Father Saunière and the Holy Grail — The French mystery that inspired the Da Vinci Code

Father Antoine Gélis wasn’t a well-liked man. He was secretive, haughty, and the judgemental type. And he was rumoured to be rich. Filthy rich. He had been a priest in the small Southwestern French town of Coustaussa for over four decades, but he didn’t have many local friends. Actually, only his nephew ever checked on him. On All Hallow’s Eve, 1897, he prepared his meal and sat at his modest, worn-out hardwood dinner table to eat. He tore the bread with his hands and poured himself a small glass of wine. He was still wearing his dark robes and hat. He began to slowly scratch his spoon against the sides of the bowl, waiting for the soup to cool. Nobody knows if he ever got to taste it.

The next morning, on All Saint’s Day, he didn’t show up for mass at church. Alarmed, his nephew came to check on him. Father Gélis hadn’t missed mass once in forty years, so why would he do so on one of the most important days of the year? When he got to his uncle’s doorstep, he instantly knew something was wrong. The blinds were shut, but the door was unlocked and slightly ajar. The clergyman always left his door locked overnight. He was insanely paranoid. He had even hung a bell on the door frame so he could hear it if someone tried to break in. This definitely wasn’t a good sign. The young man walked into the dark, sparsely decorated living room and found nothing amiss, so he moved on to the dining room. And the sight that greeted him when he walked in probably stuck with him forevermore.

Father Gélis lay on the floor on his back, in the very centre of a very dark red puddle of blood. The gendarmes were puzzled. Who would want to kill such an unremarkable old man, worse yet, the village priest? Nothing had been stolen. And boy, was he hiding something. Several invaluable, ancient gold coins were found in his lodgings, along with a scandalous sum of money. How had Father Gélis gotten his hands on all that gold? And how come he never told anyone about it? His drawers had been turned inside out. Whoever killed him was looking for something. Had they found it?

The neighbours later confirmed that he had received a late-night visitor, but they didn’t know who it was. It was dark. That particular narrow street in Coustaussa had no streetlights. The bell behind his door made no sound, meaning Gélis had to have opened the door himself to greet his visitor. Did the two men know each other?

The crime itself had been horrific: Antoine Gélis had been beaten and stabbed to death with his own fire iron: his neck was broken, his brain was exposed and apparent through several gaping holes in his skull. There was substantial evidence suggesting the old man had fought back with all his might, but strangely, no one heard him scream. His pocket watch was broken and stopped at exactly midnight. His estimated death time was three in the morning. And his hands had been placed together on his chest as if he was saying one last prayer.

One single, silent piece of evidence was left behind: a full pack of Hungary-manufactured cigarette-paper from the brand Tzar. Father Gélis didn’t smoke, and he had never been to Hungary. Tzar cigarette paper wasn’t sold in France back then. On the first sheet, someone had scribbled in pencil Viva Angelina.

***

When Father Bérenger Saunière arrived in Rennes-le-Château in 1885, he was only 33. He had just been promoted from deacon to parish priest, and he was thrilled to take over the local church. The quaint, lush Rennes-le-Château, with a population of only 200, happened to be Saunière’s hometown. He was to preach at St. Mary Magdalene’s church, an old romanesque construction dating back to the 8th century.

But his excitement was short-lived. When he arrived, he found the place dilapidated. The woodwork was so severely damaged, the altar crumbled beneath his feet. But nothing could dissuade Father Saunière from preaching his new audience with zeal and fervour. A tall, handsome man, he quickly became popular with the local women, who rushed to attend mass every Sunday morning. There was no altar, so he stood on a chair. It rained heavily inside his rectory, so a local widow offered to rent him a room at her place. He accepted. He would further shock the local community by hiring a local damsel, alluring 18-year-old Mary Denarnaud, as his housekeeper. Bold and daring, a fierce royalist and an unbending Catholic, Father Saunière was both controversial and strangely compelling.

It would take Saunière several months to gather enough donations to fund the much-need repairs at St. Mary Magdalene’s church. He couldn’t pay a carpenter, so a local shopkeeper offered to help him rebuild the altar. Saunière gladly accepted. The two men, aided by a couple of local youths, moved the baluster and the altar stone. As per Catholic tradition, they did so with due deference, regularly stopping to pray and to dip their hands in holy water. After all, the altar stone is an essential part of a church, consecrated by a bishop and sometimes containing fragile, invaluable relics.

As the altar tabletop finally fell to the ground with a thud, the men stopped to catch their breath. But their rest break didn’t last. As the ancient Carolingian column tops were exposed, something caught a helper’s eye. As the dust settled, it became apparent that there was a strange cavity in one of the columns. And there was something inside. Father Saunière walked over to the column, and noticing it was engraved with the Templar’s cross made a joke about unearthing a holy treasure. They were all familiar with the local legend their fathers had told them as children: centuries ago, large amounts of gold had been buried in the area for the initiated to find, but no one ever did. Saunière reached inside the cavity and felt around, but all that came out was a handful of dried fern, so old it quickly turned to dust in his hand. He reached in again, and this time he wasn’t disappointed. The men quickly gathered around him, curious to see what it was.

But what Saunière had pulled out of the cache looked nothing like a relic. He was holding three timeworn wooden tubes, all sealed shut with a strange wax seal. French law stated that whatever one found in a church had to be handed over to the town hall before it could be tampered with. But curiosity won the best of the young priest. He carefully broke the seal and began to extract a series of parchment scrolls. They looked as old as the church itself. The repairs long forgotten, the men sat on the dusty floor in a circle as Father Saunière made the sign of the cross, kissed his rosary, and began to lay them out in front of him.

Besides him, the men were barely literate, but they would later share their accounts of what they saw. The first roll was a sort of family tree bearing the date 1244. The second and third were long texts from the 1600s. There was also a fourth one, which appeared to contain multiple lines of disordered writing, including some text upside down. The men looked up at the priest inquisitively, only to see the colour drain from his face. What exactly Father Saunière read in those papers is a mystery to this day. Minutes later, he slipped the parchments under the folds of his dark robes and ran out into the rectory without a word. He was not seen again that day.

***

A few weeks later, word had gotten around that important relics had been found at St. Mary Magdalene’s church. The local mayor approached Saunière to demand an explanation. To his surprise, the young man categorically denied finding anything under the old altar. Nothing whatsoever. The mayor was aghast, but he chose to believe the respectable clergyman. Intrigued, the shopkeeper and the youths that were with him on that day decided to confront him. And they could hardly believe what they were told.

Saunière confided in them that the documents he had found were of the utmost importance, not just to St. Mary Magdalene’s church. Actually, the information they contained was so groundbreaking and potentially dangerous, it was vital to Catholics all over the world. And thus, the men were to keep quiet, and he was to make sure the parchments never left his rectory.

But that was not all the men would discover as they dislodged the massive stones in the central aisle. Weeks later, a helper came running and practically dragged Saunière from his perch under a pine, causing him to drop his bible. As the men brought down a brick wall behind the altar, they had found a small hole in the ground. As they widened it with a pick, the light shone on several glistening objects. Saunière ran inside to find several solid gold coins and an ornate golden chalice. Later that day, they would also unearth a gravestone, engraved with the likeness of a knight, and a human skull with a mysterious hole drilled through the very middle of the parietal bone. Like the first time, Father Saunière, who had trouble hiding his shock, convinced the men to sweep it under the carpet. And so the bones and golden items disappeared into the dark confines of the rectory, carefully hidden under his black robes.

In the months that followed, the once charming Father Saunière became increasingly withdrawn. He avoided all contact with the curious parishioners, who by now believed an invaluable treasure had been found at the local church. There was talk of gold left behind by the Knights Templar. Or maybe a monstrous secret relating to Mary Magdalene herself. And why not both?

Myths and legends died hard in places like Rennes-le-Château. And this particular legend said that a boat without sails washed up in Southern France circa 35 A.D, carrying three women named Mary, one of them being Mary Magdalene. It sounds too good to be true, but the truth is that the apostles, pursued by the Romans in the wake of Jesus’ trial, had to flee Jerusalem to stay alive. Southern France was a Jewish princedom at the time, a safe place for someone like Jesus’ loyal companion. Going back to the legend, Mary Magdalene went on to start her own church and later died somewhere in the mountains. To honour her memory, the pious built a large number of churches dedicated to her. Her remains have never been found.

The mayor paid Saunière another visit. And priests from other parishes came to see him in hopes of teasing an answer out of him, but they got none. Saunière moved from the widow’s spare room into his newly refurbished rectory, locked the door, and would only share his deepest secrets with his young housemaid, Mary. At night, he would go back into the church and dig. He was particularly invested in digging a hole in the back wall of a small crawl space in his sacristy. When asked, he told churchgoers he was just building himself a closet. The matter was dropped, and Father Saunière quickly resumed his digging, the sound of his shovel an eerie omen.

Shortly afterward, rumours surfaced that Father Saunière had extended his nightly digging to the church’s adjacent cemetery. In the moonlight, one could sometimes make out his servant Mary’s dark figure, upright, solemn, and undaunted, assisting him in his profanity with her enigmatic presence.

He was often seen digging up old tombs and trying to erase the epitaphs in specific gravestones. He was particularly invested in getting rid of one: the grave of a woman who had been dead for over a century — Marie de Nègre d’Ables. If records are to be believed, Marie de Nègre had been a character as mysterious as Saunière’s motives. She had been a marquise, yet her tomb was hastily and sloppily engraved with several spelling mistakes. Her name had several typos in it, and certain words alternated capitals and lower case. Put together, the lower case letters spelled out the word “sword.” The few records that survived to this day also show that the Latin inscriptions can be rearranged to form one or more anagrams. Could they be coded messages? Marie de Nègre was said to have discovered a terrible family secret. Ancient parchments were also involved. In her deathbed, in 1781, she called a priest from Rennes to confess, but as was protocol, he took her secrets to the grave.

When the increasingly concerned town council put him between a rock and a hard place, the increasingly erratic Saunière had to come clean about his discoveries. He provided a tracing paper copy of the parchment rolls he found but never produced the originals. The texts turned out to be testaments, papers mentioning the treasure of Blanche of Castile, royal Merovingian family trees, Old Testament writings, and coded messages dating from the 13th through the 17th centuries. Remarkable as those might have been, the town council was convinced there was something else at play. Something far more unsettling.

After the Bishop of Carcassone himself came to pay the young priest a visit, the latter was seen hastily hopping on a train to Paris. Whatever the Bishop had read in Saunière’s parchments must have shaken him to his core. Saunière ended up spending the summer in the French capital. He supposedly went there to seek an expert opinion on the coded parchments at the St. Sulpice Seminary. No one knows what St. Sulpice’s verdict was, or even if there was one. And no one even knows what exactly Father Saunière did in Paris, except that he was often seen with occultist Jules Bois, who also happened to be the author of several books on satanism. An unusual choice of friends for an unusual clergyman.

***

When he returned in early autumn, Saunière began to spend less and less time in Rennes-le-Château. The local folk lined up for their weekly confessions, but sometimes he wouldn’t turn up for several days. Every now and then, a local would find him digging holes in crop fields or dragging a heavy suitcase through secluded country roads.

It was also around this time that he began to refurbish his church with lavish artifacts. He had sculptors ornate the aisles, and painters decorate the walls with impressively realistic bible scenes. Except that the style he chose was described as strikingly inappropriate for a church: he placed the column where he found the parchments with the Templar’s cross upside down in the garden and had the words “mission 1891” engraved on it. He redesigned the floors in black and white, so they resembled a chessboard. He had the painters draw ominous Latin inscriptions on the walls, one of them reading Terribilis est locus iste, that translates to This place is dreadful, right by the front door. Many have noted that the names of the saints he chose to decorate the church with spell out the word GRAIL. Coincidence? And better yet: he insisted on having a local artist sculpt him an uncanny statue of a devil holding up the holy water font. Remarkably unholy.

Saunière also went on to buy himself a stretch of land adjacent to his church under his servant Mary’s name. He used it to build himself a villa, complete with a personal library inside a tower facing the lush green plateau. He would later add a greenhouse and a menagerie where he kept his exotic pets. Monkeys, macaws, cockatoos. Not to mention his two loyal companions: two large black dogs. And that’s not all: Father Saunière seemed to have a soft spot for fashion. He spent immoderate amounts of money on clothes, jewelry, and rare stamps for his extensive collection. Mary, despite being a simple housemaid, was often seen in town in opulent silks, velvets, pearls, and furs. He opened himself a secret bank account in Hungary, where he deposited his spare money. In his free time, Saunière frequently received guests in his new, eccentric home. He greeted them with the finest imported alcohol and threw grand receptions. But nobody in town knew who these people were.

Besides Mary and his mysterious guests, he only had two other close friends. One of them was Henri Boudet, and he was the priest of the parish of Rennes-les-Bains, just southeast of Rennes-le-Château. Boudet was passionate about history and archeology. He wrote several books on local Celtic lore and, most remarkably, a book on Mary Magdalene. Henri Boudet came from a slightly more affluent family than Saunière, yet he, too, was unexplainably rich for a clergyman. When he learned that Saunière wanted to renovate his church, he offered to help him pick the right icons. He is rumoured to be the mastermind behind the uncanny symbology we can still see today at St. Mary Magdalene’s. Were the two men working together to leave behind an elaborate code?

His other friend was called Antoine Gélis. Father Gélis was a priest in Coustaussa, an hour’s walk northeast. Father Saunière, being much younger and the athletic type, visited Father Gélis almost every week until his brutal murder in 1897. Saunière didn’t attend his funeral.

The villagers were understandably dumbfounded as they watched Saunière spend thousands on his very own cryptic projects. As a priest, his salary was ludicrous. His family had left him with no heritage. Churchgoers were penniless, and donations were scant. It had taken Saunière years to save up enough money to rebuild his crumbling altar. Yet when he returned from Paris in the summer of 1891, he was a millionaire. And by the looks of it, he was sharing a large slice of his earnings with his close friends.

The archdioceses made multiple attempts to understand where his wages came from. Invariably, Saunière replied that he often received generous donations from anonymous benefactors. His asset registers were seized on multiple occasions, but they had all been tampered with. Unimpressed by the local rumours hinting at a hidden Templar treasure or the Vatican paying him to keep the contents of his parchments a secret, the Bishop suspended him from his duties as a priest. He was convinced Father Saunière was practicing simony: hosting private masses and services for the royalists in exchange for large sums of money. Some believe those secret masses might have actually been satanic rituals, considering his ties to Parisian occultist cliques and the unsettling decorations he picked for his church.

Undeterred by the ecclesiastical verdict, Saunière continued to host private masses in his villa until he died in 1917. He was only 65 when he succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in his library. His governess Mary rushed for the doctor, but there was very little that could be done. Bedridden, father Saunière survived for a total of five days. He had Mary burn all his files and the journals he kept, dragging himself to the fireplace to make sure all evidence was destroyed.

The town’s new priest, Father Rivière, rushed to grant him his last rites and take his confession. For an entire afternoon, neither man left Saunière’s room. As night fell, Father Rivière was seen running out of the old man’s villa, aghast. Father Saunière was refused his absolution and went to his grave a sinner.

***

Mary Dénarnaud, his governess, survived him by many decades. She never spoke about the puzzling parchments, the treasure, the hidden crypt, Saunière’s misadventures in Paris, or the nature of their relationship. A local businessman called Noël Corbu approached her in her final years and offered to buy the invaluable estate she had inherited from Saunière, which she accepted. Mr. Corbu had secret hopes that in gaining Mary’s trust, she would end up telling him Saunière’s secrets. She never did.

She died a recluse in 1953. Corbu, aware of the potential of the whole affair, published the story in several local newspapers. People began to flock to Rennes-le-Château, looking for a treasure or clues in the church’s intricately deliberate symbology. Many believed Father Saunière had uncovered a deep, dark secret the Catholic church had tried to dissimulate at all costs: proof that Mary Magdalene had married Jesus Christ and given him descendants. These descendants later went on to form the Merovingian dynasty, as shown in the family trees found in the parchments. Her tomb was likely to be in a crypt beneath the church, accessible through the small, secret trap door Saunière had hidden in his sacristy.

As more and more people began to visit, Corbu decided to renovate the premises and turn Saunière’s villa into a hotel. As he moved the furniture around the former priest’s private chapel, he, too, found an odd cavity inside a baluster. Inside was a parchment dating back to 1907. The handwriting was uncannily similar to Saunière’s, and it appeared to be a coded message.

The businessman, who had always believed Saunière might have been Gélis’ killer, had experts crack the code and use the same cipher on the sentence found scribbled on the Tzar cigarette paper found at Gélis’s death scene. When cracked using the same pattern, Viva Angelina translated to “an angel returns.”

***

Endnotes

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visit Rennes-le-Château in hopes of solving the mystery of Saunière’s parchments. Rennes-le-Château has a current population of only 80.

After decades of dealing with unruly tourists carrying out unauthorised excavations in the vicinity of the church, authorities forbid all digging and treasure-hunting activities in the area.

The tombs in the adjacent cemetery were brutally vandalised in the years following Saunière’s death. Access has been denied to the public for decades now, and nature soon took over.

Nobody knows what happened to the original parchments, and while there are alleged copies in different archives, no version was ever confirmed to be authentic.

The skull Saunière found was discovered years after his death and turned out to be a real human skull belonging to a 50-year-old male from the 13th century, possibly a knight.

Many researchers believe there is a crypt beneath the church, home to the tomb of Mary Magdalene herself.

In the small sacristy Bérenger Saunière refurbished, the small, secret trap door is still visible. A dog once found its way in, and its owners then heard it bark deep underground, further cementing the rumour that there is a large hidden chamber.

Several reputable archeologists have tried to obtain permission to excavate the site and locate the crypt, but it was never granted.

Antoine Gélis’ murder was never solved. Like Noël Corbu, many believe his murderer was none other than Saunière. He probably considered Father Gélis a liability and wanted to keep him quiet. The Tzar cigarette paper was made in Hungary, where Saunière had a bank account.

Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code is loosely based on the Rennes-le-Château affair. One of his characters is named after Saunière, but his death was inspired by Gélis’ murder.