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locate a setting which matches so precisely that of the painting? In fact it would seem to have been standing in Poussin’s time, and “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’ would seem to be a faithful rendering of the actual site.
    According to the peasants in the vicinity, the tomb has been there for as long as they, their parents and grandparents can remember. And there is said to be specific mention of it in a memoire dating from

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    1709.8 According to records in the village of Arques, the land on which the tomb starts belonged, until his death in the 1950s, to an American, one Louis
    Lawrence of Boston, Massachusetts. In the 1920s Mr. Lawrence opened the sepulchre and found it empty. His wife and mother-in-law were later buried in it.
    When preparing the first of our BBC films on Rennes-leChateau, we spent a morning shooting footage of the tomb. We broke off for lunch and returned some three hours later.
    During our absence, a crude and violent attempt had been made to smash into the sepulchre.
    If there was once an inscription on the actual tomb, it had long since been weathered away. As for the inscription on the tomb in Poussin’s painting, it would seem to be conventionally elegiac Death announcing his sombre presence even in Arcadia, the idyllic pastoral paradise of classical myth.
    And yet the inscription is curious because it lacks a verb. Literally translated, it reads: AND IN ARCADIA I .. .
    Why should the verb be missing? Perhaps for a philosophical reason to preclude all tense, all indication of past, present or future, and thereby to imply something eternal? Or perhaps for a reason of a more practical nature.
    The codes in the parchments found by Sauniere had relied heavily on anagrams, on the transposition and rearrangement of letters. Could
    “ET
    IN
    ARCADIA EGO’ also perhaps be an anagram? Could the verb have been omitted so that the inscription would consist only of certain precise letters? One of our television viewers, in writing to us, suggested that this might indeed be so and then rearranged the letters into a coherent Latin statement. The result was:
    I “FEGO ARCANA DEI
    (BEGONE! I CONCEAL THE SECRETS OF GOD)
    We were pleased and intrigued by this ingenious exercise. We did not realise at the time how extraordinarily appropriate the resulting

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    admonition was. 2 The Cathars and the Great Heresy
    We began our investigation at a point with which we already had a certain familiarity the Cathar or Albigensian heresy and the crusade it provoked in the thirteenth century. We were already aware that the Cathars figured somehow in the mystery surrounding Sauniere and Rennes-leChateau. In the first place the medieval heretics had been numerous in the village and its environs, which suffered brutally during the course of the Albigensian
    Crusade. Indeed, the whole history of the region is soaked in Cathar blood, and the residues of that blood, along with much bitterness, persist to the present day. Many peasants in the area now, with no inquisitors 1o fall upon them, openly proclaim Cathar sympathies. There is even a Cathar church and a so-called “Cathar pope’ who, until his death in 1978, lived in the village of Arques.
    We knew that Sauniere had immersed himself in the history and folklore of his native soil, so he could not possibly have avoided contact with Cathar thought and traditions. He could not have been unaware that RennesleChateau was an important town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and something of a Cathar bastion.
    Sauniere must also have been familiar with the numerous legends attached to the Cathars. He must have known of the rumours connecting them with that fabulous object, the Holy Grail. And if Richard Wagner, in quest of something pertaining to the Grail, did indeed visit Rennes-leChateau, Sauniere could not have been ignorant of that fact either.
    In 1890, moreover, a man named Jules Doinel became librarian at Carcassonne and established a neo-Cathar church.”