Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

them. As I was saying, the Templars must have soughtrefuge in Champagne. Payns? Troyes? The Eastern Forest? No. Paynswas¡Xand still is¡Xa tiny village. At the time, it had a castle atmost. Troyes was a city: too many of the king's men around. Theforest, which the Templars owned, was the first place the royalguards would look. Which they did, by the way. No, I said tomyself, the only place that made sense was Provins."

18

If our eye couldpenetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, fromwhere we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror amass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.

¡XThomas Burnet,Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38

"WhyProvins?"

"Have you ever been toProvins? A magic place: you can feel it even today. Go there. Amagic place, still redolent of secrets. In the eleventh century itwas the seat of the Comte de Champagne, a free zone, where thecentral government couldn't come snooping. The Templars were athome there; even today a street is named after them. There werechurches, palaces, a castle overlooking the whole plain. And a lotof money, merchants doing business, fairs, confusion, where it waseasy to pass unnoticed. But most important, something that has beenthere since prehistoric times: tunnels. A network of tunnels¡Xrealcatacombs¡Xextends beneath the hill. Some tunnels are open to thepublic today. They were places where people could meet in secret,and if their enemies got in, the conspirators could disperse in amatter of seconds, disappearing into nowhere. And if they werereally familiar with the passages, they could exit in one directionand reappear in the opposite, on padded feet, like cats. They couldsneak up behind the intruders and cut them down in the dark. As Godis my witness, gentlemen, those tunnels are tailor-made forcommandos. Quick and invisible, you slip in at night, knife betweenyour teeth, a couple of grenades in hand, and your enemies die likerats!"

His eyes were shining."Do you realize what a fabulous hiding place Provins must havebeen? A secret nucleus could meet underground, and the locals, evenif they did see something, wouldn't say a word. The king's men, ofcourse, did come to Provins. They arrested the Templars who werevisible on the surface and took them to Paris. Reynaud de Provinswas tortured, but didn't talk. Clearly, the secret plan called forhim to be arrested to make the king believe that Provins had beenswept clean. But at the same time he was to give a signal, byrefusing to talk: Provins will not yield¡Xnot Provins, where thenew, underground Templars live on. Some tunnels lead from buildingto building. You can enter a granary or a warehouse and come out ina church. Some tunnels are constructed with columns and vaultedceilings. Even today, every house in the upper city still has acellar with ogival vaults¡Xthere must be more than a hundred ofthem. And every cellar has an entrance to a tunnel."

"Conjecture," Isaid.

"No, young man, fact.You haven't seen the tunnels of Provins. Room after room, deep inthe earth, covered with ancient graffiti. The graffiti are foundmostly in what speleologists call lateral cells. Hieratic drawingsof 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 inChampagne also, and they survived, meeting secretly in thesecatacombs of heresy. One hundred and eighty-three of them wereburned above-ground, but the others hid below. The chronicles callthem bougres et manicheens. Now, mind you, the bougres were simplyBogomils, Cathars of Bulgarian origin. Does the French word bougrestell you anything? Originally it meant sodomite, because theBulgarian Cathars were said to have that little failing..."He gavea 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 toaccuse him of sodomy..."

"True, and you mustn'tthink that I believe the Templars actually...They were fightingmen, and we fighting men like beautiful women. Vows or not, a manis a man. I mention this only because I don't believe it's acoincidence that Cathar heretics found refuge where the Templarswere. But in any case the Templars learned from them the use ofcaves and tunnels."

"But all this, really,is guesswork," Belbo said.

"It started withguesswork, yes. I'm just explaining why I set out to exploreProvins. But now we come to the actual story. In the center ofProvins is a big Gothic building, the Grange-aux-Dimes, or tithegranary. As you may know, one of the sources of the Templars'strength was that they collected tithes directly and didn't have topay 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 localnewspaper from 1894. In it was an article about two dragoons,Chevalier Camille Laforge of Tours and Chevalier Edouard Ingolf ofPetersburg¡Xyes, Petersburg!¡Xwho had visited the Grange a few daysearlier. Accompanied by the caretaker, they went down into one ofthe subterranean rooms, on the second level belowground. When thecaretaker, trying to show that there were other levels even fartherdown, stamped on the earth, they heard echoes and reverberations.The reporter praised the bold dragoons, who promptly fetchedlanterns and ropes and went into the unknown tunnels like boys downa mine, pulling themselves forward on their elbows, crawlingthrough mysterious passages. And the paper says they came to agreat hall with a fine fireplace and a dry well in the center. Theytied a stone to a rope, lowered it, and found that the well waseleven meters deep. They went back a week later with strongerropes, and two companions lowered Ingolf into the well, where hediscovered a big room with stone walls, ten meters square and fivemeters high. The others then followed him down. They realized thatthey were at the third level, thirty meters beneath the surface. Wedon't know what the men saw and did in that room. The reporteradmits that when he went to the scene to investigate, he lacked thecourage to go down into the well. I was excited by