Arques, Rennes-le-Chateau and the Razes Region Saturday 10/14/10
For variety, will do this entry more as field notes than a refined essay, a form quite appropriate to the research stage.
Will start with a humorous bit: before leaving New York, my laptop was the last thing to be turned off and thrust into my on-board luggage. I intentionally left the external mouse behind as too cumbersome, figuring I could get by with the built-in touchpad. When I arrived in France, I discovered that I hadn’t reactivated the touchpad and so couldn’t get into my own machine. I had to scribble (ask anyone who knows my handwriting–patently illegible even to me) notes on pen and paper for several days before I found a replacement mouse. A moment’s lapse can become quite the pain.
Before leaving Carcassonne, I reserved a room for Saturday night, the 14th, in Hotel Moderne et Pigeon in Limoux, a city on the inconvenient perimeter of the my next targeted region, the Razes. This alone should have warned me that the terrain was about to change abruptly.
As I put it in one of those handwritten notes, there was the sense that “the scenery was setting the stage literally…a dramatic change going south, from rolling hills to steep stuff, almost like driving west from Boulder [in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies]. I can see how these land configurations served as natural boundaries, why this area was a defensive position worth fortifying against invasion from across the Pyrenees.”
I became quickly aware that I was approaching a region of multiple mysteries.
The Cathar monuments, once intentionally neutered by their French conquerors to hide the nefarious act of religious and political genocide that was the Albigensian Crusade, are now well marked, perhaps with signage too obvious in their appeal for tourist dollars; but who the Cathars were, what they believed, and why and how the medieval Church annihilated them remains a painful puzzle that haunts this area.
My first stop, just into the circle route south of Limoux that I followed that day, was to explore the castle of Arques, which, in 1217, was taken by the notorious Simon de Montfort, chief of the Crusaders, and burned. In the adjacent village, which Simon also ravaged, I visited the house of Déodat Roché (1877-1978), the premier historian of the Cathars, with a permanent and poignant exhibition devoted to Catharism.
But another mystery, one initiated hundreds of years later, shares the limelight in the Razes with the Cathars: Rennes-le-Château. With tens of thousands of visitors per year, this small hilltop village has become known internationally as the center of various conspiracy theories and the location of an alleged buried treasure discovered by its 19th-century priest Bérenger Saunière, although the precise nature of the booty is disputed by those who believe in its existence.
At the center of all the controversy is the village church dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene—a ubiquitous biblical figure who keeps reappearing in this region, vying for my attention despite my best efforts to stay focused elsewhere. More on Mary Magdalene in later entries.
On the web and in literature, discussion of Rennes-le- Château seems everywhere. It was even picked up in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code. Brown’s novel never specifically mentions Rennes-le-Château, but some key characters in the book had related names, such as Saunière, after the priest.
The third mystery element in the region swirls around the enigmatic Knights Templars, otherwise well-known modernly, but rarely, and then only loosely, connected with this area or with the Cathar movement. A seemingly intentional oversight by historians as building remnants of both organizations sit almost side-by-side in the Languedoc, and the chronicles of both run parallel for over two hundred years. Given the obvious intersection of time and place, one has to ask, as I did before going there: how could these two movements not be connected?
And so it happened that in my day’s itinerary was the Templar commandery of Bezu, supposedly near a tiny town in the hills halfway between Rennes and the main road back to Limoux. I had little to go on. No historical site was indicated on the maps, and I’d only found two references to its existence, but they were enough to get me sniffing. After all, I wasn’t out there just to gape at things others had long discovered; my thrill comes from finding new things and making original connections.
In Wanderings of the Grail, Andre Douzet wrote: “Some knights actually protected certain Cathars: Pierre Fenouillet allowed Cathars into the commandery of Mas-Deu [of which more in a later entry], in the Roussillon, a commandery linked with the Templar house of Le Bezu, near Rennes-le-Chateau.”
And in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln tease with this: “Near the end of the thirteenth century a separate detachment of Templars was sent from the Aragonese province of Rossillon to the Rennes-le-Château area in southern France [the old Cathar stronghold]. This fresh detachment established itself on the summit of the mountain of Bezu, erecting a lookout post and a chapel. Alone of all the Templars in France, they were left unmolested by Philippe le Bel’s seneschals on October 13, 1307,” the date the entire Templar organization was suddenly attacked by both church and state and shut down.
My search for Bezu was something of a disappointment although it provided some vigorous exercise. (But all was not lost in tailing the Templars: a similar effort to follow a slim lead would be rewarded with the “discovery” of Mas Deu itself, an adventure to come later in the blog.)
Earlier in the day, I’d chanced taking a back road through the hills to Rennes-le-Château and would have gotten hopelessly lost had someone not come by to point the way at a critical junction. No such luck finding the commandery of Bezu. Courtesy of my limited French, either the people I asked didn’t understand what I was looking for, and/or I didn’t understand their reply. I merely went off in the general direction they had pointed. As I wrote afterwards, “Luckily, I didn’t take the car someplace too treacherous. At one point from the top of the hill, I thought I saw the ruin. So I took off after it on a steep dirt road, then climbed up to it [on foot], only to find that it was a couple of dilapidated old farm houses. Anyway I got a good idea where the commandery might have been and will look it up further and go from there.”
In short, no big deal. I was in my element, in the thick of the mysteries of the Languedoc and feeling quite like an Indiana Jones, and relishing it.
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