NEWS
English · Deutsch · Português · Français · Italiano · Русский · Español · Norsk · Česky · ελληνικά · עברית
The Bérenger Saunière Myth:
Turning Straw into Gold
| Introduction | Early Years | Appointment as curé | Political hot water | Church project | Documents | Tomb-and-treasure | Building & borrowing | Gifts & 3-per-day | Absences | Moving the bones | Mass destruction | Fire & refurbishment | Bulk Masses | Land & luxuries | Change of Bishop | Bills & belvedere | Family estrangement | Extravagant life | Conflict with the Bishop | Continued enquiries | The Bishop & Masses | First indictment | The money fairytale | Second indictment | Continued advertisements | "Not authorised" | Final suspension | The Rome trial | Health and war | Death & Last Rites | Saunière's legacy | Conclusion |
We can conclude, therefore, that there is a strong likelihood that his absences are largely explained by his trafficking in Masses (collecting and cashing money orders), and occasionally by his personal soliciting for funds. The wilder speculations about his absences have no supporting evidence, and are the products of later imaginings, not contemporary evidence. One could as easily claim that Saunière frequently met up with alien allies in a spaceship in orbit around Mercury, discussing their plans for a galactic empire. But unless evidence is found supporting the notion that an alien spacecraft was in orbit around Mercury, and that Saunière was in communication with the aliens of that spacecraft, this claim is rightly confined to the realm of fiction. In other words, speculation has as its only raison d’être the exercise of imagination, not fact, and no explanation is beyond the limits of a fertile imagination.
Moving the bones
Saunière had much of the old churchyard cleared away, with the purpose of modernising it anew to his own plan. Skeletons and bones were actually removed from their grave and placed temporarily in an ossuary that he had built especially to contain the remains he disturbed in his reconstruction of the churchyard. (The skeletal remains were reburied after Saunière had finished redesigning his new modern churchyard, but it can scarcely be imagined that the bones had been kept separately or identified so that people could know who was buried where, or that there was any attempt to ensure that one set of bones did not end up having, for instance, the skull of an entirely unrelated skeleton buried with it.) This careless disregard for the dead and for the living who didn’t want their ancestors’ remains dug up and disturbed is sadly not untypical of Saunière’s behaviour. The outrage and annoyance of the villagers doesn’t need to be imagined: they protested loudly and in 1895 made formal complains to the Préfet11 about the graves and tombs of their ancestors being treated in such a disrespectful way. Two of the letters are shown below:
10 March 1895
We electors protest that the curé continues his work and we reinforce our earlier complaint and our desire to be free to maintain the tombs of our ancestors, and that the curé should not have the right to make embellishments, or place crosses or crowns, or shift everything or dump it in a corner.12
14 March 1895
Monsieur le Préfet,
We are not at all happy about how the cemetery is being worked on, particularly
under the conditions that there have been up to now; if there are crosses
they are uprooted, also stones from the tombs, and at the same time this
said work involves neither compensation nor nothing.13
This letter was signed by several villagers (or marked with their cross if they were illiterate).
The Préfet did order Saunière to stop, but it was really too late – the disturbance had already been done.
12 Descadeillas, Mythologie, p. 22
13 Descadeillas, Notice, p. 2
