The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  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 suppose
d 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.

  Reading further, though, I was heartened to learn of the discovery of a Merovingian tomb during the restoration of a church in Tournai, Belgium. The mason who’d made the discovery found a startling array of treasure, including, strangely enough, a purple silk cloak embroidered with three hundred gold and garnet bees. Also in the tomb were a leather purse full of gold coins; four weapons—a sword, a saber, a lance, and a throwing hatchet, all ornamented in gold and cloisonné; a golden bull’s head, also in gold and garnet; and a gold seal ring, emblazoned with the name Childerici Regis. King Childeric, the father—as I learned from the book—of Clovis.

  This was promising news: a tomb found during the restoration of a church. And it had contained a collection of coins, perhaps like the ones we had found in the valise. Good omens, I felt. I was certain now that my knight’s stone was a gravestone, and while it might not be the tomb of Dagobert or Childeric, it might very well contain some other ancient king’s corpse, along with his own catalogue of jewel-encrusted weaponry and artifacts. Perhaps the priest who hid the flask had been the first to discover this tomb, and because he didn’t want its wealth to be plundered by revolutionaries, he turned the stone over, burying its engraved face in the dirt. Maybe he hid the flask in the capital of the baluster for a trusted friend, someone who might be able to smuggle the tomb’s treasure into more peaceful territory, to reserve its wealth for the Church or for France—or for himself.

  Though I had answered some questions by reading, there was still the matter of what more I might learn from Mme Laporte. It was my choice: I could continue to pretend that Michelle had found the stone or I could trust in Madame’s discretion.

  I returned to Madame’s early the next morning. No one answered my knock, which surprised me because I knew Madame to be an early riser. I wandered around the castle grounds, heading toward the wall that abutted the church cemetery, where I knew I might get a glimpse of her window. I did not intend to spy; I had only the vague notion of looking for a light in the room, some evidence of whether or not she was awake. I was in a strange state of mind, having spent a sleepless night squinting at the small print of the Merovingian history by candlelight.

  Leaning over the château wall, I looked out over the garrigues. Sunlight flashed from the bits of mica in the stone wall. The sky trumpeted its brilliance. I wondered at the crisp teeth of a Kermes oak leaf, watched a butterfly alight on a cyclamen and marveled at the perfect fluting of its wing. Dagobert II himself might have marveled at the same sight. How near the past was! A thousand years was a breath, the turn of a head.

  A footfall broke my reverie. M. Laporte, his cap pulled low over his forehead, was peering quizzically at me.

  I stood at once, brushing dust from the breast of my frock. “Pardon me, monsieur. I came to visit Madame. When do you expect her to be at home?”

  “Mme Laporte is away, Marie,” the mayor replied uneasily. He must have wondered why I had come to see his wife at such an odd hour of the day. “I’ve just left her at the train station.”

  “Where’s she gone?” I asked, stunned.

  “To Paris.”

  “Paris? Why? When will she be back?”

  “Not for some time. Her aunt has just passed, Marie. She’s gone to see to her affairs.”

  “Oh,” I said, dumbfounded. She had mentioned nothing of a sick aunt. Why hadn’t she told me she would be leaving? Or had she only just found out, yesterday afternoon after our visit—received a telegram, perhaps, and decided to take the first train out this morning?

  “Excuse me, please, Marie,” the mayor said, when I failed to say anything further. “I haven’t yet eaten my breakfast.”

  “Yes, of course, monsieur,” I responded, then walked slowly home.

  BY THE END of that summer, renovation came to a halt. The roof was repaired, the new altar installed, the windows in the nave replaced by a glazier from Bordeaux. There was more to be done—the structure of the church needed buttressing and we had not yet begun to refurnish the interior—but Bérenger had run out of money. He had still not heard from the Austrian, despite a second letter informing the archduke of the knight’s stone and the items we’d found beneath it.

  Bérenger took to traveling. He told us that he was visiting his mother in Montazels or his brother in Narbonne, and, carrying his satchel, he would set off before dawn to make the hike down the hill. He would leave for one day or occasionally as many as six. He continued to avoid me. Despite my resolution, I could not leave him alone. I brooded when he was gone and confronted him when he returned, asking where he’d been, what he’d been doing. I tried to keep my questions lighthearted and polite, but I am afraid I could not fully disguise the undertone of need. I longed for him to confide in me. But he would tell me nothing, only that he had had family business to attend to.

  When he was home, Bérenger spent a good deal of time in his office with the door closed. His correspondence increased substantially. It seemed each
morning he had a few new letters to post, and he began to receive numerous letters daily, from all corners of France: Alençon, Montpellier, Amiens, Bayonne, as well as many from Narbonne. Some envelopes boasted an array of colorful stamps and were marked with such exotic addresses as Perugia, Barcelona, Prague, and Budapest. M. Déramon grumbled about the increase in volume. “I’m not a pack mule, you know,” he would say, dropping the letters on the kitchen table.

  One afternoon as I was going to change the linen in Bérenger’s bedroom, I noticed him in his office, sitting before a pile of letters, perturbedly slicing open each one. I stood at the threshold.

  “When did you get to be so famous?” I asked.

  To my relief, he smiled, then lifted the stack of letters, demonstrating the weight of the load. “All of this, just today.”

  “Who are they from?”

  He shook his head. “It’s my own fault. I posted a few advertisements in the weeklies for Mass requests, thinking it might help our financial situation. Now I can hardly keep up with the receipts.”

  I nodded sympathetically, pleased that he was sharing this information. In the past, he had received occasional requests for Mass intentions—Masses said for a particular person or institution. Enclosed with each request would be a small honorarium of one or two francs. It was a common practice among country priests, whose meager salaries required some sort of augmentation. “Maybe I can help,” I suggested. “At least with the receipts.”

  “Oh, Marie,” he said, and his voice sounded genuinely appreciative. “You’re a godsend.”

  As I entered the requests in Bérenger’s notebook of Masses—noting the number of intentions requested, the name of the correspondent, and the amount of the honorarium, and leaving a column open where Bérenger could mark the date on which he had fulfilled the request—I was startled to see that he had received hundreds of requests for Mass intentions in the past few months alone. The accumulated honoraria amounted, then, to several hundreds of francs. And as the Church prohibited priests from fulfilling more than three requests a day, Bérenger had begun to fall behind.