The Priest's Madonna (18 page)

He was not much of an artist, and it puzzled me why he’d chosen to paint the picture himself. But as I watched, as the colors brought definition to the shapes and exposed the scene—Marie Madeleine in her grotto, kneeling before a thin cross of green wood, a book open at her elbow and a skull at her knees—I understood. I saw how worshipfully he touched the brush to her skin, her golden dress, her long curls and heavy eyebrows, how he lingered over her face, mixing and remixing his colors to achieve the perfect shade of rose for her cheeks.

One afternoon, bitten by envy, I accused him: “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

He turned, startled. “Marie. I didn’t know you were there.”

“The way you paint her. The way you linger over her body with the brush. It’s almost … immoral.” I blushed as I spoke, for I hadn’t found the right word. It wasn’t immoral at all: it was endearing and seductive.

He snorted. “There’s nothing immoral about loving a saint. On the contrary. Adoring a saint softens the heart, make us more willing to receive the grace of God.”

“Why her, though? Why not Mother Mary? Or Saint Francis? Or Jesus himself, for that matter?”

He looked at the painting. “It’s her ardor,” he said. “The tears of the Madeleine make God bend toward all of us, make him willing to forgive us. If it weren’t for her, we’d all be damned from birth.”

“Aren’t we already?” I pressed.

“There’s our baptism, Marie. Baptism remits the stain and punishment of original sin. You know that.”

“But it doesn’t save us.”

“Not by itself, no. We sin and we sin again. Only the grace of God and a willing heart can do that.” He began to paint once more.

His piety both chastened and enraged me. “What have you done with the things you found under the stone?” I demanded, unable to contain the question any longer.

“I’ve put them away for the time being. I’ve written again to the Austrian, and I will wait upon his word.” He spoke with studied calm and continued to paint, his eyes remaining on the bas-relief.

I felt this news as further insult, for he hadn’t requested my help with the letter. Wounded, I left him alone with his saint.

His aloofness filled me with melancholy. I felt lonelier than during his exile in Narbonne, for at least then I had the comfort of hope: that he’d return, that he’d be near, that we’d grow to love each other. But the future had arrived. He had returned, he was here, working at his desk or beside me in the church, physically present and yet inaccessible. I concluded that he felt no love for me.

I could not wallow in my self-pity for long, though, for I had to remind myself of the rectitude of his behavior—he was, after all, a priest. How could he love me? It was I who was in the wrong for trying to win his favor. I chastised myself repeatedly, and having suffered well, resolved to extend my martyrdom into the infinite future: I would obey Bérenger’s implied request and stay away. I would perform my duties in the church and the presbytery when expected, but invite no further friendship.

This resolution was all very well in the abstract, as a form of atonement, but the enactment of it proved a challenge. There were two confounding elements: first, the nature of my own personality, which was not, alas, inclined toward silent suffering; and second, there was the matter of the knight’s stone (as I had come to think of it) and the items we’d uncovered beneath it, items I was determined to investigate further.

As Bérenger clearly did not intend to share any more information with me, I resolved to pursue the matter on my own. Using my father’s pen and the clean side of a scrap of butcher’s paper, I sketched the carved surface as I remembered it. My sketch looked something like this:

I thought it was a decent reproduction, though the scale was imperfect, and I could not remember the particular ornamentation of the arches. The figures told an undecipherable story. What was the knight carrying? Was it a child? And what did the animals—bears, perhaps—indicate? Were those scenes—the fight and then the flight—supposed to tell some larger story, something happening beyond the more intimate scenes with the man and the horse? Was it a hunting scene of some kind? They were unanswerable questions based on the little I knew.

After some agonizing, I decided to bring my sketch to Mme Laporte. Bérenger would have forbidden it, and had he given me any welcoming cues—a smile, a soft look—I might have brought it to him instead so we could mull over the questions together. But he hadn’t.

“Michelle sent this drawing to me,” I told Madame. “She saw the carving in a church in Carcassonne.”

“It must be a very old carving,” she said, peering at the paper.

“How old?”

“Well, it’s difficult to tell from the sketch, of course. But these animals—very ancient stone cuttings often make use of animal patterns like this one.”

“What did they mean?”

“Oh, it depends, of course. Depends on the animal.” She stared at the drawing. “These look like bears.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Bears held something of a sacred status during Merovingian times. Fifth and sixth centuries,” she added. “I’m not sure why, exactly. Something to do with the power of the animal, probably—its strength, its ability to hibernate and yet maintain that strength.”

“You think this is that old?”

“Possibly.”

A quotation came back to me, and I spoke it aloud, on an impulse. “ ‘Bow thy head humbly, revere what thou hast burned and burn what thou hast revered.’ ” They were Saint Rémy’s words, words I had been made to memorize many years earlier in school. I had last recited them in front of my class in the frigid school-room, my hands trembling from nerves and the wintry cold. Saint Rémy had spoken those words at the baptism of Clovis, the most famous of the Merovingian kings. Clovis was a convert to Christianity. We had learned to recognize him as a hero, the new Con stantine, the king who had brought the light of Christ to the people of France in the Dark Ages.

“Yes,” Madame said, lifting her head. “Clovis is the Merovingian king most people know about. The dynasty was named for Mérovée, his grandfather. They were said to have magical powers, to be able to heal the sick with the touch of a hand.”

In the fifth century, France was called Gaul and Rennes-le-Château was a Visigothic city known as Rhédae. The land still spoke of this ancient city: Roman roads still scarred the surface of the hills, and from time to time, the red soil spat out shards of am phorae and brick, thinned Latinate coins, arrowheads, and bones. “You can still find ancient Visigothic skeletons around here,” Madame said. “There are many tombs in these hills.”

“La Capello,” I said, realizing.

“Yes—that’s the largest. You know it?”

I nodded. Gérard had told me of the place: an abandoned chapel on his uncle’s land. Nothing was left of the building except for some large, roughly cut stones, tumbled in disarray on the ground. Years ago, his uncle’s father had dug up one of those stones—large and flat, half buried—in the process of building a wall. Beneath the stone, rising out of the soil, were smooth white bones: skulls, femurs, knobby vertebrae. The bones were piled thick and deep, enclosed by four buried stone walls. His uncle’s father, horrified, had replaced the stone and forbidden his children to set foot on that part of the property. He left the wall unfinished. Gérard had taken me to see the spot: it was overgrown now, tufts of broom straddling the tombstone—similar in size and shape, I now realized, to the stone we’d unearthed in the church.

“The Merovingian kingdoms were to the north and west of Rhédae,” she continued. “The kings themselves actually had very little to do with this region, until Dagobert II.”

Madame, it must be said, loved legend as much as history. Two forces battled within her: the impulse toward accuracy and the guilty desire to augment the facts with magic, gore, and acts of heroism. Her language grew voluptuous and her expression animated when she told a tale, though she was always careful to qualify it as such.

When Dagobert was only five, she said, his father, King of Austrasia—the northeastern region of Gaul, an area that included present-day Cologne and Metz—died, leaving Dagobert in the care of the nefarious Grimoald, the mayor of the palace. Grimoald sent Dagobert to Ireland, spread the word that the prince was dead, and hastily enthroned his own son, Childebert. Within days, angry subjects had deposed Childebert and taken him and his father to be killed. Kingless, Austrasia fell into thirty years of chaos, with seigneurs battling each other for power, until Dagobert II, now a monk, returned from Ireland in 674.

Here Madame paused and leaned forward, her eyes bright with delight at what she was about to reveal. “Before going to Austrasia, though, Dagobert may have come here, to this hilltop, to Rhédae.”

Dagobert, it was said, married a Visigothic princess whose father was the Count of Rhédae. They were married in Rhédae—perhaps even on the site of our present-day church, where another church likely stood. They dwelt here together while Dagobert waited until the proper moment to reclaim his northern kingdom. When he finally was reinstated as king, he amassed a good amount of gold, which he is said to have kept in Rhédae.

What a thrill! To think that an ancient king had been here, on this very hill, had known this place, its red soil, its winds, its breathtaking views of distant mountains. And to imagine what he might have brought with him! Great chests of ancient treasure could be sequestered beneath the church: gold, jewels, ancient tapestries and mosaics, all of which might have belonged to Dagobert II himself. It took all my will to hold my tongue; I so longed to tell Madame everything. I had not been so far off, then, to think of treasure! And treasure so ancient—how much more exhilarating would that be!

I drummed my fingers against the arm of the chair while Madame finished her story. Dagobert II did not rule for long. One afternoon while he was resting beneath a tree, his own mayor drove a lance through his eye. The same man then went on to murder Dagobert’s family. His wife and her children, including the heir, Sigebert IV, were supposed to have been killed in the raid. But some believed that Sigebert IV survived and lived to father a whole line of unacknowledged kings.

She stopped abruptly. “Forgive me, Marie. I’ve gone on far too long. And I still haven’t told you anything of value that concerns your stone.”

“No,” I said. “No, it’s been very helpful.”

She examined my sketch one more time. “I wish I knew more about the history of Carcassonne. It may be a local story depicted here.” She rubbed the top of the drawing with her thumb, as if the ink and paper offered the same texture as the engraved stone. “It’s interesting that the horse and rider stand beneath the animals and trees. It’s as if they are riding beneath the ground.” Then she looked at me sharply, and I felt sure she had penetrated my lie. “Where exactly was the church, Marie, where Michelle found this?”

I shrugged, unwilling now to reveal anything more. “Oh, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.”

She stared at me a moment longer, then turned again to the sketch. “I’ll tell you. If Michelle had found this stone here in Rennes-le-Château, there would be more to say.”

At home that evening, my mind buzzed.
She knows,
I thought,
she knows. Bérenger won’t trust me again.
Our dinner was interminable. I couldn’t look at Bérenger for fear my eyes would reveal my treachery. It was only when I was lying in my cot that night, listening to my father’s ragged snoring, that I realized I was worrying over nothing. Madame would tell no one. As long as I’d known her, she had been utterly discreet.

The important question was what more she had to say.

I wondered, after hearing the story of Dagobert II’s presence in Rhédae, whether the knight’s stone covered Dagobert’s tomb. Dagobert might have been buried beneath the floor of that ancient church. The stone, remarkable as it was, could have been saved to pave the floor of our own church, hundreds of years after his death.

As I lay awake, I re-created his murder in my mind, down to the crunch of his skull as it splintered beneath the lance, and then imagined his loyal mourning subjects transporting his corpse on a rickety cart over the rocky hills and valleys that spanned the distance between the Ardennes, where he was killed, and Rennes-le-Château. Growing more and more convinced that his corpse was there, buried deep beneath the surface dirt, I even considered sneaking into the church with my father’s crowbar and shovel. The only thing that stopped me was that I would not be able to lift the stone alone.

It was impossible to sleep, so I crept downstairs with a book on the Merovingians that Madame had lent me. I read by candlelight and found, to my disappointment, that the whereabouts of Dagobert’s remains were well documented. He had been buried in Stenay, the capital city of his kingdom. Two centuries after his death, the Church canonized him—the book did not explain why—and his corpse was transferred, but only to a different church in the same city. Almost a thousand years later, during the Revolution, Stenay was taken, the church destroyed, and Dagobert’s relics dispersed across France. His skull was thought to be at a convent in Mons.