Is there any evidence that these amounts are a vast overstatement? Yes. In his first drafts for his defence, the figures he lists add up to 70,000 francs. Subsequent drafts inflated the costs until the figure of 193,090 francs was reached. The question arises: if Saunière inflated these figures, why on earth did he do so?

The answer is to be found in the defence he writes in his memoire to Abbé Huguet.

In other words, knowing that the money he had made from trafficking in Masses was already so high that it seemed almost beyond belief, Saunière wanted to push this amount even higher, so that, in his words, “one would be nuts to assert that”. He wanted the amount he was supposed to have spent to be beyond his ability to make, even with all the trafficking in Masses that he did. It was a desperate sort of defence, with no real hope of convincing anyone, but Saunière thought it was his best shot.

Once he had decided what sort of expenditure he would have to account for, Saunière juggled his incoming figures so as to match the total here (of 193,093 francs). We know that Saunière did not submit all of his bills to the Ecclesiastical Court, but those that he did submit were intended to support the notion that he had indeed spent 193,090 francs. It is this amount therefore which needed to be accounted for. And it is almost exactly this amount to which the purported incoming figures come. Saunière must have hoped that his juggling act would explain the gold of his own personal fairytale, rather than be exposed for the man of straw that he was.

The second indictment

Once again Saunière failed to appear in the court, even though he was actually in Carcassonne on the 15th October, the date of the trial. Once again, he was found guilty, and sentenced to go into spiritual retreat for ten days at the Monastery of Prouilles. He did not carry out this sentence until April 1911.

There was still the problem of those unsaid Masses and the payment retained by Saunière. Here Saunière had some unexpected luck: the judgement was that “it is not sufficiently established that Saunière retained in his possession payment for Masses, and the judicial doubt must benefit the accused… It is inadmissible that a curé who has solicited so many payments for Masses did not take care to keep the slightest record.”³⁹ That Saunière steadfastly denied having any records worked in his favour.

Continued advertisements

One would think that with such a close shave to disaster, Saunière would curb his excesses – but not so. In December 1910, Saunière still had an advertisement running in Issue 13 of Veillées des Chaumières, offering the saying of Masses for 1 franc. On the 5th of December, the Bishop, at the end of his tether, instructed that a notice be inserted in La Semaine Religieuse and other journals that Saunière no longer had the right to say Masses.

In his memoire to Huguet, Saunière claimed that, although he had indeed received payments for Masses, he referred them on to other priests when he could not say them himself. When asked who these priests were, so that his claim could be verified, Saunière hurriedly asserted that they were all dead.