Does the French word bougres tell you anything? Originally it meant sodomite, because the Bulgarian Cathars were said to have that little failing….” He gave a nervous laugh. “And who else was accused of that same failing? The Templars. Curious, isn’t it?”
“Up to a point,” I said. “In those days the easiest way to get rid of a heretic was to accuse him of sodomy….”
“True, and you mustn’t think that I believe the Templars actually … They were fighting men, and we fighting men like beautiful women. Vows or not, a man is a man. I mention this only because I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Cathar heretics found refuge where the Templars were. But in any case the Templars learned from them the use of caves and tunnels.”
“But all this, really, is guesswork,” Belbo said.
“It started with guesswork, yes. I’m just explaining why I set out to explore Provins. But now we come to the actual story. In the center of Provins is a big Gothic building, the Grange-aux-Dîmes, or tithe granary. As you may know, one of the sources of the Templars’ strength was that they collected tithes directly and didn’t have to pay anything to the state. Under the building, as everywhere else, there’s a network of passages, today in very bad condition.
Well, as I was going through archives in Provins I came across a local newspaper from 1894. In it was an article about two dragoons, Chevalier Camille Laforge of Tours and Chevalier Edouard Ingolf of Petersburg—yes, Petersburg!—who had visited the Grange a few days earlier.
Accompanied by the caretaker, they went down into one of the subterranean rooms, on the second level belowground. When the caretaker, trying to show that there were other levels even farther down, stamped on the earth, they heard echoes and reverberations.
The reporter praised the bold dragoons, who promptly fetched lanterns and ropes and went into the unknown tunnels like boys down a mine, pulling themselves forward on their elbows, crawling through mysterious passages. And the paper says they came to a great hall with a fine fireplace and a dry well in the center. They tied a stone to a rope, lowered it, and found that the well was eleven meters deep.
They went back a week later with stronger ropes, and two companions lowered Ingolf into the well, where he discovered a big room with stone walls, ten meters square and five meters high. The others then followed him down. They realized that they were at the third level, thirty meters beneath the surface. We don’t know what the men saw and did in that room. The reporter admits that when he went to the scene to investigate, he lacked the courage to go down into the well.
I was excited by the story and felt a desire to visit the place. But many of the tunnels had collapsed since the end of the last century, and even if such a well did exist at that time, there was no way of telling where it was now.
“It suddenly occurred to me that the dragoons might have found something down there. I had recently read a book about the secret of Rennes-le-Château, another story in which the Templars figure. A penniless and obscure parish priest was restoring an old church in a little village of some two hundred souls. A stone in the choir floor was lifted, revealing a box said to contain some very old manuscripts.
Only manuscripts? We don’t know exactly what happened next, but in later years the priest became immensely rich, threw money around, led a life of dissipation, and was finally brought before an ecclesiastical court. What if something similar had happened to one of the dragoons? Or to both? Ingolf went down first; let’s say he found some precious object small enough to be hidden in his tunic. He came back up and said nothing to his companions. Well, I am a stubborn man; otherwise I wouldn’t have lived the life I have.”
The colonel ran his fingers over his scar, then raised his hands to his temples and brushed his hair toward his nape, making sure it was in place.
“I went to the central telephone office in Paris and checked the directories of the entire country, looking for a family named Ingolf. I found only one, in Auxerre, and wrote a letter introducing myself as an amateur archeologist.
Two weeks later I received a reply from an elderly midwife, the daughter of the Ingolf I had read about. She was curious to know why I was interested in him. In fact, she asked: For God’s sake, could I tell her anything? I realized there was a mystery here, so I hurried to Auxerre.
Mademoiselle Ingolf lives in a little ivy-covered cottage, its wooden gate held shut by a string looped around a nail. An old maid—tidy, kind, and uneducated. She asked me right away what I knew about her father, and I told her I knew only that one day he had gone down into a tunnel in Provins. I said I was writing a historical monograph on the region. She was dumbfounded; she had no idea her father had ever been to Provins.
Yes, he had been a dragoon, but he resigned from the service in 1895, before she was born. He bought this cottage in Auxerre, and in 1898 he married a local girl with some money of her own. Mademoiselle Ingolf was five when her mother died, in 1915. Her father disappeared in 1935. Literally disappeared. He left for Paris, which he regularly visited at least twice a year, but was never heard from again. The local gendarmerie telephoned Paris: the man had vanished into thin air.
Presumed dead. And so our mademoiselle, left alone with only a meager inheritance, had to go to work. Apparently she never found a husband, and judging by the way she sighed, thereby also hangs a tale—probably the only tale in her life, and it must have ended badly. ‘Monsieur Ardenti,’ she said, ‘I suffer constant anguish and remorse, having learned nothing of poor Papa’s fate, not even the site of his grave, if indeed there is one.’
She was eager to talk about him, describing him as very gentle and calm, a methodical, cultured man who spent his days reading and writing in a little attic study. He puttered in the garden now and then, and exchanged a few words with the pharmacist—also dead now. From time to time he traveled to Paris—on business, he said—and always came home with packages of books. The study was still full of them; she wanted to show them to me. We went upstairs.
“It was a clean and tidy little room, which Mademoiselle Ingolf dusted once a week: she could take flowers to her mother’s grave, but all she could do for poor Papa was this. She kept it just as he left it; she wished she had gone to school so she could read those books of his, but they were in languages like Old French, Latin, German, and even Russian.
Papa had been born and spent his childhood in Russia; his father had been a French Embassy official. There were about a hundred volumes in the library, most of them—I was delighted to see—on the trial of the Templars. For example, he had Raynouard’s Monuments historiques relatifs a la condamnation des chevaliers du Temple, published in 1813, a great rarity.
There were many volumes on secret writing systems, a whole collection on cryptography, and some works on paleography and diplomatic history. As I was leafing through an old account ledger, I found an annotation that made me start: it concerned the sale of a case, with no further description and no mention of the buyer’s name.
Nor was any price given, but the date was 1895, and the entries immediately below were quite meticulous. This was the ledger of a judicious gentleman shrewdly managing his nest egg. There were some notes on the purchase of items from antiquarian booksellers in Paris. I was beginning to understand.
“In the crypt in Provins, Ingolf must have found a gold case studded with precious stones. Without a moment’s thought, he slipped it into his tunic and went back up, not saying a word to the others. At home, he found a parchment in the case. That much seems obvious. He went to Paris and contacted a collector of antiques—probably some bloodsucking pawnbroker—but the sale of the case, even so, left Ingolf comfortably off, if not rich. Then he went further, left the service, retired to the country, and started buying books and studying the parchment.
Perhaps he was something of a treasure hunter to start with; otherwise he wouldn’t have been exploring tunnels in Provins. He was probably educated enough to believe that he would eventually be able to decipher the parchment on his own. So he worked calmly, unruffled, for more than thirty years, a true monomaniac. Did he ever tell anyone about his discoveries?
Who knows? One way or another, by 1935 he must have felt either that he had made considerable progress or that he had come to a dead end, because he then apparently decided to turn to someone, either to tell that person what he knew or to find out what he needed to know. And what he knew must have been so secret and awesome that the person he turned to did away with him.
“But let us return to his attic. I wanted to see whether Ingolf had left
