The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  He examined the paper again for some time. Then, popping his last morsel of bread in his mouth, he said, “Show me where you found this, Marie.”

  At the base of the bell tower stairs, I showed him the wooden baluster and slid the section of the capital away to reveal the hollow compartment. He knelt before it as I had and peered into the slot, then slipped his hand in and felt around. When he found nothing more, he fitted the piece of the capital into the slot, then removed it and slid it in once again. “Remarkable,” he whispered.

  “Whoever hid it went to a lot of trouble,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  “I really couldn’t say,” he said, thoughtfully rubbing the flask with his thumb.

  “Do you think something’s been hidden? That dot seems intentional.”

  “Such as what?” He turned to me from his squat.

  “I don’t know. Something valuable.”

  “A treasure, you mean?” His eyes flashed, as if he’d uttered something scandalous.

  I shrugged self-consciously. “Maybe.”

  “Could be,” he said. “Or it could be the dot is just a drop of ink that fell on the page.”

  We had no time to discuss the paper further. Bérenger had to prepare for Mass, and I had my chores to attend to. But I spent the hours away from him thinking of nothing but the little flask, the parchment, and its possible meaning. It had to have been a priest who composed the message. Even now, most of the adults in our village could neither read nor write—they got their news at the tavern or the market, memorized scripture at Mass, and learned fairy stories and folktales from their grandparents. Ours was one of the few literate families in town. It might have been possible that the writer had copied the text from a Latin Vulgate Bible, which he or she would have gotten from the priest. But even so, to have carved the slot so carefully from the baluster—it would have taken time, and could only have been done by someone with regular access to the church.

  So, likely it was a priest who had written the message and hidden the flask. But what would he have hidden beneath the stone? And why had he included the grim passage from Job?

  The conversation at dinner that afternoon was strained and fueled almost entirely by my mother. Bérenger and I were too distracted to talk. I kept glancing in his direction, only to meet his impenetrable stare, at which point I’d look away. Moments later, we’d play the game again. I could not understand his gaze; I thought he might be angry with me, though I could not figure out why. Exasperated, my mother finally set her spoon down and scolded me. “Stop playing the coquette, Marie! You’re driving us both batty!”

  When the meal was finished, I declared I had to do some dusting in the presbytery, and I followed Bérenger, practically tripping on his heels. Closing the front door behind us, I said in a triumphant voice, “He was a priest!”

  But he was not interested in my hypothesis. “Listen, Marie. You haven’t told anyone about that letter I received last year, have you?”

  “No,” I replied, surprised by the question.

  “Not Michelle? Not even your mother?”

  “No, no,” I assured him. “I haven’t told a soul, monsieur. Just as you requested.”

  He breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Thank the Lord.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He studied me. “You must have guessed the identity of our generous donor, Marie,” he said finally.

  “I had a suspicion, yes,” I said.

  “It was he who got me reinstated here. I owe him a great debt of gratitude.” And he proceeded to tell me the following story.

  Late one night, a man had arrived on Bérenger’s doorstep in Narbonne, carrying an envelope with a letter from the archduke. The letter instructed him to open an account at a certain bank in Perpignan. The archduke would then transfer three thousand francs to Bérenger’s account within a week. It also informed him that he would be hearing from the bishop about his reinstatement in Rennes-le-Château. The only caveat was that Bérenger would be expected to report to the Austrian from time to time on the progress of the restoration and to inform him if he found anything out of the ordinary.

  Bérenger took the train to Perpignan the following morning, opened the account, and then returned to Narbonne to await further news. As promised, a few days later he received a letter from Carcassonne informing him that his services were once again needed here, in Rennes-le-Château.

  “Evidently, the man wields a great influence with the Church, Marie. He must be powerful indeed.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, amazed. “So the flask, the message—do you think he knows of it?”

  “I’m not sure. But I have promised to tell him what I find.”

  “Yes,” I said, gloomily. I was reluctant to relinquish the discovery just then, to hand it over to a strange man in a foreign land who, for all I knew, might send another messenger to take the flask, lift the stone, and remove whatever was underneath it.

  Bérenger, perhaps sensing my reluctance, added, “I would be grateful, Marie, if you would help me draft the letter.”

  And so we spent the next hour together in his new office on the second floor, which consisted of a handsome rolltop desk, a kerosene lamp, and two chairs. A gnarled oak branch stood in the corner of the room—something he’d picked up on one of his walks—and on the wall across from the desk was a terra-cotta crucifix supporting the body of Christ. Bérenger dictated the first few sentences, but once he began to tell the story of finding the flask, he faltered. “How exactly did it happen, Marie?”

  I began to narrate the story aloud once more, but he interrupted me.

  “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.”

  AS 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.”

  SUMMER 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 ou
t 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.