudulence suspected in this case is not “pure,” not the classic con
game for ill-gotten gain, found out because ineptly conducted, but rather seems
calculated and deliberate, and so my speculation below is mostly aimed at the
possibilities of what could be behind that, first in the case of the priest Saunière
and then of Pierre Plantard and the Priory of Sion. Along with others, I was guessing at various
“secret” societies who might need a campaign of disinformation to cover what
they were really up to, and “synarchy” is one of the possibilities mentioned. Much of the guessing can perhaps now be
dispensed with, after the 2006 publication of Picknett and Prince’s The Sion Revelation, where a synarchist
agenda of an elitist “revolution from above,” to result in a theocratic United
States of Europe, is pretty convincingly shown to be the antecedent and
backdrop of, and link between, many secret societies and various religious, political,
and esoteric movements of the last several centuries, perhaps culminating in
France’s Mitterrand years, but for our
purposes most notably of the Priory of Sion.
This would even account for the inconsistencies in the Priory’s policy statements
and historical claims as an example of the “shape-shifting” required by
changing circumstances of a red-herring “front” organization, which the Priory
seems to have been. Even so, many of the
questions raised below have not been answered.
This Page Two focuses on the original mystery of how the priest Saunière
got wealthy and did what he did, and the next on how the Priory of Sion grafted
onto that, and, if Picknett and Prince are right, it may be that synarchy is
the missing link, whether consciously so or not.]
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We’ve been teased into wanting to be “in
the know” about the mystery of Rennes-le-Château by the slow leaking and
compiling of information about this fascinating story over the last 50 years
by, to speak of just the leading authors, five men with considerably different
interests and motives, some questionable—Nöel Corbu, Robert Charroux, Gérard de
Sède, Pierre Plantard, and Henry Lincoln (with co-authors Michael Baigent and
Richard Leigh). Corbu and Charroux
certainly got the ball rolling (in the 50s), but Plantard and De Sède (in the
60s and 70s) are the main promoters of the Rennes “mystery,” at least in
France, and they supposedly had other members of their putative secret society,
The Priory of Sion, working with them, most notably the disinherited Marquis
(again, putative) Philippe de Chérisey and Jean-Luc Chaumeil (Jewish,
supposedly, with high connections in French law enforcement who later turned on
them when he discovered Plantard’s apparently anti-Jewish roots. Or was the fight with Plantard purely about
money and the announcement of Jewishness on Chaumeil’s part merely part of a
strategy to slander and discredit Plantard as anti-Jewish? For Chaumeil has been reported by others to
be orthodox Catholic!). Chaumeil and De
Chérisey actually seemed to replace De Sède after a few years (apparently due
to a quarrel over book royalties on The
Gold of Rennes). Were there
others? Plantard claimed legions of
supporters, but that may have all been on paper and in his fantasy. Or somebody’s
fantasy. If it wasn’t a calculated
disguise.
Plantard’s group (or was it just or
mainly Plantard?) seem to have had ulterior motives of a conspiratorial nature,
which became evident when they tried to influence a later group of researchers
(in the 70s, 80s, and 90s) who came upon “the mystery” from a completely
different angle, that of BBC-TV documentarians.
This last group was led by television personality Henry Lincoln, who
after doing TV documentaries on “the mystery” eventually teamed up with Michael
Baigent and Richard Leigh (famous for their questioning of the secretive
handling of “The Dead Sea Scrolls”) in the writing of books, beginning with Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1982, and
often when I refer to “Lincoln” below I will mean this team. It was Lincoln et al who made this a
popular story world-wide and whose account I refer to as “the popular
version,” although many others have developed it along the way and sent it in
different directions, some of which Lincoln himself disapproves. Several decades of village gossip may have
helped shape the tale before it left town, as well, and, in fact, the oral
tradition that preceded the written version, sustained first by Saunière
himself (privately, maybe) and then mainly by his “servant” Marie (maybe), may
be where things went off the rails, if that is what happened.
Such gossip seems to have been overheard by Plantard, De Sède, Charroux,
and perhaps others in visits to the area before things got rolling.
It appears that “The Saunière
Episode,” though supposedly known to a select few at the time, at least
partially if not entirely, and maintained orally for forty years after the
priest’s death (maybe), did not gain much currency in the larger world until
from 1956 on bits and pieces of the mystery began spilling out in mostly
popular media, and people began adding two and two and doing research on their
own. Research in the 60s and 70s led to
the discovery that much seemingly relevant material, often privately and
pseudonymously published, was also being deposited by mysterious persons in
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As far as the print version is
concerned, the initial story-teller was Nöel Corbu, described as a failed businessman with
an aristocratic background who ran a small hotel, the “Hotel de la Tour”
(formerly the priest’s guest house known as the Villa Bethania, bought from
Marie) and eventually a restaurant under the Tour Magdala’s esplanade, in Rennes-le-Château, after moving there
with his family in mid-life. Corbu
continued the oral tradition, but then caused it to be converted into print
when he “leaked” the story to the press in 1956, ostensibly to drum up
trade. Journalists from Dépêche du
Midi, a regional publication (with Synarchist ownership!), dined at his
hotel’s restaurant one evening and ended up publishing the story, of what has
come to be known as “The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château,” after hearing the tale
Corbu told his customers (sometimes by simply playing a recorded tape—see http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/
corbu.htm) and which he said he had learned from locals, especially from
the priest’s “housekeeper” Marie Dénarnaud.
Charroux then picked up on this, and into books the story went.
[A digression—The
Rennes Alchemist of October, 2003 has published a document submitted by
Patrick Mensior entitled “Power and Death” that purports to be a hitherto
unpublished text of Noel Corbu, written probably in 1955 but at least before
1965, but whether this came first or the taped version he played for customers
at his restaurant came first is not established. This new account is a much longer and more
polished version of the story (partly because it’s better translated but mostly
because it has a stronger narrative feel to it) and tells it quite differently,
for one thing putting much more emphasis upon Marie’s role in everything, and
for another leaving out elements of the story, such as Emma Calvé, St. Sulpice,
and the paintings of Poussin and Teniers.
Although there seem to be no outright contradictions between the two
accounts and one could justify their differences as simply different ways into
the same material (one starts with the history of RLC back to pre-historic times,
the other starts with Blanche de Castille’s supposed hiding of the royal
treasure in RLC), that Corbu had different drafts of the story is of course
going to lead to further questioning of the version first published.]
The crux of the matter is this--did Corbu just embellish
an authentic story or did he make it all up?
Or was it already made up when it got to him?
The popular view is that Corbu told
the story pretty much as it was told to him, mostly by Marie Dénarnaud, the “housekeeper”
who had “inherited” the priest’s estate when he died in 1917 (Quotes around
“inherited” because, actually, at his death people were surprised to discover
that Saunière had long ago put all the property in Marie’s name, anyway! It’s said that this was because priests
weren’t allowed to own property, which may be valid, but Saunière surely didn’t
put as much property into the name of a “servant” as he did unless there was an
unusual, trusting relationship established).
Because she needed money near the end of her life, according to the
popular account, Marie sold the priest’s guest house to Corbu (in 1946?), which
he converted into the hotel (after her death but he kept lodgers before
that). Corbu and his family reportedly
took good care of Marie in her old age, until her death in 1953 at the age of
85. This scenario assumes that Marie
told Corbu a reasonably authentic story, and the question then is whether Corbu
pretty much left it that way or subjected it to heavy fictionalizing, if he
didn’t make it all up.
The debunkers believe “the mystery”
was entirely made up. Unfortunately, the debunker’s case against the
popular version follows more than one scenario, depending upon whether
they see Corbu or Marie or Saunière himself as the original fabricator, with
Plantard and his associates later accused of adding major elements to the
fiction by grafting his family’s claims to ancient nobility upon the Saunière
discoveries (as assumed by the story).
The whole Rennes-le-Château affair has been heavily debunked by various French sources (see
bibliography on Page
7), while Brits make up most of the True Believers of the “proper heretics”
sort, but the chief debunker has been Brit Paul Smith, who seems to be
principally obsessed with disputing the claims of Plantard and his Priory of
Sion (which will be dealt with on Page 3), but who disbelieves in the claims
made for Saunière as well, and that will be the focus of this page. Unfortunately, Smith’s zealous, rather
bullying, and sometimes incoherent debunking raises questions about his motives
and funding. Smith gives the impression
of being “employed” in this cause, which of course makes one wonder, “by
whom?” Smith is invariably banned from
every chat room or internet discussion group for his rudeness and name-calling,
so be wary of engaging him.
Nevertheless, Smith has built a case that can’t just be ignored Let’s begin with Smith’s case against Corbu, which at least
contains questioning of the Saunière episode that must be answered. [A new development: much of Smith’s argument has
been incorporated in Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood’s The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved (Sutton
Publishing, 2003), although, strangely, Smith is given no credit and is not
even named anywhere in the book except for one footnote reference to Smith’s
website. Putnam and Wood, who try hard
to appear objective, systematic, and factual in their approach, appear also to
be trying to disassociate themselves from the combative Smith. More about this book later.]
On Smith’s
often cryptic but also enlightening website,
http://smithpp0.tripod.com/psp/idx.html (now moved to http://priory-of-sion.com, after removal of some material, including, it seems, the
following!), he at times presents his case in his own voice but sometimes
provides translations of French sources, which he presumably endorses (All too
often, by the way, he quotes sources without putting these quoted passages
within quotation marks, thus exposing himself, I would think, to charges of
plagiarism. But that’s his worry). In “Two Accounts Relating to Marie
Dénarnaud” (which I can no longer find listed on Smith’s website!) the author translated first, Vinciane Denis, muddies the waters by first
implying that Corbu’s tale was largely factual and then that it was largely
fictional. Without questioning Marie’s
credibility, Denis says that Corbu
“recounted the facts as Marie had told them to him, summarized them and brought
out the picturesque details….”
(And on another page, by the way, Smith indicates that Corbu’s story was
based not just on oral accounts but on Marie’s “archives relating to…Saunière.”
Presumably these archives are what Corbu’s daughter and son-in-law Antoine
Captier used in establishing the Saunière museum in 1989. Well, why would Marie have kept
such artifacts unless she thought they supported her exalted view of Saunière,
a man she clearly planned to spend eternity with because she had herself buried
right next to him? Would she have kept
them if she thought they proved Saunière a crooked priest?).
But when Corbu
went on to say that Saunière at his death had building plans costing another
eight million francs, Denis comments that “for the first time the story of Bérenger Saunière
becomes part of the world of fiction.”
What is meant by “for
the first time”? That is at least
ambiguous, and it even seems to contradict the earlier assertion that Corbu
“recounted the facts as Marie had told them to him.”
Denis may have meant that that single
detail—the eight million franc building plan--then convinced him that the
whole tale was invented (which I infer because Smith certainly treats
pretty much the whole Corbu story as fiction from there on, presumably based on
such accounts as Denis provides), but Denis’s text here sets up a contradiction
of that assessment by first implying that the rest of the story Corbu
told was not fiction, that only the eight million franc building plan
was fiction. Confusing, to say the
least.
I appreciate the contributions that Smith’s
historical sleuthing is making, however borrowed from French sources it may be (are these sources all
right-wing Roman Catholic, by the way?), but he really needs to be
clearer in his statements and more explanatory.
His website is as frustrating as it is enlightening because it is so
fragmentary, hops around so much, is often imprecise in its language and vague
in its references, does not notice or attempt to deal with contradictions,
takes as proof what is only assertion, does not take into consideration the
veracity of the testimony, and too often merely hints where it should boldly
state and explain in detail. Perhaps
he’s assuming that his reader has read everything else on the subject or on his
website, but I doubt that that is often the case. Smith needs to explain, for instance, how he
(presumably following Denis) leaped to total disbelief in Corbu’s story when
encountering the eight million franc building plan. And was it the building plan itself or the
eight million francs that convinced Denis and Smith that Corbu’s tale was too
tall to contain any truth?
If it was the eight million francs
that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, this is then just part of
Smith’s general argument that, based on his reading of extant accounts,
Saunière’s income from 1891 on has been grossly exaggerated. And he believes that Saunière actually lived
in poverty from 1905 on, thanks to Republican legislation separating church and
state and cutting the clergy off from traditional funding [Putnam & Wood do
not entirely support this, for Saunière’s spending continued to be lavish
during this period, although he seemed to be under more strain in paying his bills]. Smith believes Saunière did not find any
“treasure,” that Saunière was simply a simoniac (as his bishop later charged),
guilty of trafficking in masses and selling masses to the rich, which even the
most ardent simoniac would have difficulty making millions on, even if he
actually spent all day every day saying that many masses. Smith has published on his website a
translation of a work by Jean-Jacques Bedu that agrees with Smith that
Saunière’s wealth came from trafficking in masses, but Bedu thinks Saunière
simply took the cash without saying the masses and thus was capable of
acquiring considerable amounts of cash, although perhaps not piling up as much
money as the popular story wishes him to.
At any rate, it seems it’s primarily Smith’s disbelief in Saunière’s extreme
wealth, in the millions of francs rather than in the thousands, that makes him
dismiss Corbu’s account rather than Corbu’s account itself.
Smith may be
right, but both Bedu’s account of Saunière’s “Mass Books” and certain elements
of the story call his estimation of Saunière’s income into question, as follows:
Others have found suggestions of secret accounts, for example, as far away as Budapest or
even abroad, and certainly if Saunière had possession of the sort of Secret he
is supposed to have had and had contact with the sorts of people he is reported
to have had, he surely would not have been dumb enough to confine his income
accounting to his usual books, the books to be found in the archives. It is quite reasonable to assume that the
majority of his income and expense was “off the books,” another thing that
contributes significantly to our “Hermeneutical Hell.”
Then there’s Saunière’s tendency to put property in Marie’s
name. Was his later “poverty” (if Smith
is correct in that) only in appearances, due to his putting everything in
Marie’s name? If he was using Marie as a
screen for property-holding, why
wouldn’t he have used her for money-laundering as well? And if secret accounts existed at the time of
his death, would not Marie have closed ones she knew about and destroyed
records of them? (And, by the way, would
a priest entrust a mere “housekeeper” with such things? It’s pretty clear that Marie was a good deal
more than just housekeeper in this house.
See the section on Page 5 entitled “The Romantic Couple.”). And, finally, it’s assumed by the popular
story that Marie, who outlived Saunière by 36 years, lived on money or treasure
he left her, only falling short when France’s changing currency after World War
II forced her to burn her remaining money rather than give an accounting of it. It would take a lot of money to get through
even 30 humbly-lived years. It’s either explain this or give
a different accounting of Marie’s life after her priest’s death. It’s said she became a recluse, but, if she
was poverty-stricken (because property rich and money poor?), was she forced to
work for a living all those years? If
so, what did she do for a living?
And did she or did she not keep telling Corbu that they were all
“walking on gold”? If she did, was that
just to keep him interested? After he
signed the papers buying the property from her and made the deal to take care
of her in her last years, why would there have been any need for her to
continue the ruse, if ruse it was?
Another question concerns motive. If Saunière was receiving
large sums from certain wealthy people, then, as some have charged, why
wouldn’t blackmail
have been just as likely the cause of this income? If Saunière held the key to the kind of
Secret some suppose he had, or if he was trafficking in forged documents that
threatened certain powerful people, as lately has been claimed, then blackmail
would be very plausible. And it’s plausible too that the “Mass
Books” were attempts to disguise that.
But if blackmail is not the case (and I’m inclined to think it wasn’t
because of Saunière’s tone of righteousness), one could think of other reasons
why certain rich people would give Saunière money, such as because they
supported his esoteric endeavor, whatever it was, and if it was simply
monarchist, then there were plenty to support that. He may have had wealthy sponsors, who kept
their own accounts, and who might even have schemed to cover the money they
gave him by pretending to ask him to say masses for their souls! Which would be especially ironic if these
sponsors were actually “heretics” or secularists. Bedu’s account of Sauniere’s “Mass Books” suggests that they
are ambiguous documents, that could just as easily be read as an attempt to disguise something as to
keep track of something. And the requests for masses may have
been from a mixed group, including those who were sincere, merely responding to
his ads, and those who were using the trafficking as cover. At lest one letter exists strongly
suggesting that Saunière had rich sponsors but without revealing the motives of
such sponsors.
Further, if simony was
the case, why would these particular rich people have given money to this
particular priest? What made Saunière the simoniac
of choice? Given how small and
obscure his parish was at the time, why would the rich have picked this
particular priest to support, rather than, say, their local priest, or some more
famous priest or larger church? In
short, what made Saunière’s masses so worth the price? Smith’s explanation that he was working the
anti-Republican crowd all over France and elsewhere in Europe through
advertisements doesn’t seem adequate, even though the evidence of such ads
appears to be there, unless there was some special reason for such masses to be
said at Rennes-le-Château rather than, say, Lourdes or someplace else. What would that special reason have
been?
Smith reports that Saunière at his trial claimed to have
spent over 200,000 francs (over 3 million in today’s francs, apparently) but
could only account for about 36,000 francs, considerably less than half of what
even Smith estimates it would have taken to do what Saunière did in Rennes.
(Incidentally, the “Mass Books” do not seem to have figured in to Smith’s
calculation, and so why not, since they apparently could have proved Saunière’s
claim of greater wealth? The new Putnam
& Wood book makes no attempt to add up income and expenses, although citing
items of expense as they go, taking at face value the sums Sauniere reported of
193,000 francs as income and 190,000 francs as expense. Nor do they attempt to translate the money
into current values, except off-handedly (in a footnote!) suggesting a
multiplier of 7 to get today’s equivalent in pounds. The problem here is that inflation and
devaluation and currency conversion over the years make it difficult to compare
money values from
different periods of history, and this seems to be especially the case
here. The True Believers think
Saunière’s money was worth a good deal more in today’s terms than the debunkers
do, and each can make a case.
So the question is—was Saunière’s estate as it was in his day affordable by a simoniac, no
matter how diligent or fraudulent he was? Granted, it doesn’t appear that it
would take millions to buy the property and build what he built on that land
and also renovate the church, but by Smith’s own calculations it also seems
clear that a mere 36,000 francs wouldn’t have come close to covering his
expenditure. Not to mention all the
money supposedly spent fêting locals and visiting celebs and on making
improvements to Rennes-le-Château (if those accounts are credible), and on
travel (which is increasingly being documented). And what of his and Marie’s lavish spending
on living expenses, which seems to have been mostly “off the books”? As for not being able to account for his
expenditure, this fits in with the presumed secretiveness of his accounting
practices. Obviously, he could not
reveal secret bank accounts (but we should be on the lookout for coded
references to them). And Smith’s thesis
that Saunière exaggerated his expenditure in order to make it appear that his
income was not small enough to support the characterization of a simoniac seems
to raise even more serious questions about the priest. At the moment Saunière claimed 200,000
francs as his income, surely any ecclesiastical authority would have been even
more alarmed and even more diligent in discovering the source of that income,
for surely something more serious than ordinary simony would have been
suspected. It seems more logical that
Saunière claimed 200,000 francs because he knew that that is what he (or
someone else!) had actually spent on Rennes or perhaps what an objective
assessment would have arrived at, and so he didn’t want to be caught with an
obvious discrepancy between the physical reality and its cost. Perhaps he felt it was better to suffer the
embarrassment of not being able to account for expenditure and thus thought to be
covering up simony than to be discovered as a perpetrator of “crimes” the
Church would think more serious. He may
have thought he was lucky to get off being thought merely a simoniac, which
allowed him a convenient cover as well.
And that would also account for his defiance after the trial and his
continuing to say masses on a make-shift altar outside the church. This may have been a man who thought he was
in the right, and the Church could go to hell with its piddling indictment. If he was part of the anti-modernist
movement within the Church, then that could account for his attitude toward
what he thought was a Church that had lost its way. Lately, some commentary connects Sauniere’s
rise and fall in fortune to changes in the papacy, which at the end led to his
extravagant building plans for the future when the right sort of pope came into
office and caused him to hope for a return to his old ways.
And it doesn’t seem likely that his building of the guest house
was merely to accommodate those he was selling salvation to or to, eventually,
provide a retirement home for priests (as he claimed to his bishop). If the Villa Bethania was a House of Simony, wouldn’t we have heard
about that from the locals? All we’ve
heard from the locals is that there was much partying going on there, with VIPs
featured. Incidentally, although the
locals were clearly upset with Saunière at times, especially at his desecration
of the graveyard, it’s noteworthy that they closed ranks with him when the
Bishop suspended him and ignored the new priest sent after Saunière’s
suspension in 1911 and instead congregated for services around the altar he
constructed outside his guest house.
Interestingly, Smith has an entirely different theory about the use of
the guest house; he wonders if it wasn’t built for the monarch-in-hiding, Le
Roi Perdu, this monarchist supported.
But inasmuch as Saunière was calling attention to this place with his other
construction, it doesn’t seem logical that he would simultaneously be hiding a
pretender to the throne.
Similarly, why would a simoniac call
attention to his corruption by building
such an outrageous estate and by restoring his church in such a gaudy
manner? Saunière has been accused of
“bad taste” in renovating his church, which may be the case, but that doesn’t
mean he was stupid as well! And why
would he keep the “Mass Books” that Bedu uses to build his case on if he
thought them incriminating? Or why
wouldn’t Marie have destroyed them? Is
it possible that he constructed them deliberately as red herrings? Or to authenticate his cover story? Have they been authenticated as his, by the
way?
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The
gaudy pulpit of Saunière’s church, St. Madeleine’s |
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There is some difficulty in reconciling the picture of a
right-wing, ultra-righteous priest trying to bring his Church back to
righteousness with the accusations of simony.
He speechified about the moral bankruptcy of the Republic and its new
capitalism, so why would
he choose to be a poster boy for Church corruption? Well, politics is known for making hypocrites
of people, and hypocrisy fits the picture of Saunière as someone who was
pretending to be someone he was not, but this rather contradicts the idea that
his pretense was to cover treasure-hunting or some other secret, which seems to
better fit with accounts of his activities, such as his constant tramping
around the countryside to collect “rocks” and his digging about the place and
his refusing to allow the locals one time to use his covered well to put out a
fire. What was he hiding in that
well? Also, a secret room has been
found in the church that Saunière is known to have popped into from time to
time, especially after one of his tramps around the country collecting
“rocks.” And he was known to dig in the
church cemetery at night! Where he reportedly defaced a tombstone that
supposedly held clues to deciphering the parchments. Curiouser yet, Saunière had letters prepared
to send out when he took certain mysterious trips, letters Marie then mailed to
make it appear that he was in RLC when he was not! All this surreptitious and duplicitous behavior does not fit well with
the obvious display of wealth he was making. Add a “stealthy” Saunière to an
“ostentatious” Saunière and you get a two and two that are not adding up here,
and so we have to ask if we’ve got the equation right.
There is also some question raised by the fact that the accusations of simony
were not brought by Msgr Billard, Saunière’s bishop at Carcassonne during the
period when Saunière was involved in his most extravagant expense and who
supposedly encouraged Saunière, but by Msgr Beauséjour, who replaced Billard in
1902. Suspicions of collusion with
Saunière have been directed at Billard because the Bishop died a millionaire,
and Smith thinks those unwarranted because the bulk of that wealth came from
the bequest of a rich lady. But this
just makes one wonder why this particular lady gave this man so much
money. And did she give it to him as a man or as a bishop? And why did he spend much of it, apparently,
on the purchase of a particular church—Notre Dame de Marceille in Limoux?
[Smith’s explanation that its value was as another shrine to a miraculous
appearance of the Virgin, bolstering the case for Saunière’s and Billard’s
being of the chivalric party that especially venerated such shrines because
they were part of the conspiracy to restore the monarchy, has mysteriously
disappeared from his website.
Incidentally, the Black Madonna in that church has recently been
decapitated! ]. Because it is believed that there is something fishy about the whole
simony trial of Saunière, that it must have been trumped up, either to cover up
something or because the new bishop hadn’t been or couldn’t be “bought off,”
some remain unconvinced that Beauséjour’s treatment of Saunière as a simoniac
is to be taken at face value or that it is the whole story. It would be interesting to know if Beauséjour
was of the modernizing party within the Church and thus found himself
especially antagonistic to a reactionary Saunière on those grounds. Or was Beauséjour simply overzealous in
trying to clean up the financial mess left by Billard? Factor in too that a new law passed in 1905
prohibiting priests from owning anything (as part of the movement to separate
Church from State) may have been a principal motivating force for both
Beauséjour's investigation and the strange ways that Saunière reacted to it and
prepared for it by putting property in Marie's name.
Finally,
for more on Beauséjour's possible motives,
I would recommend reading an article by Nicolas Mazet at http://www.tsj.org/saunmarg1.htm that
provides the most detailed account of Saunière's finances I've yet come across
and that argues for sources of income that no one has yet considered, such as
his serving as "Marguillier" (some sort of Trustee or Adminstrator)
of poor box funds for several parishes.
Yes, it’s possible, maybe even likely,
that Saunière was not as filthy rich as the True Believer account contends, but
the case has not been proven conclusively, and may never be proven as long as
it’s plausible that secret accounts were involved or that Bedu’s view of
Saunière as a simoniac who didn’t earn his pay is possible.
We must also keep open the possibility that, with the accession of a
pope who was more sympathetic to him, Saunière knew that he had substantial
funds coming his way from his sponsors or the people he was bribing, so that
even the extravagant building plan he had at the end of his life may not have
been beyond his reach, or rather the reach of his sponsors or payees.
Ironically, it appears that corroboration of Saunière’s
grandiose plans for further building, including major improvements to
the village and a car for himself, has come to light (see André Douzet’s Sauniere’s
Model). That a man plans grandly
doesn’t mean he has the means to see it through, of course, but it may mean, as
Douzet speculates, that he had sponsors who could see it through. However, since Corbu’s son-in-law, Antoine
Captier, wrote to Smith in 1988 denying that any such plans existed, such being
the fabrication of Corbu, Douzet’s opposite claim will need further
verification. But if it can be
verified, then that would lend credence to the popular view that Corbu mostly
told the truth, saving a few embellishments and over-dramatization. But can this really be settled? How well did Corbu’s daughter and son-in-law
know the old man? Did he have a secret
life? Are children always the best
guides to or the most informed about the lives of their parents? And what about the manner of Corbu’s death in
1968, in an auto accident? People have
wondered about that, as it is just one of many “accidental” deaths connected to
this case.
Smith seems to have been influenced
in his opinion of Corbu by his discovery that Corbu, when younger, had had
aspirations of being a novelist and had even published a detective novel, Le Mort Cambrioleur (interestingly, a
novel about double identity). Once a fabricator, always a fabricator, seems to
have been Smith’s conclusion; but that is surely not a necessary
conclusion. My own experience of fiction
writers, which is considerable, provides the rule that when they write
historical fiction most writers do not stray far from the “facts,” such as they
are known, rather preferring to build their fiction from them, and when they
write history or biography, as Corbu apparently thought he was doing, they
stray even less. Even so, there’s some
fiction in almost everything written, including the writings of people
who think they’re not writing fiction, so one must always be ready to
discount that. Of course there are
exceptions, and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci
Code may be an example of that!
{By the way,
there are lots of writers
and at least one actor
involved in the development of this story, and the debunkers visit the same
suspicion upon such imaginative types as Plato did when he banned them from his
utopian Republic! However, what is sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander.
My training in literary analysis makes me suspicious of all the
texts in this case, including those of the debunkers. I see all texts here as parts of a single but
very complex Grand Text in which the parts mostly talk past each other, in a
series of monologues, creating some sort of madhouse Tower of Babel, if taken
literally. Most arguments just ride off
on their own hobbyhorses, and many take leaps of faith at just the moment when
one longs for substantive proof. There
seems to be little effort to address the evidence of others with different
views in any sort of direct, rational, sequential way, covering all bases and
backed up by solid proof at every step of the way. Instead of proof we get assertions and
inferences and testimony that can’t be backed up. Appeals to authority are often dubious
because most “authorities” are themselves dealing mostly in speculation or with
disputed documents and do not agree among themselves, not to mention the bias
of “History-as-Written” and the fact that some of these authorities had or have
motive for not telling the truth, some of them even being
treasure-hunters. It might be said that
Putnam and Wood’s The Treasure of
Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved is an exception to what I’ve just
described as the norm in RLC studies, and certainly the authors think so, but I
urge you to count the number of times in this book that the authors assert that
something is true without providing any or adequate proof. This book has a higher standard of proof
than most, perhaps, but still it’s the same old story in that too often they
ask you to believe in something they lack proof of. And, while their effort is especially
helpful in corroborating the view that Pierre Plantard simply grafted his monarchist
ambitions onto the RLC mystery, a
conclusion we had already come to, they are less convincing in dealing with the
RLC mystery itself, and surprisingly their check of those finding geometric
patterns on the ground in the region more confirms than not that such exist,
though they argue for coincidences as the cause. And, like every other RLC study, this one
omits to deal with a number of elements of the story, probably because they
can’t yet be explained (just note the still unanswered questions raised on this
website), and so these loose threads will continue to be the subject of
speculation.
Back to Smith’s ironic “leap of
faith” in Corbu as complete liar, when he decided to dismiss Corbu’s story
altogether. But it seems unlikely that
Corbu would have told the story as he told it, with those particular details,
unless prompted by his recollection of what Marie and her “archives” had told
him. Embellish and dramatize, yes. Make it up entirely? Doubtful.
Because his hotel guests could see with their own eyes what
Saunière had done. A guest at this hotel
would not have looked around at Rennes-le-Château and guessed that the story
was entirely made up, that it covered the sordid reality that the priest
had been nothing more than a simoniac.
Quite the contrary. Why would a
simoniac call attention to his crimes in the way Saunière did? He was obviously proud of this place, not
ashamed of it. Which is also why I’m
dubious about charges of blackmail. I’m
inclined to believe that Saunière thought he was in the right and had done
right. And that he was being sponsored
in this. Whatever it was he was doing.}
As said, the debunkers sometimes
confuse matters further by equally entertaining the notion that Marie is
the original liar. If Corbu’s tale is
largely fictional, it could be because Marie Dénarnaud is the one who made it
up and Corbu was just telling it as it had been told to him! And one could find motivation for Marie’s lying. Perhaps Marie was desperate enough in her old
age to attempt to dupe with a wild tale the only person gullible enough to buy
her property, significantly someone from outside the community. (Although Corbu didn’t necessarily have to
be gullible; we could imagine him as seeing through the tale but also seeing
its potential as a magnet for tourists, and perhaps in addition the fabulist in
him relished the tale and enjoyed embellishing the tale further.) Or perhaps Marie just wished to replace the
awful truth about her corrupt lover man with an ennobling myth that would
transmogrify them both, make them mysterious romantic lovers guarding the
Treasure of the Ages. Or perhaps she
felt that her lover was not corrupt, that to the contrary he had
produced something truly remarkable, which she had contributed to, and thus
they deserved transmogrification on those grounds. Or some combination of motives. And then she kept Corbu and his family in
suspense and in attendance upon her by promising to reveal The Big Secret. Well, maybe so, but I fail to see how this
debunking version of the tale could be construed as any less romantic than that
of the True Believers, another irony to add to the pile. And the fact that the debunkers can’t make up their minds about who
the principal liar was suggests that, ironically, they care more about the
principle of the thing—that we have been lied to—than about “the truth.” We are confronted with the
At any rate, the centerpiece of the
tale Corbu told was Saunière’s finding ancient, coded parchments while digging
around in his church that served him as a guide to some sort of significant
treasure, which Corbu specified as the treasure of the Capetians (the royal house of France from
987 until 1328), concealed in the thirteenth century by Blanche de Castile, who
was de facto ruler of France (today’s north France) while her son, the pious
but bloody “St.” Louis, was off on the Albigensian Crusade butchering
“heretics.” A threat of a barons’ revolt
in the north supposedly persuaded her that the royal treasure was safer in the
south, where Louis had joined his army with Simon de Montfort’s in an attempt
to squash “heretics” and take their lands, with the Pope’s blessings. Curiously, although there’s no reason
Capetian treasure couldn’t be here, the popular account generally does not
pursue that, perhaps because steered by later accounts to favor other sources
of the treasure but also because even the True Believers thought Corbu was just
guessing in this part of his story, as was everybody else, including, perhaps,
Saunière himself. And, besides, the
True Believers wanted the “treasure” to be more exotic, more significant. And so, instead of Capetian treasure, most
guessed that the “treasure,” if
literal, might have belonged to any number of groups who preceded the
Capetians—Carolingians, Cathars, Knights Templar, Merovingian Franks,
Visigoths, Romans, Gauls, Celtic Druids, ancient Hebrews, etc., all of whom
certainly had occasion and perhaps reason to bury treasure here or have it deposited
for them. And of course it could have been the same treasure passed
through many different hands and gradually added to. However, the True Believers rather prefer the
idea that the “treasure,” or the most important “treasure,” was not
literal treasure but some sort of significant knowledge or Wisdom that brought
money-making power to the priest. Such
as blackmail power because this knowledge threatened the establishment! Or perhaps the power of magic-making
ritual! Or perhaps the power to grasp
the profoundest secrets of the universe!
Or perhaps knowledge of alien origins and secret technology derived from
that. And so on!
Whatever the “treasure” was (of
repute, that is), from then on Corbu’s “leak” eventually combined with “leaks”
from other sources to inspire mostly French tourists to show up at the Hotel de
la Tour to see what was going on (and which continued after Henri Buthion
purchased the hotel in 1964. Corbu died
in a suspicious car wreck in 1968). As
they dined in his restaurant, Corbu played a tape for them of “The Mystery of
Rennes-le-Château” (a transcript of this 1955/56 tape may be available in the Archives
de l’Aude in Carcassonne, and an English translation is now available on
Torkain’s website—see page 7 or click here (mark your spot!). Was this just business as usual? For Corbu, perhaps. The economic motive is always present in
this story, but perhaps sometimes as a distraction, a misdirection, and in this
instance seems relatively innocent, providing that Corbu was not in cahoots
with the other “leakers” but just being businesslike about his hotel. Incidentally, another theory about Corbu is
that he was sent to RLC by that
spooky secret group may think was operating behind the scenes to get control of
Marie’s property and conduct investigations and excavations.
If Corbu’s motive was
relatively innocent, in the sense of not being part of some grand conspiracy
but just transparently self-interested, this was in contrast to what, according
to the popular view, appears to have been the principal motive of the
other leakers. The others were decidedly not
innocent of conspiracy, and their principal motive seems not to have
been economic. “The
conspiracy” that followed Corbu appeared to True Believers to be about power,
power on a grand scale, and maybe salvation (international salvation
more than personal salvation), with probably benevolent intentions, as long as
we understand that “Hell
is paved with good intentions.”
And it’s at this point that the debunkers have their strongest case for fraud,
even if ultimately that does us no good in solving “the mystery” because it does not implicate Saunière, who
was long dead when it began.
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