On June 1, 1885, a new priest, 33-year-old Beranger Sauniere, arrived in a small parish in the village of Rennes-le-Chateau. He was a handsome, strong-built man, energetic and very intelligent. He seemed destined for a brilliant career - in the seminary, he was considered one of the first.
Classmates predicted a place for Sauniere somewhere in Paris or, at worst, Marseille. However, the young priest insisted on coming to a small, God-forsaken village, lost at the foot of the Eastern Pyrenees with a population of only 200 people, forty kilometers from the nearest city - Carcassonne. At a feast organized by young people on the occasion of leaving the walls of the seminary, Sauniere explained his voluntary exile in the following way: “I would like to take a break from the hustle and bustle, retiring to a modest and morally healthy parish. Besides, I grew up in a neighboring village. Rennes-le-Chateau is my second home."
The Church of St. Mary Magdalene, entrusted to the care of a newly made priest, has turned into ruins from time and bad weather; the roof was leaking, so much so that streams of rainwater fell directly on the priest and the parishioners performing the service. The priest's house completely collapsed, and therefore Saunière was forced to live with one of his parishioners, Alexandrina Marro.
At that time, the salaries of clergymen were paid by the state. It so happened that Saunière once, during some election campaign, delivered a sermon that the authorities considered free-thinking, for which they put him on the "black list" and deprived him of his money. Now he became not just poor, but beggar in the truest sense of the word. The hopeless need forced the priest to refuse the services of Madame Marro and, with a sin in half, settle in a dilapidated house near the church.
He went into debt and struggled to get his living by hunting and fishing. However, time passed, and it is not known for what money Beranger Saunière hired a maid - a worker in a hat workshop named Marie Denarnot, who faithfully served him until her last breath. All subsequent years, these two, so different in character and education, were tied by some unknown mysterious force that made them loyal allies. And even when Beranger Sauniere had already achieved tremendous success and lived in luxury, he did not even think about parting with Marie. And she, in her turn, in her declining years, exhausted by illness and loneliness, did not give in to any persuasion and generous promises and did not reveal the secret that only Sauniere and she owned.
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Curé endured hardships, but fortunately, a certain Abbot Pons bequeathed 600 francs to the parish of Rennes-le-Chateau. In 1888, thanks to this modest donation, Saunière was able to begin the most needed renovations in the temple. A little later, he turned to the municipality with a request to allocate funds for the restoration of the church. Money in the amount of 1,400 francs was given to him, but in debt, and the curé did not know at all when and how he would be able to pay off the debt.
At the end of 1891, the renovation of the central altar began, which rested on two very ancient pillars, presumably left over from the time of the Visigoths and decorated with fine carvings in the form of crosses and mysterious letters. With the help of workers, the slab was removed from the altar, and then the restorers were in for a surprise: one of the pillars was hollow.
Sauniere reached into the grayish dust that filled the post and brought out four wooden pipes, sealed at both ends with wax. The wax bore impressions of some strange seals. The tubes were immediately unsealed, and parchment scrolls fell out of them. As it turned out, they were hidden here around 1790 by Abbot Antoine Bigoux, Saunière's predecessor, and contained a text written in Latin letters and images of three genealogical trees.
At first glance, the text seemed meaningless, and only a very attentive reader could notice that some letters in the text are slightly higher than others. Reading them in succession, a rather coherent message came out: "A DAGOBERT II ROI ET A SION EST CE TRESOR ET IL EST LA MORT" ("This treasure belongs to King Dagobert and Zion, and it is death"). In addition to this phrase, there were some numbers in the text.
Rumors of a strange find stirred up a small village. On the mayor's advice to hand over the found antiquities to the municipal archives, Sauniere replied that it would be better to sell this curiosity for a tidy sum, for example, to Paris. The municipality dispatched the enterprising curé there, paying all his expenses.
Arriving in Paris, Beranger Sauniere went to the head of the Seminary in Saint-Sulpice, Abbot Biel, a specialist in linguistics, cryptography and paleography. The Parisian light knew him as well as not the last person in esoteric groups, sects and secret societies engaged in occultism. Curet spent three weeks in the capital, during which he visited the Louvre and ordered copies of three paintings: "Arcadian Shepherds" by Poussin, "Saint Anthony the Hermit" by Teniers and a portrait of Pope Celestine V by an unknown artist. Quite a strange set!
For some unknown reason, Biel did not return the ancient manuscripts to Sauniere (however, the curé copied them just in case). In Carcassonne, Saunière visited the bishop and after a conversation with him received 2000 francs for his labors, which allowed him to pay off the municipality and continue the restoration work. Soon he unearthed an interesting carved slab from the ground, dating back to the 7th-8th centuries and possibly covering the entrance to the ancient crypt. And then completely strange things began to happen: at the local cemetery, the curé found the grave of the Marquise Marie d'Hautepoul de Blanchefort, who died about 100 years ago. On her headstone was carved … an exact copy of the message contained in one of the scrolls found! And Sauniere … destroys this inscription (not knowing, however,that it had recently been copied by members of the archaeological expedition from among local history buffs).
Accompanied by the faithful Marie Denarneau, Sauniere went around the neighborhood in search of other gravestones. Which ones - only he knew. Moreover, the village priest entered into active correspondence with all of Europe; then he started some obscure business with various banks and, finally, began to travel incognito, not disclosing his routes, after which large money transfers from different countries began to arrive in the name of Marie Denarneau …
Further more. Curé suddenly makes some inexplicable spending, which, as it turns out after his death, amounted to millions of francs! The fact that the priest and his girlfriend had a lot of money, Saunière explained simply: an inheritance. But no one in the district believed in him: the gifts that he gave to his friends were too suspicious. So, one got an ancient goblet of the finest workmanship, the other - a precious collection of coins of the 6th-7th centuries.
It was rumored in the village that Saunière had found the treasure of the shepherd Ignace Pari. Every boy in the district knew the story of this shepherd. Local legend told that in 1645 he returned home with pockets full of gold coins. He explained his find as follows: looking for a lost sheep, he came across a cave in the mountains, inside which he found chests bursting with treasures. The shepherd refused to take the villagers to this cave, and they, considering Ignas a liar, simply hanged him as a thief.
Saunière generously shared his wealth: part of his money was used to improve the village (construction of a road, water supply) and material assistance to its poorest inhabitants. As for the church, an inscription in Latin was engraved above its portico: "TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE" ("This place is terrible"), and the church itself was completely rebuilt. After the completion of the major works, the curé Saunière invited a group of skilled stone carvers and artists to work on the interior of the temple. Saunière personally oversaw the implementation of all his plans in life, he himself composed the texts of the inscriptions, three times forced the masters to rewrite the scene of the crucifixion. This painting alone cost him 11,000 francs!
All work was completed in 1897, and God only knows why the church was consecrated by Bishop Billard of Carcassonne: the result of the "repair", to put it mildly, was surprising. Judge for yourself: as soon as you entered the temple, the visitor immediately had some kind of incomprehensible anxiety. The water pot at the entrance was supported by an utterly ugly imp, and when the eyes got used to the twilight, it was already possible to discern a whole crowd of unimaginably ugly creatures, grimacing like clowns, frozen in obscene poses, painted in bright colors and staring at the guests with terrible glass eyes. It is not clear why, but there were many Hebrew inscriptions in the temple.
Meanwhile, the curé continued to waste money. For example, he erected a three-story cogwheel tower on the top of a mountain, which he named the Magdalene Tower. He personally watched how it would be oriented, and demanded literal mathematical precision from the builders. At the other end of his domain, Sauniere built a huge villa, naming it Bethany after a biblical village; then he built a beautiful greenhouse here and laid out a wonderful park with a reservoir. Curé threw money left and right, buying rare Chinese things, expensive fabrics, antique marbles, collected a magnificent library. He even arranged banquets for parishioners, gave them expensive gifts. The highest ecclesiastical authorities turned a blind eye to all this, but after the death of Bishop Billard, the new Bishop of Carcassonne demanded an explanation from Sauniere. He removed the priest from office and brought a number of charges against him. However, unexpectedly, someone in the Vatican interceded for Sauniere, where Saunière appealed in his defense.
On January 17, 1917, Sauniere was struck. A priest from a neighboring parish was invited to him. He locked himself in a room with the patient, and after confession left there, as eyewitnesses testify, in great confusion. According to him, he refused the last communion to the dying man, so Sauniere died without receiving absolution.
In his will, Saunière announced that he had no centime behind his soul. However, his faithful Marie continued to live in the owner's villa until 1946, without needing anything, and only the exchange of banknotes, carried out by order of the Ramadier government, ruined the former maid. All day long she burned in her garden many thick bundles of discounted bills. In 1953, as with Beranger Sauniere, she suffered a stroke, and soon she died, taking her secret to the grave. However, she did tell her close friend Noel Corby about something. According to her, the ancient parchment found under the altar contained encrypted information about the location of a huge treasure, and the key to the secret was Poussin's painting "The Arcadian Shepherds" (a copy of which Saunière acquired during a trip to Paris).
The painting depicts three shepherds and a shepherdess, who, surrounding an old grave, contemplate the inscription on it: "ETINARCADIAEGO" and in the background is depicted some faceless mountain landscape, allegedly invented by the artist. In 1970, ten kilometers from Rennes-le-Chateau, near the village of Arcs, a grave was found that was completely identical to the one that the shepherds looked at in the picture: the shape, size, location, vegetation around, even a piece of rock on which one of the shepherds - everything coincided. When the grave was opened, it was empty.
Undoubtedly, Saunière found some kind of treasure, but it does not explain either the church's special interest in this matter, or the Vatican's condescension towards the disobedient priest, or the tacit permission to build a strange church, or the refusal of the last communion. Or maybe Sauniere's wealth has another source - an intangible one? Maybe it is some kind of mysterious knowledge, and in this case one is exchanged for another: wealth for knowledge, and the first is the payment for the second?
What kind of treasure could have fallen into the hands of Saunière? According to one version, this wealth belonged to the Visigoth kings. Having plundered Rome, they took out untold booty from there. When the Franks attacked them, the Visigoths hid the loot, but never returned for the treasure. Another version says that the treasure, on the contrary, belonged to the Frankish kings, who took the place of the Visigoths. According to the third version, during the peasant uprising of 1250, Queen Blanche hid family jewels and gold near Rennes-le-Chateau, and she and her family fled to Spain.
In 1956, René Decadeyat, curator of the Carcassonne library, with several enthusiasts undertook excavations in the church of Rennes-le-Château in front of the main altar, where they found a lot of curiosities. For example, a skull of a man with a ritual notch, and in the garden of Saunière's house there are skeletons of three men with traces of gunshot wounds. In 1960, a special commission from Paris undertook new excavations in the temple. What they found remained a secret.