‘The lords of Perillos?’
‘No one knows how the house of Perillos came to have the treasure, but the house of Perillos and the house of Blanchefort have had close ties since the Crusade against the Cathars.
The Blancheforts were a Cathar family with Templar affiliations, and the lords of Perillos were connected to the Cathars through Raymond de Parella, the master of Montsegur. They were united, if not by blood, by loyalty. So it was natural that when the Perillos family became diminished the treasure passed into the hands of the Blancheforts for safekeeping. Knowledge of it and information about its whereabouts eventually reached François d’Hautpoul when he took for himself the lands and the titles of the lords of Blanchefort. François then married a nineteen-year-old orphan, Marie de Nègre. On his deathbed he bequeathed knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden treasure to Marie, and on her deathbed, having no male heirs and fearing instability in the land, she in turn passed the information to the only man she could trust – her priest.’
‘You say there were no heirs?’ Eva said coldly.
The woman glanced sharply at Eva. ‘I said no male heirs.’
‘So there were female heirs?’
That glance was full of contempt. ‘Yes, but perhaps she did not consider them suitable. Women were just chattels, to be disposed of at will, they held no power in society and were quite defenceless. This information was a perilous thing, after all,’ she said, and smiled at her little pun. ‘Marie then died. Do you know the date?’
Rahn nodded. ‘The seventeenth of January 1781.’
She smiled and raised one brow. ‘As it happens, her confessor, Abbé Bigou, was himself affiliated with a circle, a brotherhood that had inherited the knowledge of a secret. To be precise, they were called the Compagnie du Saint Sacrament. The order was formed in Toulouse sometime around 1630 but was based at Saint Sulpice whose feast day is—’
‘The seventeenth of January,’ Rahn said.
She sat forward. ‘Saint Vincent de Paul was a member of this order, as was Richelieu, who was not only a cardinal of the Church but also King Louis XIII’s prime minister. Now, after Marie de Nègre died in 1781, we find that the old Abbé Bigou, a member of the Compagnie, which now calls itself Association Angelica, is in possession of the information that relates to the whereabouts of the inheritance of the Hautpoul-Blancheforts – not the treasure itself, but the information pertaining to where it had been hidden by the family Perillos. Of course he had a sense for its significance in relation to the secret, but he couldn’t take it to anyone more senior, since the order by now consisted of a network of provincial branches that were forbidden contact with one another. Moreover, France was erupting in a revolution inspired by the Freemasons and everything was falling into chaos; he did not know whom he could trust.
‘It was a difficult time for the Catholic Church. Many priests were killed and their churches ransacked or put to the torch. This meant that Association Angelica was in disarray and those clergy who did survive chose to leave the country rather than swear an oath of fidelity to the revolutionaries. Abbé Bigou and a certain Abbé Caunielle, of Rennes-les-Bains, decided to head for exile in Spain together. But before Bigou left for Spain he hid the information somewhere in the church here at Rennes-le-Château, as he’d been told to do by Marie Blanchefort before she died. Fearing for his own health and to ensure that it would not be forgotten, he confided that he had hidden it, but not its whereabouts, to the younger Abbé Caunielle of Rennes-les-Bains. He encouraged him to tell his successors what he had done if ever the young abbé returned to France. When Abbé Caunielle finally made his way back to Rennes-les-Bains some years later, he mentioned it to his successor and the information came, finally, to the attention of Abbé Boudet – who became a friend of Abbé Saunière’s.’
‘This Boudet is on the list,’ Rahn said, under his breath.
‘Of course! Abbé Boudet was a very knowledgeable man, a historian of the Celtic past of this area. It was Boudet who encouraged Saunière to begin his modest renovations. He even supplied him with the funds he needed from donations made by the Countess of Chambord and others. These renovations bore fruit with the discovery of that parchment that Marie de Blanchefort had given to Bigou before she died. Bigou had hidden it inside the baluster that supported the pulpit.’
Madame Dénarnaud took out a small, weathered parchment from inside the pages of the bible and gave it to Rahn.