by Umberto Eco
—Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38
"Why Provins?"
"Have you ever been to Provins? A magic place: you can feel it even today. Go there. A magic place, still redolent of secrets. In the eleventh century it was the seat of the Comte de Champagne, a free zone, where the central government couldn't come snooping. The Templars were at home there; even today a street is named after them. There were churches, palaces, a castle overlooking the whole plain. And a lot of money, merchants doing business, fairs, confusion, where it was easy to pass unnoticed. But most important, something that has been there since prehistoric times: tunnels. A network of tunnels—real catacombs—extends beneath the hill. Some tunnels are open to the public today. They were places where people could meet in secret, and if their enemies got in, the conspirators could disperse in a matter of seconds, disappearing into nowhere. And if they were really familiar with the passages, they could exit in one direction and reappear in the opposite, on padded feet, like cats. They could sneak up behind the intruders and cut them down in the dark. As God is my witness, gentlemen, those tunnels are tailor-made for commandos. Quick and invisible, you slip in at night, knife between your teeth, a couple of grenades in hand, and your enemies die like rats!"
His eyes were shining. "Do you realize what a fabulous hiding place Provins must have been? A secret nucleus could meet underground, and the locals, even if they did see something, wouldn't say a word. The king's men, of course, did come to Provins. They arrested the Templars who were visible on the surface and took them to Paris. Reynaud de Provins was tortured, but didn't talk. Clearly, the secret plan called for him to be arrested to make the king believe that Provins had been swept clean. But at the same time he was to give a signal, by refusing to talk: Provins will not yield—not Provins, where the new, underground Templars live on. Some tunnels lead from building to building. You can enter a granary or a warehouse and come out in a church. Some tunnels are constructed with columns and vaulted ceilings. Even today, every house in the upper city still has a cellar with ogival vaults—there must be more than a hundred of them. And every cellar has an entrance to a tunnel."
"Conjecture," I said.
"No, young man, fact. You haven't seen the tunnels of Provins. Room after room, deep in the earth, covered with ancient graffiti. The graffiti are found mostly in what speleologists call lateral cells. Hieratic drawings of druidic origin, scratched into the wall before the Romans came. Caesar passed overhead, while down below men plotted resistance, ambushes, spells. There are Catharist symbols, too. Yes, gentlemen, the Cathars in Provence were wiped out, but there were Cathars in Champagne also, and they survived, meeting secretly in these catacombs of heresy. One hundred and eighty-three of them were burned aboveground, but the others hid below. The chronicles call them bougres et manichéens. Now, mind you, the bougres were simply Bogomils, Cathars of Bulgarian origin. 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-Chateau, 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 re-signed 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, the
reby 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 sec—on the trial of the Templars. For example, he had Raynouard's Monuments hisloriques relatifs à 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 any clues, so I told the good mademoiselle that if I examined her father's books, I might perhaps find some trace of the discovery he had made in Provins. If so, I would give him full credit in my essay. She was enthusiastic. Anything for poor Papa. She invited me to stay the whole afternoon and to come back the next morning if necessary. She brought me coffee, turned on the lights, and went back to her garden, leaving me in full charge. The room had smooth, white walls, no cupboards, nooks, or crannies where I could rummage, but I neglected nothing. I looked above, below, and inside the few pieces of furniture; I searched through an almost empty wardrobe containing a few suits filled with mothballs; I looked behind the three or four framed engravings of landscapes. I'll spare you the details, but, take it from me, I did a thorough job. It's not enough, for instance, to feel the stuffing of a sofa; you have to stick needles in to make sure you don't miss any foreign object...."
The colonel's experience, I realized, was not limited to battlefields.
"That left the books. I made a list of the titles and checked for underlinings and notes in the margins, for any hint at all. After a long while, I clumsily picked up an old volume with a heavy binding; I dropped it, and a handwritten sheet of paper fell out. It was notebook paper, and the texture and ink suggested that it wasn't very old: it could have been written in the last years of Ingolf's life. I barely glanced at it, but suddenly noticed something written in the margin: 'Provins 1894.' Well, you can imagine my excitement, the wave of emotion that swept over me....I realized that Ingolf had taken the original parchment to Paris, and that this was a copy. I felt no compunction. Mademoiselle Ingolf had dusted those books for years and had never come across that paper, otherwise she would have told me. Very well, let her continue to be unaware of it. The world is made up of winners and losers. I had had my share of defeat; it was time now to grasp victory. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. I bade Mademoiselle Ingolf good-bye, telling her that, though I had found nothing of interest, I would nevertheless mention her father if I wrote anything. Bless you, she said. A man of action, gentlemen, especially one burning with the passion that blazed within me, can't have scruples when dealing with a dismal woman already sentenced by fate."
"No need to apologize," Belbo said. "You did it. Just tell us the rest."
"Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It's not distrust. I don't want to subject the original to further wear."
"But Ingolf's copy wasn't the original," I said. "The parchment was the original."
"Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original."
"But Ingolf may have made errors in transcription."
"You don't know that he did. Whereas I know Ingolf's transcription is true, because I see no way the truth could be otherwise. Therefore Ingolf's copy is the original. Do we agree on this point, or do we sit and split hairs?"
"No," Belbo said. "I hate that. Let's see your original copy."
19
After Beaujeu, the Order has never ceased to exist, not for a moment, and after Aumont we find an uninterrupted sequence of Grand Masters of the Order down to our own time, and if the name and seat of the true Grand Master and the true Scneschals who rule the Order and guide its sublime labors remain a mystery today, an impenetrable secret known only to the truly enlightened, it is because the hour of the Order has not struck and the time is not ripe....
—Manuscript of 1760, in G. A. Schiffmann, Die Entstehung der Rittergrade in der Freimauerei um die Mitte des XVIII Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, Zechel, 1882, pp. 178–190
This was our first, remote contact with the Plan. I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn't been in Belbo's office that day. I could be—who knows?—selling sesame seeds in Samarkand, or editing a series of books in Braille, or heading the First National Bank of Franz Josef Land. Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.
The colonel handed us the page with a flourish. I still have it here among my papers, in a little plastic folder. Printed on that thermal paper photocopies used in those days, it is more yellowed and faded now. Actually there were two texts on the page: the first, densely written, took up half the space; the second was divided into fragments of verses....
The first text was a kind of demoniacal litany, a parody of a Semitic language:
Kuabris Defrabax Rexulon Ukkazaal Ukzaab Urpaefel Taculbain Habrak Hacoruin Maquafel Tebrain Hmcatuin Rokasor Himesor Argaabil Kaquaan Docrabax Reisaz Reisabrax Decaiquan Oiquaquil Zaitabor Qaxaop Dugraq Xaelobran Disaeda Magisuan Raitak Huidal Uscolda Arabaom Zipreus Mecrim Cosmae Duquifas Rocarbis.
"Not exactly clear," Belbo remarked.
"No, it isn't," the colonel agreed slyly. "And I might have spent my life trying to make sense of it, if one day, almost by chance, I hadn't found a book about Trithemius on a bookstall a
nd noticed one of his coded messages: 'Pamersiel Oshurmy Delmuson Thafloyn....' I had uncovered a clue, and I pursued it relentlessly. I knew nothing at all about Trithemius, but in Paris I found an edition of his Steganographia, hoc est ars per occultam scripturam animi sui voluntatem absentibus aperiendi certa, published in Frankfurt in 1606. The art of using secret writing in order to bare your soul to distant persons. A fascinating man, this Trithemius. A Benedictine abbot of Spannheim, late fifteenth-early sixteenth centuries, a scholar who knew Hebrew and Chaldean, Oriental languages like Tartar. He corresponded with theologians, cabalists, alchemists, most certainly with the great Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim and perhaps with Paracelsus.... Trithemius masked his revelations about secret writings behind magical smoke screens. For instance, he recommended sending coded messages like the one you're looking at now. The recipient was then supposed to call upon angels like Pamersiel, Padiel, Dorothiel, and so on, to help him decipher the real message. But many of his examples are actually military dispatches, and his book—dedicated to Philip, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria—represents one of the first serious studies of cryptography."
"Correct me if I'm wrong," I said, "but didn't you say that Trithemius lived at least a hundred years after the manuscript we're talking about was written?"
"Trithemius was associated with a Sodalitas Celtica that was concerned with philosophy, astrology, Pythagorean mathematics. You see the connection? The Templars were an order whose initiates were also inspired by the wisdom of the ancient Celts; that has been widely demonstrated. Somehow Trithemius also learned the cryptographic systems used by the Templars."
"Amazing," Belbo said. "And the transcription of the secret message? What does it say?"