Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (15 page)

If our eye could
penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from
where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a
mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.

¡XThomas 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¡Xreal
catacombs¡Xextends 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¡Xnot 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¡Xthere 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 above-ground, but the others hid below. The chronicles call
them bougres et manicheens. 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-Dimes, 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¡Xyes, Petersburg!¡Xwho 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 die 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¡Xtidy, 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 resigned 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, thereby also hangs a tale¡Xprobably 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¡Xalso dead now. From time to time he traveled to
Paris¡Xon business, he said¡Xand always came home with packages of
books. The study was still full of them; she wahted 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¡XI was delighted to see¡Xon
the trial of the Templars. For example, he had Raynouard's
Monuments historiques relatifs a 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¡Xprobably some
bloodsucking pawnbroker¡Xbut 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 fall 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 coifee, 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."