© Copyright 2005 Éditions Sud Ouest.

ISBN : 978-2-8177-0291-9

Éditeur : 18174.01.03.04.05

www.editions-sudouest.com

Table of contents

Preface

Prologue

“This Place is Marvellous”

A Priest in his Parishe

First Days as a Priest

Stay in Narbonne

The Secret of the Abbé Bigou

Work Begins

First Discoveries

Gold from the Tomb

Ransacking the Cemetery

A Bank Account in Budapest

Devil from Giscard

The Flavour of Secrecy

The Fakers

Construction of the Domain

Like a Chess-Board

The Flamboyant Years

The Tragic Ends of Gélis and Boudet

Trafficking in Masses

The 1910 Trial

Ruined by the War

The Burial of Bérenger

Hard Times for Marie

A Secret that will make you Rich…

Change of Scene

A Theoretical Gold-mine

Destructio ad Absurdum

Skull and Crossbones

The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail

Rennes-le-Château Today

The Habsbourg Trail

Summer 2004 – Rennes-le-Château. Henry Lincoln, co-author of The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail, with Jean-Luc Robin in the Atelier Empreinte bookshop. Photo Philippe Marlin.

Preface

Jean-Luc Robin has one advantageover those scores of writers who have pursued the ghost of Bérenger Saunière. He has shared Bérenger’s space. He has lived under his roof, handled his possessions, read his writings and felt the influence of the changing seasons as he did. He has absorbed a truth and a reality of Rennes-le-Château which few others can claim to have done. All those other writers – myself included – can only catch a glimpse of the truth of Bérenger Saunière’s life. Jean-Luc has felt it. And so this book has something special to offer.

I have long argued that our subjective interpretations of the mystery surrounding Bérenger’s village can have absolutely no validity, but there is someone whose views merit our attention.

Jean-Luc’s guesses are founded on a knowledge denied to the rest of us. Added to which, he can entertain us with a fund of village anecdotes which bring a delightful solidity to the shadows who inhabit this extraordinary story. Having read more books than most people about the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, I might be forgiven for not being too enthusiastic about yet another, but when Jean-Luc asked me to write these few words of introduction, I suspected that he might have something rather different to offers his readers.

As a joke he asked me to say that I thought his book was “sans doute le meilleur ouvrage écrit à ce jour sur le mystère de Rennes-le château”. Well… maybe… but then-who am I to argue?Henry Lincoln

For my fatherwho, when I was seven years old,was the first to tell me the story of “the curé aux milliards”.

The village of Rennes-le-Château. Photo Laurent Theillet.

Prologue

In 1995, I made up my mind to come back home to the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, deep in south-western France, in the high valley of the Aude, I’d spent the happiest days of my childhood. Those pre-teen years, from seven to twelve shone bright in my memory: Saint Stanislas School in Carcassonne, the baking summer heat of the Corbières hills, the soaring castle ruins, that nobody had yet thought to label “Cathare” and – of course – the fabulous tale of Bérenger Saunière, le curé aux milliards – the millionaire priest.

Henri Buthion, the owner of the Abbé Saunière’s domain, had just sold it to two foreigners, an American businessman and a talented Dutch journalist, the Geneva correspondent of the International Herald Tribune and Time Magazine.

Where is Rennes-le-Château situated?

I was a reasonably successful restaurant owner and I’d just signed an agreement to buy a little place in Carcassonne. I couldn’t, however, take over until September and we were still in the early part of June. I’m not the sort of person to sit, twiddling my thumbs, for weeks on end, so I began to hunt through the Small Ads for something to fill the summer months. “Rennes-le-Château seeks chef for summer season.” I dialled the number, made an appointment for the same afternoon and in no time, I was at the foot of the Tour Magdala, staring up at it and wondering why, as a child, I’d found Saunière’s library tower so scary. Bathed in midsummer sunlight, it looked quite attractive. A few yards away, down the sloping road, I could see the door of the Villa Bethania. For the first time, I was about to cross Bérenger Saunière’s threshold.

The Rennes-le-Château area

The new proprietors had installed a team of four people to develop the tourism potential of the place. When this quartet introduced themselves, they gave me the distinct impression that they were the actual owners – and I had no reason to doubt their word. Terms were agreed and I moved in, looking forward to reliving my childhood fantasies for a few months. It took me no time at all, however, to discover that my employers’ideas of how to run an establishment of this kind were a touch curious. They seemed to have worked out an efficient scheme for losing as much money as possible as speedily as possible and they were certainly managing the job rather well. But – what the hell! – as far as I was concerned, this was just a summer fill-in and if they’d made up their minds to feed half the Département free, gratis and for nothing – well … that was their problem.

Things made a little more sense, though, when the real owners, panicked by the fiscal haemorrhage, turned up out of the blue, half way through the season. Which was how I got to know Bob Kroon and Bert Gerards. It didn’t take long for them to suggest that I should take over the lease myself, to see if I could save the business from total collapse. I accepted the offer – provided I could have a free hand. The obvious first requisite was to un-prise the fearsome foursome, a job which, in the event, proved relatively painless.

Our two financiers, however, had cooked up a grandiose and totally unrealistic plan for the running of their hotel. Praise be to the guardian spirits of gastronomy, there wasn’t a hope that they were ever going to be able to raise the necessary money for their scheme. If they had, the village would have been changed beyond all recognition. In all probability, Rennes-le-Château would have been ruined forever. Looked at with a professional eye, though, I could see that there was sufficient potential to maintain me and my family in modest comfort – provided we kept everything under reasonable control. So I suggested to Bob and Bert that I should rent the place from them. My Carcassonne plan was abandoned and suddenly, there I was, running my own business in the Abbé Saunière’s domain.

And that’s how, in the last five years, I’ve come to welcome thousands of visitors. I can count among my friends, Antoine Captier and his wife Claire Corbu (whose father had owned the estate from 1947 to 1967). They agreed to let me lease Bérenger’s goods and chattels – documents of all sorts – the priest’s diaries – furniture – personal effects – all the sort of things that could go together to create a worthwhile museum.

This mass of documentation, together with the research that the Captiers had already put together, enabled me, bit by bit, to begin formulating my own ideas about the story. And now the daily contact with the public, answering the same questions over and over again – dealing with the incredulity of some and the ingenuousness of others – all this has helped me to construct an account which, without destroying the dream, still makes a certain sense. To achieve this, I’ve stuck to solid, verifiable facts. I don’t repeat what other writers say without checking. I take into account that most writers begin with their own preconceived ideas and hunt about desperately for anything to back them up. If they can’t find them – they just fabricate them. I don’t think this is the right way to go about things and – not having any theories of my own to suggest, nor any secret messages to pass on – I’ve been able to approach the Saunière story with fresh eyes. I had to be able to satisfy the curiosity of the public and at the same time to respect them by keeping them interested without yielding to the temptation simply to invent.

This, then, is what I hope to offer in this book. A story which has grown out of the privileged position in which I find myself – at the centre of the web where all the ideas and discoveries – real or imagined – come to be tried out. There’s no question that the story of the Abbé Saunière is worth telling and even more, that it merits being stripped of all the wild fantasies which have been draped over it. In its own underlying simplicity his story holds up a mirror to the curious questionings of our modern age.

“This Place is Marvellous”

Whether they’re obsessed or just simply intrigued by the Da Vinci Code puzzle, millions of people now know the name Saunière, the central character in Dan Brown’s best-seller. History-buffs will also have spotted the links between the thriller and the story of Rennes-le-Château.

But The Da Vinci Code is not the first book to be based on the incredible secrets which float about this little village in the Languedoc. More than two hundred books have already been written in French on the mystery of Rennes-le-Château and the Abbé Saunière’s treasure, as well as countless radio and television programmes and press articles. Taking into account foreign language versions never translated into French, that number could easily be doubled. All kinds of garbage have been heaped up to provide a fertile soil in which the myth of this little village in the high valley of the Aude has grown and flourished.

Any number of writers claim to have solved the mystery. I make no such claim, although I’m fairly sure that my modest contribution will help towards getting nearer to the truth. When I finish this book, the mystery will – for the most part - still remain.

I’ve often compared the mystery of Rennes-le-Château to the Amazonian rainforest, which I got to know when I lived in Brazil. It constantly renews itself, feeds on itself and grows day by day. If ever there were to come a time when “the solution to the mystery” were to be found, it would be like totally deforesting the landscape, so that in a couple of years, nothing would be left but sandy, sterile soil. And what a shame that would be!

Our time needs dreams. Today, we want to understand everything – explain everything. Rationalism is making us lose our ability to dream. This is why places like Rennes-le-Château have such a powerful appeal. They are the safety valves of our collective unconscious. And you don’t block a safety valve – unless you’re stupid enough to want the pressure cooker to blow up in your face.

I first got to know the village in 1957. I was seven years old. The story had only just been heard of for the first time: “With just one swing of his pick at the altar pillar, the Abbé Saunière uncovered the treasure of Blanche of Castille.” This was the claim made by Noël Corbu, three years after he’d inherited the domaine. La Dépêche, a local newspaper, picked up the story in January 1956 … and the fuse was lit. Corbu had just turned the place into an hotel-restaurant, calling it the Hotel de la Tour. The Saunière Mystery had embarked upon its commercial phase.

Treasure stories have an irresistible appeal. What child has not dreamt of Stevenson’s Treasure Island? Or turned themselves into Tintin, hunting the four corners of the earth for Red Rackham’s treasure? I was just like any other young sproggit and when, on Sundays, our family went up to Rennes-le-Château, I would scrabble in the earth at the foot of the Tour Magdala, turning over the stones in the vain hope of finding the treasure.

Every summer, for years now, the village has been a magnet for all kinds and conditions of folk. From famous surgeons to bank directors – from university professors to bus drivers – from detectives to dustmen – every one of them with a new theory, new measurements, a new certainty that this time they really have found The Hiding Place. Long-suffering spouses take the children to Rennes-les-Bains for a swim, while the serious work goes on all over the hillsides and through the forests. With a compass in one hand and a map in the other, they trail clouds of conspiratorial confusion, as they follow the lines they have drawn to their – inevitable – intersections. And to complete the picture, one must not forget the rucksack stuffed with “Every Treasure-Hunter’s Kit of Treasure-Hunting for Hunting Treasure” … shovels, lamps, ropes, metal detectors, hard hats and … for the truly romantic … the dowser’s pendulum. The system seems to be roughly thus:

First find the location by tracing a line from the turret of the Tour Magdala to the summit of Mount Cardou. Where this line crosses another line drawn at right angles from the village of Le Bezu to the tower of Rennes-le-Château church, draw a third line to reproduce the design on the tombstone of Marie de Blanchefort...

At this point there generally seems to be a choice of two different treasure-hunting styles. Either our hunter (who, for the rest of the year, is a reasonably rational sort of person, who can’t bash a nail into a wall to hang a picture and who thinks that digging in his garden is a pointless and exhausting exercise), now transforms himself into a manic mole, moving mountains of muck and masses of masonry, rubble and rocks, to come crawling back to his hotel or camp-site at the end of the day, scratched, bruised, tattered and battered, but definitely unbowed – and convinced that tomorrow will be the day when he’ll finally lay his hands on the treasure.

Or … he’s the other sort, for whom the very fact that he’s finally found “The Place”, seems to tie him up in irrational and panic-stricken knots, so that he’s totally incapable of ever lifting a finger to dig further down into his very own “golden hole”. For the rest of his summer break, you’ll find him propping up the village bar, making subtly unsubtle hints that he’s found... IT! From then on, he joins the bunch of “old hands”, sporting a slightly smug superiority, with a smirk implying that “You may think you’re bright boys – but I’m the one who’s cracked it!” Until, that is, in the course of conversation, he discovers that there’s an entire regiment who, while they know nothing of the excruciatingly ingenious clues that he’s unravelled, have all identified precisely the same spot! No more than a tiny bit “put about”, he goes home – bashes in his nail – finally hangs his picture – and forgets entirely about Rennes-le-Château... at least until Christmas.

But, with the coming of spring, unfailing as the cuckoo, he feels the twitch of temptation. He re-calculates his calculations and Madame – grinding her teeth as, yet again, her dreams of Disneyland fade – gets herself and the offspring into practise for putting up the tent for yet another holiday at Rennes-les-Bains.

I love my treasure-hunters! Quite a few have become good friends. Once a year, they have the luck to find that they can still squeeze into their seven-year-old skins. If you know of anywhere else on the face of the earth where you can so easily carry yourself back to the simple joys of childhood, then I’d be more than grateful if you would just show it to me!

Terribilis est locus iste. This place is Marvellous! Not “terrible”, as your kitchen classicists would have it. But then, on the other hand – yes … This Place is Terrible! In French, we can still say that a girl is “terrible” without, as far as I know, anyone thinking that she’s scared us half to death! Terribilis – “terrible” … yes. But in the sense of “awesome”, “terrific”, “marvellous”. That’s what the Abbé Saunière meant, when he carved onto the front of his church the phrase uttered by Jacob as he climbed back down from the Heaven he had reached at the top of his amazing ladder. And there’s another hint that’s worth noting in passing: Saunière has chosen to truncate the phrase. It’s possible that this might have been with the deliberate intention of giving free rein to the wildest of interpretations – and, if so, he was more successful than he could have hoped. The original quotation ends: For This is the House of God. This is the sort of game that our curé constantly played with the inscriptions decorating his buildings.

A Priest in his Parishe

What was he really like? What sort of story has built up to attract so many tens of thousands of visitors to this tiny place from all around the world? How has this village – in thirty years – become the high spot … the top of the bill … of the esoteric? (At least, according to some people.) According to others, it’s the treasure hunter’s Mecca – or for the more caustic – the open lunatic asylum. (Not to mention: the Cosmic Centre of the Universe … the resting place of the Holy Grail … the Sepulchre of Christ … the birth place of His offspring … Or how about: a subterranean parking lot for flying saucers? … Or the only place which will remain stable, when the earth slides off its axis? … Even the lurking place of Old Nick himself … and/or … a landing ground for extra-terrestrials arriving from the Planet Knutkayce.)

1905. Bérenger Saunière poses for posterity in the porch of his church. The photo allows us to gauge his height (in relation to the doorway): 1.79 metres. The prie-dieu chair beside which he is standing is part of the Corbu-Captier inheritance. The prayer-book which the priest is holding is almost certainly the one with which he was buried. Removed when his body was exhumed in 2004, it is presently in the possession of the municipality. Corbu-Captier collection..

To tell the truth, I’d rather write my reminiscences about the little pathways hedged with brambles – the roadside fig-trees – the fish in the streamlet of Couleurs – the flocks of red partridge on the thyme- and rosemary-scented uplands – the woodcock in the woods on the Serre de Lauzet and the wild boar who outnumber the humans, up on the high plateau. I’d like to tell you of a magical and well-remembered twilight among the gorse, when I put up a Royal Partridge – that rare and special and wonderful bird we call a bartavelle. But this is Bérenger Saunière’s story …

It was here, through this spectacular landscape, in the early summer of 1885 – (it was the first of June) – that Bérenger Saunière, a young priest of three and thirty years, climbed up from Montazels to take charge of Rennes-le-Château … his new parish.

For a long, long time, he had known every inch of this country. As a child he’d spent days hunting here with his father and so he knew the tiniest ponds where he could catch fresh-water shrimp, or the streams where sleek trout were waiting to be tickled. The village of his birth was no more than a couple of kilometres away and from his bedroom window – (the house is still there in the centre of Montazels) – he could see Rennes-le-Château on its crest where, one day, he was to build the neo-gothic tower he would name Magdala in honour of St Mary Magdalene.

And – come to think of it – why Magdala and not Magdalena?

Saunière was educated, clever and quick-witted: in Old Hebrew, Magdale means tower … means turn. There are going to be lots of nudges – lots of hints – like this. And – it must be said – it’s this attitude of his that makes the clues so complicated and confused. Saunière was always on the lookout for clever ways, like this, to lay false trails. One should never take one of his clues at face value – there is almost always going to be a second, if not a third, possibility. Like Russian nesting dolls, there’ll be another hidden inside … and then another … and then …

Rennes-le-Château Church. Photo Laurent Theillet.

What thoughts must have been turning in our priest’s head as he climbed the road under the baking heat of the sun and the persistent singing of the cicadas? He would have been the first to be amazed if, at that moment, somebody had revealed to him the astonishing future that he had in store. He would certainly have been wondering about what sort of welcome was waiting for him. He knew the kind of problems he was going to have: a poor parish, split into two clans – the ones who went to Mass – and the others, who “wished the priest to hell!”

This was when France herself was divided in two. The monarchy had almost been restored a few years earlier. So nearly, in fact, that coins had already been struck with the image of Henri V, Comte de Chambord. The Catholic Church was enjoying the last years of its undivided power; money was pouring in and churches, monasteries, convents and seminaries were springing up everywhere – one has only to look at the huge number of late-nineteenth century religious buildings, all over the country.

As if to counterbalance this strength, Revolution was again in the air and ten years later fierce anti-clericalism would lead to the final separation of Church and State.

This attitude was very much alive in our part of the world, where those unholy saints, those devoted servants of centralism, those rabid regiments of Republicanism – the teachers – were doing their best to get rid of our local patois by bashing it into submission with a ruler.

Such was the background for our curé, Bérenger Saunière who, like most of the priests of his time, was fiercely and openly Royalist. Nowadays, we’d think him rather “fundamentalist”. But at the time, he was just a priest like so many others, who wouldn’t dream of holding services in any other way than as had been laid down by the sainted Pius V (i.e. in Latin and with a due and proper formality).

A priest’s authority in his village was considerable and was counterbalanced only by that of the schoolmaster, who was also generally the secretary of the town council. In fact, these two key personalities were often the only ones in a rustic community who could read and write.

Some authors have claimed that Saunière was sent to Rennes-le-Château by his bishop with a specific task (the implication being that he was there to find a treasure, as well as documents compromising to the Vatican). This immediately sheds quite a different light upon our little country priest. Certainly, he was bright, cultivated and with a knowledge of Latin and Greek, as well as a little Hebrew. But the same could be said of every other priest at that time … after all, they’d gone through ten years of intensive study. Some of the local clergy – such as the Abbé Boudet of Rennes-les-Bains, for example – were even better educated than Bérenger Saunière and would have been perfectly capable of taking on the job of a Papal Nuncio.

Neither was Saunière “banished” to Rennes-le-Château as punishment for some sort of outrageous misdemeanour, as others have said.

The only job given to Bérenger Saunière was that of simple parish priest. His bishop, a good tactician with a thorough knowledge of his diocese, had sent a local lad to a far-from-easy village. Saunière’s family was well-known and respected in the area. Bérenger knew most of the people round about, and spoke the regional dialect which meant that he could slip into the bosom of his flock like a fish into water. I’d be surprised if there were any other reason for his appointment.

Certainly, stories of treasure hidden in the Rennes-le-Château area had been in the air for ages and Bérenger, like everybody else, had grown up with them. In particular, there was the story of the shepherd, Paris, which went back to the seventeenth century.

(Paris, a poor shepherd who lived near Rennes-le-Château, had come up to the village one day with his pockets stuffed with gold. When he refused to say where it had come from, his frustrated compatriots had stoned him to death.) But if such thoughts had been in Bérenger’s mind, we’d have heard stories of him being “on the hunt” from the very beginning of his time there. But, as we shall see, Saunière’s searching didn’t begin until several years later – and the circumstances are relatively easy to verify.

The thoughts going round in our curé’s head, as he climbed the last few bends in the road, must have been much more down-to-earth. He knew that the presbytery was little more than a ruin and that he was going to have to find a room somewhere. He’d already arranged to rent one with the Dénarnaud family. Their house was close to the church, so it would suit perfectly well for the time being.

Full of enthusiasm and physically strong, Saunière had already made up his mind to get everything sorted out as quickly as possible – even if it meant that he’d have to roll up the sleeves of his cassock. As for the church, which he knew was completely dilapidated, he was determined to restore it to its former glory and his first job was going to be to repair the roof. The village council could hardly refuse some sort of help and he was prepared to dip into his own six hundred francs-worth of savings.

The present-day village has not extended beyond the limits of the ancient fortifications. Its centuries of peaceful slumber would have remained undisturbed, had it not been for a certain Abbé Bérenger Saunière… Photo Paul Saussez.

One of the most misleading stories, that is continually churned out, would have it that Saunière chose to become a priest in order to escape from his miserable peasant existence. But in reality, although he wasn’t anything like the millionaire that, one day, he would become, he seems to have been far from penury. Savings of six hundred francs added up to quite a healthy sum – (we’re talking about gold coinage) – and his family was quite comfortably off. His father had been mayor of Montazels, director of the flour mill and – most significant – estate manager for the Marquis de Casemajou, whose chateau still stands in the centre of the village.

He was the eldest of seven children. His brother Alfred had also opted for the priesthood and for a while, taught for the Jesuits, although he never joined the Order. (At the time, the Jesuits were short of teachers, as the Order had been “exiled” to Spain a few years earlier).

His two younger brothers were also given a university education – one choosing medicine, the other law. This simple fact gets rid, once and for all, of the legend that Saunière became a priest in order to escape a life of poverty. Obviously, if his parents had the means to pay for the education of his younger siblings, they were even more likely to have done as much for the others. If Saunière, the eldest, chose the priesthood, then, quite simply, he must have had a vocation.

Without a knowledge of this aspect of the story, as well as of the political and social context of the time, it is simply not possible to make a rational approach to the story of Bérenger Saunière, the priest.

First Days as a Priest

There is very little in the way of detail to help in the retracing of Saunière’s life at the beginning of his ministry at Rennes-le-Château.

Not being able to get any help from the local council, as he might have expected (though they probably didn’t have the resources in any case), he paid for the first work on the church out of his own pocket. The roof was in urgent need, as the rain bucketed down on to the altar whenever Rennes-le-Château was lashed by the not infrequent and violent winter storms.

An account book, which our priest also used as a diary, has survived and there’s no doubt that he wasn’t rolling in money. Once his savings had been spent, he was even reduced to borrowing from his landlady, Mme Dénarnaud.

Saunière’s main preoccupations at this time would have been the same as those of any other priest struggling to do his job... visiting the sick, teaching the catechism to the village children. He made himself a list of “Rules for a Priest’s Relationship with his Flock” – and in particular with his maid. In this last passage he’s quite fierce with himself:

No confidences! (Secrets shared with a maid will be passed on to all the women in the village!) No familiarity! The maid is not to enter my bedroom unless I am ill!

All of which is quite different in tone from the way he will write a few years later, when he was on a retreat at Prouilhe. Then, his letters would be addressed to “My dear little Marinette” and he would end with “Your Bérenger” or sometimes better still: “Your affectionate Bérenger”.*

Saunière had been at Rennes-le-Château for five months, when, for the first time, something happened to disturb his life. Superficially innocent enough, it was going to propel our priest, by a string of circumstances, into a maelstrom whose ripples, even now, haven’t yet altogether faded.

It was in October 1885 – on the eve of a general election. In the church, the congregation was largely female (81 places with 70 women, according to the seating plan drawn up by the priest himself, as can be seen below, in the page from his journal). In the two village bars, the men were waiting for the Mass to end.

“My dear brethren, the Republic is asking us to elect our Representatives”, he declaimed from the pulpit. “We mustn’t lose such a wonderful chance to get rid of this evil institution with the very weapons it’s given us. Any method is good – even legitimate – to crush this wicked regime! The Republic is the Devil’s work. The blood of our Kings stains the Republicans’hands. And now they want to bring down the Catholic Church and – make no mistake – if we don’t get rid of them, they’ll do everything they can to make it happen. I’m talking especially to you, my dear sisters, so that, when you get home, you can explain to your husbands† the danger facing our church; the danger facing our children, deprived of a religious education... and the danger to our very souls, exposed as they are to such godless and revolutionary propaganda. If the Republican Party defeats the Royalists, I can see dark days ahead for our Church and for our Country.”

We can’t be sure what effect this forceful sermon had on the elections at Rennes-le-Château, as we haven’t been able to track down the local results – but in 1885, the Republicans strengthened their position. Saunière’s gloomy predictions were borne out. In 1905, the militant anti-clerical majority achieved the separation of Church and State and the confiscation of all church property. This was the atmosphere of conflict in which Saunière had to carry out his pastoral role.

After the Mass, the priest’s sermon was heatedly discussed. In the café favoured by his supporters, they were worried:

“Our abbé’s going a bit far. Oh yes, we know he’s right, but the Royalists aren’t doing that well and if “the Blues” win, our priest is going to get clobbered.”

“You’re right. Since the Comte de Chambord turned down the chance to take over, they haven’t had a prayer.”

In the other village bar, the schoolteacher was holding forth:

“It’s a scandal! Priests ought to keep out of politics. He keeps whingeing on about the Republic, but he forgets that it’s paying all their wages – and the whole lot of them are behind the big landowners.”

“Absolutely! All these bloody “ritous”* – they know how to suck up to the bosses. And how to fatten themselves up on the working classes.”

“It’s not going to be that easy to get rid of this one! He’s got more balls than the last one!”

(The parish had been without a priest for several months before Saunière arrived).

The mayor (trying, as usual, to calm things down), chips...