The Priest's Madonna (16 page)

“Why not simply write it down. You were there.”

He watched my hand as it traveled over the page and stopped now and then to dip the pen in the ink. I wrote the account from Bérenger’s point of view, referring to myself as “my housekeeper.”

“How well you write, Marie,” he said, startlingly close. I looked up in surprise. He was gazing at me with such affection I felt myself redden, brow to ear, and I had to look back down at the letter.

“Where did you learn to write so well?” he asked. “My seminary students didn’t write half as well as you.”

“Books, I suppose,” I said, staring at the letter. “I am fond of them.”

He nodded approvingly, and I continued my account, more haltingly this time, impaired now by my self-consciousness.

When I had finished, he took the paper from me and read it over.

“Wonderful,” he said. “And let’s add a line … ‘I will await your instruction, dear sir. Yours in the service of Christ, Bérenger Saunière.’ ”

I complied, then slid the paper to him for his signature. “I wonder what he’ll do,” I said as he signed. “Do you think he’ll tell us to lift the stone?”

“I’ve no idea,” Bérenger said. He had little patience for musing. “We’ll have to wait for his response.”

And so we waited, interminably. I visited the small altar daily, lingering before the stone, imagining what might be hidden beneath it. A silver chalice, encrusted with jewels? Ancient holy writings? A rusted, chipped chest brimming with gold? I thought of the long-ago priest, prying the edge of the stone loose, hefting it open, digging away the dirt and rocks, the accumulation of centuries of dust. Removing a cloth-wrapped package from a satchel, and covering it with shovelfuls of red dirt. I imagined he must have grieved over the loss of something so precious.

Weeks passed, and then a month, and still we heard nothing. I itched to lift the stone. Time after time, I pressed Bérenger, insisting that there would be no sin in looking, that the Austrian had not forbidden him from pursuing any clues he might find. “Maybe that’s what he intended. After all, he set you on this course, didn’t he? Maybe he hoped you would stumble across the flask and then lift the stone yourself.”

But Bérenger steadfastly refused, insisting that we had to wait to hear from the archduke before taking any further action. He even put off my requests to examine the parchment again, and would not entertain hypotheses as to what might be hidden beneath the stone or what the cryptic text might mean. “Maybe it’s a code of some kind,” I suggested.

“It’s no use guessing. It could be anything.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I really can’t imagine, Marie.”

A
S A WAY to distract myself—and perhaps to punish Bérenger for his obstinacy—I decided to visit Mme Laporte. I realized, with some shock, that I had not visited her since the day of the terrible episode with Gérard. I had, of course, returned the frock she’d loaned me, and though I’d seen her in the village now and then, always exchanging a few civil words with her, I had not been to the castle for more than a year.

I appeared at her door the next afternoon, a plate of cookies in my hand. The anger I once had felt toward her had dissolved, and in its place there was only shame at my long absence, especially after she had been so kind to me. When she greeted me as usual with that calm, welcoming expression, I was greatly relieved. She ushered me in and called to Mme Siau to bring coffee to the library, as if no time at all had passed.

I was different with Madame than I was with Bérenger. With him I could be brazen. It had become my way of courting him. Since I’d failed to behave perfectly piously—I had criticized the Church in his presence—I had taken to displaying the whole of myself as a kind of challenge, a glove thrown down: Take me or leave me, this is who I am. But with Madame, I was gentler, influenced as I was by her quiet, contemplative nature. Her presence never failed to soothe me. Her meditative step, her catholic interest in the world, the quiet of her household were all a stillness I entered into, an expanse in which I was made to confront not only myself, but the sloughed-off skin of history.

After we made small talk for several minutes about the weather and the progress of the church renovations, Madame asked if I’d come to hear her explanation for why she had reported Bérenger’s sermon to the government.

“Oh, no,” I protested. “It’s all right.” The incident, long past now, embarrassed me.

“I would like to share it with you, Marie. I think you may find it illuminating.”

“All right, then. If you like.”

“I was not born here in Rennes,” she began. “I moved here as a teenager, from Lyon, where I spent my childhood.

“We had a good life there, my family. My father was a professor of history. My mother was educated and she educated me, bringing me to museums, teaching me English, Latin, and Hebrew. I was an only child. We danced together in the evenings after supper. My mother would play minuets and waltzes on the piano and my father swung me about the room as if I were a grand lady in the king’s court.” The memory seemed to transport her, and she remained quiet a moment, savoring it.

“My father was very principled. An idealist. He believed that humanity’s God-given destiny was to progress toward the divine, but that in order to progress it was necessary to know where one had been. So he studied history. He was a republican, though not a revolutionist. He hated war. And he loved his country. He wrote for the newspaper occasionally, praising France for making the Jews full citizens. He believed France was the blade of progress, that we would eventually lead Europe toward our ideals. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Those words were like scripture to him.”

She looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Purposefully, she unfolded them and laid them flat across her thighs. “He was killed by a mob of anti-Semites just before Easter. They dragged him from our home and beat him to death with clubs and the butts of their rifles. They stuffed his mouth with crumpled newspaper pages and set fire to them.

“We did not have much money saved, and so my mother had to send me to live with my father’s cousins here in Rennes-le-Château. The Laportes. She had no family alive in France.”

“So Mayor Laporte is your cousin?” I asked, immediately embarrassed by the hasty tone of my question. Her confession flustered me; I did not know the appropriate way to respond.

“Second cousin, yes.”

“But he’s not Jewish.”

“No. My grandfather—my father’s father—converted to Judaism to marry my grandmother. They were unconventional people. When my mother wrote to Mme Laporte, Philippe’s mother, it was the first time our families had spoken in thirty years. The Laportes took me in under the condition that I come alone, without my mother.”

I imagined a younger Mme Laporte, trudging up the dusty hill from Couiza, dragging an overstuffed bag behind her in the dirt. “What did she do?”

“She moved to Paris. She couldn’t stay in Lyon.”

“I’m sorry about your father,” I said.

She shook her head impatiently. “I’ve told you this, Marie, not to inspire your pity, but because I want you to understand why I reported
l’abbé
to the government. Religion is a potent force—both for good and for evil. As a man-made creation, it is imperfect; as an institution, an organized body of people, it can be dangerous. The men who killed my father believed they were acting faithfully, according to what their Church had taught them—they were avenging the death of their God, whom they believed had been killed by my father’s ancestors. They used Christian ideas to justify a brutal, evil act—a sin, if ever there was one.”

I nodded, thinking of her pistol. Had she ever feared for her own life?

“This is why,” she continued, “religion must never partner with government. It is powerful enough as its own independent entity; it influences the moral worlds of every member of its body. But when it partners with government, it becomes a source for great evil.” Though her face remained calm, the fierceness of her gaze and the intensity of her voice betrayed—for once—her emotion.

“I hope I haven’t said too much.” She leaned back in her chair and looked kindly on me. “I know you are a faithful Catholic, Marie. I imagine you find strength and hope and joy in the practice of your religion. I begrudge you none of that.”

“Yes, of course. I know,” I said. It was not the right time to share my own disillusionment with her. It seemed trivial, weightless next to what she’d told me.

“It remains a puzzle to me—how some people can be so uplifted, so transformed by their religion and others can fall so low, descending into darkness even as they live.”

“I guess it’s the devil going walking,” I offered.

She laughed, a surprised, delighted laugh. “Yes. That’s right, Marie. The devil going walking.”

S
UMMER ARRIVED, AND still we had not heard from the Austrian. I grew perturbed with Bérenger, who continued to behave as if he were indifferent to the mystery of the flask and its message. I had even started to entertain the notion of creeping into the church by night and lifting the stone myself, when he took me aside one day and announced that the new altar was due to arrive the next week. It was, he explained, to be a gift from Mme de Guiraud, a native of Rennes-le-Château. Her family had owned the old sawmill and had moved to Narbonne when the mill closed, before our family had come to town. Bérenger had called on her several times during his stay in Narbonne, and she had been charmed by his manners and his feeling for her home village. When he learned he would be returning to Rennes-le-Château, Mme de Guiraud offered him the gift of a new altar, designed to his specifications. An artist in Toulouse had been building it, and Bérenger had just received word that it was finished.

“To install it, the workers will have to remove some of the flagstones in the floor. I’ll ask them to remove the stone that’s marked on the drawing, and we’ll be able to see whether there’s anything to your theory then.”

I was, needless to say, elated. I awaited the altar’s arrival with fidgety anticipation.

It came, hauled uphill by a faltering mule, who lay down to roll in the dust once relieved of its burden. Behind the cart were a few laborers from the fields who’d followed it uphill, curious about what lay beneath the dustcover. People came out of their houses to watch as Bérenger helped the driver and his assistant lift the altar from the cart and stagger with it into the church. Inside, one of the men removed the cloth. Several people gasped at what was revealed: a gilded tabernacle, crowned with a golden cross on a pedestal, and the table itself topped with Italian marble.

“You must have spent all your money on this, Monsieur
le curé,
” said M. Verdié.

Bérenger seemed not to have heard him. He was studying the altar’s surfaces, fingering the gild.

“The boss said you’d paint that yourself,” one of the men said to Bérenger, when he bent to examine the face of the altar, which was strangely bare: an unpainted plaster bas-relief that swelled here and there in the shape of a head, a draping robe, a cross.

Bérenger nodded. He got to his feet, rubbing his fingers against his cassock. “Very nice,” he said, and then ordered the men to remove the old altar and install the new one in its place.

I lingered in the church that day, sweeping the floor several times, dusting in invisible niches. It took the men some time to remove the old altar, massive and ponderous as it was. Though I had chores to tend to at home, I would run back to the church whenever I could and stand outside the door, listening for the sounds inside, the scraping of iron against stone. I heard it finally, just after the midday dinner—grunts and groans crescendoing into a great roar—and I rushed in to see two men hefting the stone upright, dust billowing into the air, and Bérenger dropping to his knees to examine what lay beneath.

I ran to stand beside him. He lifted a dusty and cracked leather valise from the dirt. Its contents chimed dully. I could see that he wanted to open it but did not trust the workmen. So he simply touched the bag, fingering its cracks, as if the leather itself were a thing to be admired. Still in the dirt lay a small leather-bound book.

The men dragged the stone away from the shallow hole and were about to lay it back down, when I stopped them. The underside of the stone was contoured. Stepping closer, I could see that the contours were patterned, intentional, carved. Bérenger noticed the same thing and instructed the men to turn the stone over and lay it down, face up. As they did, he tucked the leather-bound book into his cassock.

The four of us knelt before the stone, each on one side. I took a cleaning rag from my belt and wiped the surface thoroughly. As the layers of dust came off, the contours grew more distinguishable, though years—centuries—of shifting soil had ground them down, blurring the shapes. There were four panels on the stone, set off from each other by patterned arches. On the bottom left, a figure stood by a horse, which drank at a trough. Above the arch that circumscribed that panel, two animals were pictured, one fleeing the other. To the right of that, another panel showed the two animals facing each other, on either side of a tree trunk, their teeth bared. And below that panel, beneath another patterned arch, a knight rode his horse, a spear in one arm, an indistinguishable object in the other—an urn, a figurine or maybe even a child.

“You’ve got something here, Monsieur
le curé,
” said one of the workmen. “Something old.”

The other sat back on his heels. “What’s in the case?”

A look of desperation passed over Bérenger’s face. I could see the impulse to hide the bag, get rid of the workers—it was the same impulse I’d had when I found the flask in the baluster. Instead, he bravely worked the sticky latch open.

The case released a metallic scent, like blood. Inside was a scattering of items: a silver chalice and bowl, a tiny copper bell ornamented with a red cross, a frayed silk stole, a golden censer and chain. There were a few porcelain statuettes—Saint Roch, Sainte Germaine, the Virgin Mother—and a large golden cross, like the one that crowned the new altar. A small framed painting of a grieving Sainte Marie Madeleine, her hair long and loose, lay at the bottom of the case, and scattered across the face of this painting were dozens of coins.