The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  “Philippe cared for me quite a bit it seems,” she offered, shyly. “I hadn’t known.”

  “Hadn’t you?”

  She darted her eyes at me guiltily. “Marriage settles into its own rhythms, Marie,” she said. “These become ruts, and then gullies, ravines. You can’t get out easily.” She lifted a hand to the collar of her nightgown and adjusted the cloth at her throat. “He was not the type to do such a thing,” she said, and her eyes grew unfocused and once again full of fear. “He was so happy all the time, so glad to be in the company of other people. Of all of you.”

  “He fell into drinking after you left,” I said.

  She nodded absently, her finger dipping below her collar, moving back and forth against her neck. She would suffer always with this guilt, this final violence.

  “I loved him once,” she said. “He seemed to embody the France my father so loved—he was generously, profoundly democratic. Philippe never had a bad word to say about anyone.”

  I nodded; it was true.

  “He sent me a letter,” she said. “He told me I was like a star, distant and glittering. That was all the letter said. Two lines: Dear Simone, You are a star, distant and glittering. Philippe. I laughed when I got it. I thought it was a love letter.”

  “It was, I guess.”

  “It was his note.” She brought her eyes into focus then and turned to me.

  “Why did you tell me he was your cousin?” I asked.

  Her eyes flickered in surprise. “An impulse, Marie. I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t an impulse. You planned to tell me. You were the one who brought it up. You could have left all of it unsaid.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Monsieur Laporte told me the truth,” I continued. “But I could easily have found out from anyone else in the village who had been here long enough. It wasn’t even a good lie.”

  She laughed sadly. “You’re right,” she said. “It wasn’t. I’m not accustomed to lying.”

  I waited.

  “I was protecting myself. That’s all. It was a fib, really. A way to avoid telling a much longer story that I wasn’t quite ready to tell.”

  “So I imagine your father’s alive and well?” I said cavalierly. She flinched, and I immediately regretted the question.

  “No,” she said. “That part was true. He died before I came to Rennes, before I bought the castle here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right. You have a right to know.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth, though? It’s not so much longer. It’s not even such a different story, after all.”

  “I suppose not,” she said, though her tone was evasive.

  “What about the caves?” I asked. “Was that an invention, too?”

  She considered me for a long, serious moment. “No, Marie,” she said. “That was no invention.”

  I breathed, relieved. But before I could press her further, she began to question me.

  “I must know about the stone, Marie. Where in truth did you find it?”

  I felt that if I was demanding her honesty, I had to give her the same. “Here,” I said. “In the church.”

  She nodded, as if she’d expected the answer. “Is it still there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Behind the church, anyway. In the cemetery. Monsieur le curé removed it to tile the floor.”

  She fell silent a moment, then asked, “Please tell me how you found it.”

  I told her the story of its unearthing, feeling my betrayal of Bérenger lodged like a bone in my throat. I left nothing out, however, from the Austrian’s initial letter to my discovery of the flask, from the story of the madwoman and her visions to my latest recovery of the old register and the entries that mentioned the tomb.

  “You haven’t yet found the book?” she asked when I had finished.

  “No. Monsieur le curé might have, though, for all I know. I’m sure he’s found the tomb.”

  “And what will he do with it, do you think, if he finds it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How curious,” she mused. Then she glanced at the grandfather clock, a queer light in her eye. “Do we have time, do you think, Marie, to look at the stone before midnight Mass begins?” It was eleven o’clock.

  She buttoned an overcoat over her nightgown. The night was frigid, the wind stinging our cheeks. We carried a lantern but did not light it, for we wanted to remain inconspicuous. Luckily, most everyone was tucked up in his house, reveling in the holiday. We passed the tavern, where a few men hunched at the bar, and continued on toward the church, tiptoeing through the garden to reach the cemetery.

  Once there, sheltered by the church walls, we lit our lantern. The light barely dispelled the darkness; we could see only the few closest graves, their stones tipped and half-sunk in the soil like a miniature ruin. Animal refuse and unearthed bones were strewn across the ground: the dogs and boars were not averse to digging.

  Holding the lantern high, I led Madame along the church wall to the place where I knew the knight’s stone to be. “We’ll have to turn it over,” I whispered, setting the lantern on the ground. “It’s very heavy.” Together we pushed it away from the wall. It thumped against the hard earth. Madame dropped to her knees beside it and I held the lantern aloft once more, shining light over the stone’s curvaceous surface.

  “Oh,” Madame gasped. She bent reverently over the stone, tracing the shapes with her fingers. “It’s larger than I had thought. And much rougher than your sketch, Marie. Difficult to discern what the shapes are exactly.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I drew from memory. I might have taken some liberties.”

  “It’s centuries old.”

  We were silent a while longer as Madame examined the carving. I huddled in my shawl. The stone walls sheltered us from the worst of the wind, but the air was bitter cold.

  “I will confess to you, Marie. When you brought me your sketch, I thought it depicted a particular story about the secret transport of a child. But the shapes are far less defined than I had imagined. It’s impossible to tell whether a child is present at all. It could be almost anything: a statue, an urn, even. Still, one could imagine—” She broke off, tracing the stone once more with her fingertips.

  “What was the story?” I prompted.

  “I had two in mind, really. One I spoke to you about. I thought the stone might have depicted the flight of Sigebert IV, the son of the murdered King Dagobert II. It was unusual, a knight riding with a child. And the bears or creatures in the top panels seemed to imply that the horse and rider were moving below-ground, as if they were in hiding. But I had a second theory as well, one I did not share with you.”

  Madame inhaled deeply. Then she stood, brushing the dirt from her skirt, and gestured toward the lantern.

  I followed as she picked her way through the graves until we came to a small upright stone. Squatting, I read the lettering in the lantern-light: LADY JEANNE CATHERINE BERTHELOT. DIED 1781. This must have been the woman the mayor had referred to, the woman who had gone mad at the death of her son.

  “She was an ancestor of mine,” Madame said. “My father’s great-aunt. I never knew her.”

  Madame, I learned, came to Rennes not simply to buy a castle, but to find the answer to a question, to satisfy a matter of curiosity that had grown into an obsession after the death of her father. When she was a teenager and had begun to ask about the Christian branch of the family, her father had told her the tragic story of his great-aunt Jeanne Catherine de Berthelot, the onetime resident of the château, a woman of noble birth who harbored delusions that she and her children were descendants of Jesus, literal children of God.

  She had held this belief long before her son was born, and though she had seen doctors and priests, no one could convince her of the impossibility of such a thing. According to her fervid imagination, her family had descended from the Merovingian kings, who had, in turn, descended
from the man they eventually claimed as their messiah. And the female progenitor of this line, according to Jeanne Catherine, was Marie Madeleine, the bride of Christ.

  “Apparently, the other members of her family found Jeanne Catherine’s notions pleasantly ludicrous. They called her eccentric, imaginative. And the delusion might have remained a benign fantasy had she not given birth to a son.”

  When her son was born, Madame continued, Jeanne Catherine believed him to be the reincarnated Christ. She celebrated his birth as the Second Coming. Upon his death—he was thrown from a horse when it reared and then trampled beneath its feet—she lost all hope, all semblance of sanity. She spent nights scrabbling at the graveyard dirt, trying to unearth her son’s body. “He’s suffocating!” she cried to the silent dark, for she was certain he would be resurrected, and would wake trapped in his coffin. She broke fingers with her frantic digging, disturbed the villagers with her wails, and grew ill from so many nights without sleep. Finally, hoping to cure his wife, her husband reinterred the child in the tomb beneath the church and then ordered it sealed.

  Jeanne Catherine’s condition only worsened. She grew incoherent, sometimes speaking in a babble that she claimed was Aramaic. She began to confuse herself with Marie Madeleine, insisting that she had to get to the tomb, that the Lord was waiting for her there. Her husband locked her in the castle. He escaped to Toulouse, where he had many business interests, but he left his daughter, Anne Marie, with strict instructions not to allow her mother to leave the castle. Anne Marie followed his instructions to an even greater degree than he had intended, for she never left the castle either, even after her mother’s death. She died unmarried, leaving behind a vast library.

  I was quiet, my fingers pressing the cold dirt of Jeanne Catherine’s grave. The story, though outrageous, seemed to corroborate what I already knew. “So all those books?” I asked. “They weren’t your father’s?”

  “Some were. But most were Anne Marie’s,” Madame admitted. “The previous owners kept the library intact, and passed it on to us.”

  “But how did he know all of this? Did he know Jeanne Catherine or Anne Marie?”

  “He never met them, no. But he corresponded with Anne Marie. He was sorry for the division in our family, and wrote to her in an effort to heal it. Anne Marie wrote back, intrigued by the fact that he was a scholar.”

  I nodded, growing accustomed to the new information.

  “My curiosity about Jeanne Catherine took on a new urgency after my father’s death. The claims she made possessed me, the possibility of their truth. Understand, Marie, that in my mind Jesus was not God, but a man—a great man, a charismatic rabbi, but a man nonetheless. And why not a father? All the Jewish men I knew, including our own rabbi, were fathers, were even commanded to be fruitful by God. Why not Jesus? Of course the task of tracing his lineage, if it existed, through two thousand years was unwieldly to say the least, if not altogether impossible. But my grief blinded me to practicalities. I wanted revenge. If the bigots who killed my father could learn that they had killed a descendant of the very man they worshipped … I came to Rennes-le-Château with revenge on my mind.”

  She continued, faster now, apparently finding some relief in the telling of her story. “I learned all I could when I first arrived, diving into Anne Marie’s library, reading histories and genealogies, listening to legends from the oldest residents of the village. They were the ones who told me about the Cathars, the Visigoths, the Merovingians, and the network of caves that I never succeeded in finding. I tried to convince the priest at the time to reopen the tomb, but he would have none of my stories. He was suspicious of me. Everyone was. Philippe humored me at first, but as I pressed on he grew more distant, more inclined toward the villagers’ point of view. They all assumed I was following the same road to madness as my ancestors.”

  “But what did you think finding the tomb would prove?” I asked. “You didn’t know about the book.”

  Madame nodded. “What, indeed? I might have found the casket of Jeanne Catherine’s son. But that would prove nothing. It was madness, Marie. I was descending into madness. I had begun to have recurring dreams of a child traveling through tunnels, transported on the back of a galloping horse. This child, I imagined, was my ancient ancestor, the ancestor of my father’s great-aunt, the child of Jesus and Marie Madeleine.”

  A new light suddenly cast its brightness on us from above. We looked up: candles had been lit in the church. Madame looked frightened.

  “Please,” I whispered. “We still have time. It’s just Monsieur le curé, preparing for the Mass.”

  She hesitated, listening for any threatening sounds. Then she went on. “My reasoning, you must understand, Marie, had become very confused. I was convinced that that child had traveled with her mother from the shores of ancient Israel to Gaul. And then, that she—for I imagined the child to be female—had been separated from her mother, taken away and given a new name, for her own safety. In my increasing delusion, I came to believe that the girl had been brought here, through the network of underground passageways, to Rennes-le-Château.

  “If I could find the passageway, then I might find evidence of the child’s existence, though what that evidence might be, I could not say. It was madness, all of it, and yet the images—the child on the back of that horse, the close grit of the tunnels—had so captured my imagination that I could not rid my mind of them.”

  How my sketch must have startled her! I felt a pang of guilt.

  She went on. “My marriage began to deteriorate. Philippe wanted children but I was too frightened. I feared a child might cause me to lose my mind utterly. There were days, Marie, whole days that I spent as if I were Jeanne Catherine herself, living in the mental world I had imagined for her: trying to reshape the past through her eyes. I pored over my books, piecing together the information I found in the genealogies, histories, and legends, struggling to make her claim true, struggling for proof. But I came up with nothing, other than what I could imagine. Only a vast despair that seemed to swallow me up every time I took a breath.”

  “Oh, Madame,” I began, wanting to say too much at once. I marveled at her strength, to have survived such an ordeal, and to be here, in this shit-strewn cemetery at midnight, telling it to me. And the story! How appealing, to imagine that our village might have been the haven for such a child—even to imagine that such a child might have lived! What a world might be born if such a thing were true! And yet how fanciful and unlikely, and how impossible to prove.

  She continued. “I decided, once and for all, to reject it. To put it out of my mind. I read. I gardened, I traveled a bit—I did what I could to distract myself. When I met you, Marie, I was glad, for I saw in you a friend. Another curious mind.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I was glad, too.”

  “I think I even imagined I might someday be able to relate to you all of this—all that I am telling you now, and together we could put it aside, relegate it to where it belonged: to the realm of curiosity and imagination, perhaps, of things to wonder over, instead of where it had forced itself: into a position of charioteer, the rein-holder of my mind.

  “But,” she said, with a deep sigh, “when you came to me with your sketch, I became very afraid. I could not help but think of it as proof of Jeanne Catherine’s tale. I felt myself spiraling once more into my terrifying obsession. So I fled—I went back to Paris, where my mother was. I begged her to take me in. She had never forgiven me for abandoning her and for marrying Philippe, but seeing my desperation, she relented. A blessing.”

  “Oh. Yes,” I said. I was still too stunned to formulate a response. “And your aunt?” I asked tentatively.

  “An excuse,” she said. “She died many years ago.”

  She smiled graciously at me, but I was mortified. “Dear Madame, what pain I caused you. Forgive me.”

  “You couldn’t have known, Marie. I don’t blame you.”

  I managed a weak smile. Then in the same instant w
e both remembered what had brought her back to Rennes-le-Château.

  “And then Philippe,” she said miserably, and began to weep. “Oh, Marie. What a mess I’ve made. What a horrible, horrible mess.”

  “You haven’t made it,” I said, taking her hand. We stood and stumbled into an awkward embrace.

  “We get so stuck, don’t we? We think we’re pioneering, blazing a trail, but in fact, we’re just lurching down the path that’s already been chosen for us. All we can do is put one foot in front of the other.”

  I did not know how to answer that, so instead I let her weep in my arms, her thin frame shaking with each sob. I held her fast, as if I could tether her to the earth, keep her from floating upward into the ether of her grief.

  The sound of voices startled us. Madame blew out the lantern and we stood listening, the cemetery illuminated only by the church candlelight. People were gathering for midnight Mass. We moved away from each other, embarrassed suddenly by the force of our emotions. I thought of my family and of Bérenger: they would be wondering where I was.

  I moved toward the cemetery entrance. Madame did not follow. She was near the stone wall, fingering one of the woody vines.

  “I don’t want to be seen,” she said.

  The church bell tolled, making my heart leap.

  As I watched, she hoisted herself up the wall, using the vine as her support. Arm over arm, lithe as a child she climbed, planting her feet against the stones, until, remarkably, she reached the top. She looked down at me from her height. Her face shone like a pale moon among the trees. “Good-bye, Marie,” she said.

  “Madame!” I called out, suddenly afraid of losing her. “I’ll come visit in the morning.”

  “No, Marie, thank you. It’s Christmas. You’ll have presents to open, your family to be with. Don’t worry, please. It’s done me a great deal of good, our conversation, seeing that stone. I’ll be fine.”