Village of Mystery

The Enigma Begins

At the start of our search we did not know precisely what we were looking for or, for that matter, looking at. We had no theories and no hypotheses, we had set out to prove nothing. On the contrary, we were simply trying to find an explanation for a curious little enigma of the late nineteenth century. The conclusions we eventually reached were not postulated in advance. We were led to them, step by step, as if the evidence we accumulated had a mind of its own, was directing us of its own accord.

We believed at first that we were dealing with a strictly local mystery—an intriguing mystery certainly, but a mystery of essentially minor significance, confined to a village in the south of France. We believed at first that the mystery, although it involved many fascinating historical strands, was primarily of academic interest. We believed that our investigation might help to illumine certain aspects of Western history, but we never dreamed that it might entail re-writing them. Still less did we dream that whatever we discovered could be of any real contemporary relevance—and explosive contemporary relevance at that.

Our quest began—for it was indeed a quest—with a more or less straightforward story. At first glance this story was not markedly different from numerous other “treasure stories” or “unsolved mysteries” which abound in the history and folklore of almost every rural region. A version of it had been publicised in France, where it attracted considerable interest but was not to our knowledge at the time accorded any inordinate consequence. As we subsequently learned, there were a number of errors in this version. For the moment, however, we must recount the tale as it was published during the 1960s, and as we first came to know of it.

Rennes-le-Chateau and Berenger Sauniere

On June 1, 1885 the tiny French village of Rennes-le-Chateau received a new parish priest.

The cure’s name was Berenger Sauniere. He was a robust, handsome, energetic and, it would seem, highly intelligent man aged thirty-three. In seminary school not long before he had seemed destined for a promising clerical career. Certainly he had seemed destined for something more important than a remote village in the eastern foothills of the Pyrenees. Yet at some point he seems to have incurred the displeasure of his superiors. What precisely he did, if anything, remains unclear, but it soon thwarted all prospects of advancement. And it was perhaps to rid themselves of him that his superiors sent him to the parish of Rennes-le-Chateau.

At the time Rennes-le-Chateau housed only two hundred people. It was a tiny hamlet perched on a steep mountaintop, approximately twenty-five miles from Carcassonne. To another man, the place might have constituted exile—a life sentence in a remote provincial backwater, far from the civilised amenities of the age, far from any stimulus for an eager and inquiring mind. No doubt it was a blow to Sauniere’s ambition. Nevertheless there were certain compensations. Sauniere was a native of the region, having been born and raised only a few miles distant, in the village of Montazels. Whatever its deficiencies, therefore, Rennes-le-Chateau must have been very like home, with all the comforts of childhood familiarity.

Between 1885 and 1891 Sauniere’s income averaged, in francs, the equivalent of six pounds sterling per year—hardly opulence, but pretty much what one would expect for a rural cure in late nineteenth-century France. Together with gratuities provided by his parishioners, it appears to have been sufficient for survival, if not for any extravagance. During those six years Sauniere seems to have led a pleasant enough life, and a placid one.

He hunted and fished in the mountains and streams of his boyhood. He read voraciously, perfected his Latin, learned Greek, embarked on the study of Hebrew. He employed, as housekeeper and servant, an eighteen-year-old peasant girl named Marie Denarnaud, who was to be his lifelong companion and confidante. He paid frequent visits to his friend, the Abbe Henri Boudet, cure of the neighbouring village of Rennes-les-Bains. And under Boudet’s tutelage he immersed himself in the turbulent history of the region—a history whose residues were constantly present around him.

A few miles to the south-east of Rennes-le-Chateau, for example, looms another peak, called Bezu, surmounted by the ruins of a medieval fortress, which was once a preceptory of the Knights Templar. On a third peak, a mile or so east of Rennes-le-Chateau, stand the ruins of the chateau of Blanchefort, ancestral home of Bertrand de Blanchefort, fourth Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who presided over that famous order in the mid-twelfth century. Rennes-le-Chateau and its environs had been on the ancient pilgrim route, which ran from Northern Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. And the entire region was steeped in evocative legends, in echoes of a rich, dramatic and often bloodsoaked past.

The Discovery of the Parchments

For some time Sauniere had wanted to restore the village church of Rennes-le-Chateau. Consecrated to the Magdalene in 1059, this dilapidated edifice stood on the foundations of a still older Visigoth structure dating from the sixth century. By the late nineteenth century it was, not surprisingly, in a state of almost hopeless disrepair.

In 1891, encouraged by his friend Boudet, Sauniere embarked on a modest restoration, borrowing a small sum from the village funds. In the course of his endeavours he removed the altar-stone, which rested on two archaic Visigoth columns. One of these columns proved to be hollow. Inside the cure found four parchments preserved in sealed wooden tubes. Two of these parchments are said to have comprised genealogies, one dating from 1244, the other from 1644. The two remaining documents had apparently been composed in the 1780s by one of Sauniere’s predecessors as cure of Rennes-le-Chateau, the Abbe Antoine Bigou. Bigou had also been personal chaplain to the noble Blanchefort family who, on the eve of the French Revolution, were still among the most prominent local landowners.

The two parchments from Bigou’s time would appear to be pious Latin texts, excerpts from the New Testament. At least ostensibly. But on one of the parchments the words are run incoherently together, with no space between them, and a number of utterly superfluous letters have been inserted. And on the second parchment lines are indiscriminately truncated unevenly, sometimes in the middle of a word, while certain letters are conspicuously raised above the others. In reality these parchments comprise a sequence of ingenious ciphers or codes. Some of them are fantastically complex and unpredictable, defying even a computer, and insoluble without the requisite key.

The following decipherment has appeared in French works devoted to Rennes-le-Chateau, and in two of our films on the subject made for the BBC:

BERG ERE PAS DE TENTATION QUE POUSSIN TENIERS GAR DENT LA CLEF PAX DCLXXXI PAR LA CROIX ET CE CHEVAL DE DIEU J’ACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN A MIDI POM MES BLEUES

(SHEPHERDESS, NO TEMPTATION. THAT POUSSIN, TENIERS, HOLD THE KEY; PEACE 681. BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD, I COMPLETE OR DESTROY THIS DAEMON OF THE GUARDIAN AT NOON. BLUE APPLES.)

But if some of the ciphers are daunting in their complexity, others are patently, even flagrantly obvious. In the second parchment, for instance, the raised letters, taken in sequence, spell out a coherent message:

A DAGO BERT II ROI ET A SION EST CE TRES OR ET IL EST LA MORT.

(TO DAGOBERT II, KING, AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD.)

Although this particular message must have been discernible to Sauniere, it is doubtful that he could have deciphered the more intricate codes. Nevertheless, he realised he had stumbled upon something of consequence and, with the consent of the village mayor, brought his discovery to his superior, the bishop of Carcassonne. How much the bishop understood is unclear, but Sauniere was immediately dispatched to Paris at the bishop’s expense with instructions to present himself and the parchments to certain important ecclesiastic authorities. Chief among these were the Abbe Bieil, Director General of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, and Bieil’s nephew, Emile Hoffet. At the time Hoffet was training for the priesthood.

Although still in his early twenties, he had already established an impressive reputation for scholarship, especially in linguistics, cryptography and palaeography. Despite his pastoral vocation, he was known to be immersed in esoteric thought, and maintained cordial relations with the various occult-oriented groups, sects and secret societies which were proliferating in the French capital. This had brought him into contact with an illustrious cultural circle, which included such literary figures as Stephane Mallarme and Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as the composer Claude Debussy. He also knew Emma Calve, who, at the time of Sauniere’s appearance, had just returned from triumphant performances in London and Windsor.

As a diva, Emma Calve was the Maria Callas of her age. At the same time she was a high priestess of Parisian esoteric sub-culture, and sustained amorous liaisons with a number of influential occultists.

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

During his stay in Paris, Sauniere also spent some time in the Louvre. This may well be connected with the fact that, before his departure, he purchased reproductions of three paintings. One seems to have been a portrait, by an unidentified artist, of Pope Celestin V, who reigned briefly at the end of the thirteenth century. One was a work by David Teniers—although it is not clear which David Teniers, father or son. The third was perhaps the most famous tableau by Nicolas Poussin, “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”—“The Shepherds of Arcadia.”

The Transformation

On his return to Rennes-le-Chateau, Sauniere resumed his restoration of the village church. In the process he exhumed a curiously carved flagstone, dating from the seventh or eighth century, which may have had a crypt beneath it, a burial chamber in which skeletons were said to have been found. Sauniere also embarked on projects of a rather more singular kind. In the churchyard, for example, stood the sepulchre of Marie, Marquise d’Hautpoul de Blanchefort. The headstone and flagstone marking her grave had been designed and installed by the Abbe Antoine Bigou—Sauniere’s predecessor of a century before, who had apparently composed two of the mysterious parchments. And the headstone’s inscription—which included a number of deliberate errors in spacing and spelling—was a perfect anagram for the message concealed in the parchments referring to Poussin and Teniers. If one rearranges the letters, they will form the cryptic statement quoted above alluding to Poussin and to Sion; and the errors seem to have been contrived precisely to make them do so.

Not knowing that the inscriptions on the marquise’s tomb had already been copied, Sauniere obliterated them. Nor was this desecration the only curious behaviour he exhibited. Accompanied by his faithful housekeeper, he began to make long journeys on foot about the countryside, collecting rocks of no apparent value or interest. He also embarked on a voluminous exchange of letters with unknown correspondents throughout France, as well as in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Spain. He took to collecting stacks of utterly worthless postage stamps. And he opened certain shadowy transactions with various banks. One of them even dispatched a representative from Paris, who travelled all the way to Rennes-le-Chateau for the sole purpose of ministering to Sauniere’s business.

In postage alone Sauniere was already spending a substantial sum more than his previous annual income could possibly sustain. Then, in 1896, he began to spend in earnest, on a staggering and unprecedented scale. By the end of his life in 1917 his expenditure would amount to the equivalent of several million pounds at least.

Some of this unexplained wealth was devoted to laudable public works—a modern road was built leading up to the village, for example, and facilities for running water were provided. Other expenditures were more quixotic. A tower was built, the Tour Magdala, overlooking the called the Villa Bethania, which Sauniere himself never occupied. And the church was not only redecorated, but redecorated in a most bizarre fashion. A Latin inscription was incised in the porch lintel above the entrance:

TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE (THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE)

Immediately inside the entrance a hideous statue was erected, a gaudy representation of the demon Asmodeus—custodian of secrets, guardian of hidden treasures and, according to ancient Judaic legend, builder of Solomon’s Temple. On the church walls lurid, garishly painted plaques were installed depicting the Stations of the Cross—each was characterised by some odd inconsistency, some inexplicable added detail, some flagrant or subtle deviation from accepted Scriptural account. In Station VIII, for example, there is a child swathed in a Scottish plaid. In Station XIV, which portrays Jesus’s body being carried into the tomb, there is a background of dark nocturnal sky, dominated by a full moon. It is almost as if Sauniere were trying to intimate something. But what? That Jesus’s burial occurred after nightfall, several hours later than the Bible tells us it did? Or that the body is being carried out of the tomb, not into it?

While engaged in this curious adornment, Sauniere continued to spend extravagantly. He collected rare china, precious fabrics, antique marbles. He created an orangery and a zoological garden. He assembled a magnificent library. Shortly before his death, he was allegedly planning to build a massive Babel-like tower lined with books, from which he intended to preach. Nor were his parishioners neglected. Sauniere regaled them with sumptuous banquets and other forms of largesse, maintaining the life-style of a medieval potentate presiding over an impregnable mountain domain. In his remote and well-nigh inaccessible eyrie he received a number of notable guests. One, of course, was Emma Calve. One was the French Secretary of State for Culture. But perhaps the most august and consequential visitor to the unknown country priest was the Archduke Johann von Habsburg, a cousin of Franz-Josef, Emperor of Austria. Bank statements subsequently revealed that Sauniere and the archduke had opened consecutive accounts on the same day, and that the latter had made a substantial sum over to the former.

The Death of Sauniere

The ecclesiastical authorities at first turned a blind eye. When Sauniere’s former superior at Carcassonne died, however, the new bishop attempted to call the priest to account. Sauniere responded with startling and brazen defiance. He refused to explain his wealth. He refused to accept the transfer the bishop ordered. Lacking any more substantial charge, the bishop accused him of simony—illicitly selling masses—and a local tribunal suspended him. Sauniere appealed to the Vatican, which exonerated and reinstated him.

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

As Sauniere lay on his deathbed, a priest was called from a neighbouring parish to hear his final confession and administer the last rites. The priest duly arrived and retired into the sick-room. According to eye-witness testimony, he emerged shortly thereafter, visibly shaken. In the words of one account he “never smiled again.” In the words of another he lapsed into an acute depression that lasted for several months. Whether these accounts are exaggerated or not, the priest, presumably on the basis of Sauniere’s confession, refused to administer extreme unction.

On January 22nd Sauniere died unshriven. The following morning his body was placed upright in an armchair on the terrace of the Tour Magdala, clad in an ornate robe adorned with scarlet tassels. One by one, certain unidentified mourners filed past, many of them plucking tassels of remembrance from the dead man’s garment. There has never been any explanation of this ceremony. Present-day residents of Rennes-le-Chateau are as mystified by it as everyone else.

The reading of Sauniere’s will was awaited with great anticipation. To everyone’s surprise and chagrin, however, it declared him to be utterly penniless. At some point before his death he had apparently transferred the whole of his wealth to Marie Denarnaud, who had shared his life and secrets for thirty-two years. Or perhaps most of that wealth had been in Marie’s name from the very beginning.

Following the death of her master, Marie continued to live a comfortable life in the Villa Bethania until 1946. After the Second World War, however, the newly installed French government issued a new currency. As a means of apprehending tax-evaders, collaborators and wartime profiteers, French citizens, when exchanging old francs for new, were obliged to account for their revenues. Confronted by the prospect of an explanation, Marie chose poverty. She was seen in the garden of the villa, burning vast sheaves of old franc notes.

For the next seven years Marie lived austerely, supporting herself on money obtained from the sale of Villa Bethania. She promised the purchaser, Monsieur Noel Corbu, that she would confide to him, before her death, a “secret” which would make him not only rich but also “powerful.” On January 29th, 1953, however, Marie, like her master before her, suffered a sudden and unexpected stroke which left her prostrate on her deathbed, incapable of speech. To Monsieur Corbu’s intense frustration, she died shortly thereafter, carrying her secret with her.

The Possible Treasures

This, in its general outlines, was the story published in France during the 1960s. This was the form in which we first became acquainted with it. And it was to the questions raised by the story in this form that we, like other researchers of the subject, addressed ourselves.

The first question is fairly obvious. What was the source of Sauniere’s money? Whence could such sudden and enormous wealth have come? Was the explanation ultimately banal? Or was there something more exciting involved? The latter possibility imparted a tantalising quality to the mystery, and we could not resist the impulse to play detectives.

We began by considering the explanations suggested by other researchers. According to many of these, Sauniere had indeed found a treasure of some kind. This was a plausible enough assumption, for the history of the village and its environs includes many possible sources of hidden gold or jewels.

In prehistoric times, for example, the area around Rennes-le-Chateau was regarded as a sacred site by the Celtic tribes who lived there; and the village itself, once called Rhedae, derived its name from one of these tribes. In Roman times the area was a large and thriving community, important for its mines and therapeutic hot springs. And the Romans, too, regarded the site as sacred. Later researchers have found traces of several pagan temples.

During the sixth century, the little mountain-top village was supposedly a town with 30,000 inhabitants. At one point it seems to have been the northern capital of the empire ruled by the Visigoths—the Teutonic people who had swept westwards from Central Europe, sacked Rome, toppled the Roman Empire and established their own domain straddling the Pyrenees.

For another five hundred years the town remained the seat of an important county, or comte, the Comte of Razes. Then, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, an army of northern knights descended on the Languedoc to stamp out the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and claim the rich spoils of the region for themselves. During the atrocities of the so-called Albigensian Crusade, Rennes-le-Chateau was captured and transferred from hand to hand as a fief. A century and a quarter later, in the 1360s, the local population was decimated by plague; and Rennes-le-Chateau was destroyed shortly thereafter by roving Catalan bandits.

Tales of fantastic treasure are interwoven with many of these historical vicissitudes. The Cathar heretics, for example, were reputed to possess something of fabulous and even sacred value which, according to a number of legends, was the Holy Grail. These legends reportedly impelled Richard Wagner to make a pilgrimage to Rennes-le-Chateau before composing his last opera, Parsifal; and during the occupation of 1940-45 German troops, following in Wagner’s wake, are said to have undertaken a number of fruitless excavations in the vicinity. There was also the vanished treasure of the Knights Templar, whose Grand Master, Bertrand de Blanchefort, commissioned certain mysterious excavations in the vicinity. According to all accounts, these excavations were of a markedly clandestine nature, performed by a specially imported contingent of German miners. If some kind of Templar treasure were indeed concealed around Rennes-le-Chateau, this might explain the reference to “Sion” in the parchments discovered by Sauniere.

There were other possible treasures as well. Between the fifth and dynasty, which included King Dagobert II. Rennes-le-Chateau, in Dagobert’s time, was a Visigoth bastion, and Dagobert himself was married to a Visigoth princess. The town might have constituted a sort of royal treasury; and there are documents which speak of great wealth amassed by Dagobert for military conquest and concealed in the environs of Rennes-le-Chateau. If Sauniere discovered some such depository, it would explain the reference in the codes to Dagobert.

The Cathars. The Templars. Dagobert II. And there was yet another possible treasure—the vast booty accumulated by the Visigoths during their tempestuous advance through Europe. This might have included something more than conventional booty, possibly items of immense relevance—both symbolic and literal—to Western religious tradition. It might, in short, have included the legendary treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem which, even more than the Knights Templar, would warrant the references to “Sion.”

In A.D. 66 Palestine rose in revolt against the Roman yoke. Four years later, in A.D. 70, Jerusalem was razed by the legions of the emperor, under the command of his son, Titus. The Temple itself was sacked and the contents of the Holy of Holies carried back to Rome. As they are depicted on Titus’s triumphal arch, these included the immense gold seven-branched candelabrum so sacred to Judaism, and possibly even the Ark of the Covenant.

Three and a half centuries later, in A.D. 410, Rome in her turn was sacked by the invading Visigoths under Alaric the Great, who pillaged virtually the entire wealth of the Eternal City. As the historian Procopius tells us, Alaric made off with “the treasures of Solomon, the King of the Hebrews, a sight most worthy to be seen, for they were adorned in the most part with emeralds and in the olden time they had been taken from Jerusalem by the Romans.”

Treasure, then, may well have been the source of Sauniere’s unexplained wealth. The priest may have discovered any of several treasures, or he may have discovered a single treasure which repeatedly changed hands through the centuries—passing perhaps from the Temple of Jerusalem, to the Romans, to the Visigoths, eventually to the Cathars and/or the Knights Templar. If this were so, it would explain why the treasure in question “belonged” both to Dagobert II and to Sion.

Thus far our story seemed to be essentially a treasure story. And a treasure story—even one involving the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem—is ultimately of limited relevance and significance. People are constantly discovering treasures of one kind or another. Such discoveries are often exciting, dramatic and mysterious, and many of them cast important illumination on the past. Few of them, however, exercise any direct influence, political or otherwise, on the present—unless, of course, the treasure in question includes a secret of some sort, and possibly an explosive one.

The Intrigue

We did not discount the argument that Sauniere discovered treasure. At the same time it seemed clear to us that, whatever else he discovered, he also discovered a secret—an historical secret of immense import to his own time and perhaps to our own as well. Mere money, gold or jewels would not, in themselves, explain a number of facets to his story. They would not account for his introduction to Hoffet’s circle, for instance, his association with Debussy and his liaison with Emma Calve. They would not explain the Church’s intense interest in the matter, the impunity with which Sauniere defied his bishop or his subsequent exoneration by the Vatican, which seemed to have displayed an urgent concern of its own. They would not explain a priest’s refusal to administer the last rites to a dying man, or the visit of a Habsburg archduke to a remote little village in the Pyrenees. The Habsburg archduke in question has since been revealed as Johann Salvator von Habsburg, known by the pseudonym of Jean Orth. He renounced all his rights and titles in 1889 and within two months had been banished from all the territories of the Empire. It was shortly after this that he first appeared in Rennes-le-Chateau.

Nor would money, gold or jewels explain the powerful aura of mystification surrounding the whole affair, from the elaborate coded ciphers to Marie Denarnaud burning her inheritance of banknotes. And Marie herself had promised to divulge a ‘secret’ which conferred not merely wealth but ‘power’ as well.

On these grounds we grew increasingly convinced that Sauniere’s story involved more than riches, and that it involved a secret of some kind, one that was almost certainly controversial. In other words it seemed to us that the mystery was not confined to a remote backwater village and nineteenth-century priest. Whatever it was, it appeared to radiate out from Rennes-le-Chateau and produce ripples—perhaps even a potential tidal wave—in the world beyond. Could Sauniere’s wealth have come not from anything of intrinsic financial value, but from knowledge of some kind? If so, could this knowledge have been turned to fiscal account? Could it have been used to blackmail somebody, for example? Could Sauniere’s wealth have been his payment for silence?

We knew that he had received money from Johann von Habsburg. At the same time, however, the priest’s ‘secret’, whatever it was, seemed to be more religious in nature than political. Moreover, his relations with the Austrian archduke, according to all accounts, were notably cordial. On later career, seems to have been distinctly afraid of him, and to have treated him with kid gloves—the Vatican. Could Sauniere have been blackmailing the Vatican? Granted such blackmail would be a presumptuous and dangerous undertaking for one man, however exhaustive his precautions. But what if he were aided and supported in his enterprise by others, whose eminence rendered them inviolable to the church, like the French Secretary of State for Culture, or the Habsburgs? What if the Archduke Johann were only an intermediary, and the money he bestowed on Sauniere actually issued from the coffers of Rome?

In February 1972 “The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?"—the first of our three films on Sauniere and the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau—was shown. The film made no controversial assertions, it simply told the ‘basic story’ as it has been recounted in the preceding pages. Nor was there any speculation about an ’explosive secret’ or high-level blackmail. It is also worth mentioning that the film did not cite Emile Hoffet—the young clerical scholar in Paris to whom Sauniere confided his parchments—by name.

Not surprisingly perhaps, we received a veritable deluge of mail. Some of it offered intriguing speculative suggestions. Some of it was complimentary. Some of it was dotty. Of all these letters, one, which the writer did not wish us to publicise, seemed to warrant special attention.

It came from a retired Anglican priest and seemed a curious and provocative non sequitur. Our correspondent wrote with categorical certainty and authority. He made his assertions baldly and definitively, with no elaboration, and with apparent indifference as to whether we believed him or not. The ’treasure’, he declared flatly, did not involve gold or precious stones. On the contrary, it consisted of ‘incontrovertible proof that the Crucifixion was a fraud and that Jesus was alive as late as A.D. 45.’

This claim sounded flagrantly absurd. What, even to a convinced atheist, could possibly comprise ‘incontrovertible proof that Jesus survived the Crucifixion’? We were unable to imagine anything which could not be disbelieved or repudiated—which would not only comprise ‘proof’, but ‘proof’ that was truly ‘incontrovertible’. At the same time the sheer extravagance of the assertion begged for clarification and elaboration. The writer of the letter had provided a return address. At the earliest opportunity we drove to see him and attempted to interview him.

In person he was rather more reticent than he had been in his letter, and seemed to regret having written to us in the first place. He refused to expand upon his reference to “incontrovertible proof” and volunteered only one additional fragment of information. This “proof”, he said, or its existence at any rate, had been divulged to him by another Anglican cleric, Canon Alfred Leslie Liney.

Liney, who died in 1940, had published widely and was not unknown. During much of his life he had maintained contacts with the Catholic Modernist Movement, based primarily at Saint Sulpice in Paris. In his youth Liney had worked in Paris, and had been acquainted with Emile Hoffet.

The trail had come full circle. Given a connection between Liney and Hoffet, the claims of the priest, however preposterous, could not be summarily dismissed. Similar evidence of a monumental secret was forthcoming when we began to research the life of Nicolas Poussin, the great seventeenth-century painter whose name recurred throughout Sauniere’s story. In 1656 Poussin, who was living in Rome at the time, had received a visit from the Abbe Louis Fouquet, brother of Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV of France. From Rome, the abbe dispatched a letter to his brother, describing his meeting with Poussin.

Part of this letter is worth quoting:

We were pleased and intrigued by this ingenious exercise. We did not realise at the time how extraordinarily appropriate the resulting admonition was.