Posted on 11/14/2004 8:49:26 AM PST by aculeus
The mayor of a French village besieged by obsessive fans of The Da Vinci Code has been forced to dig up the body of a mysterious priest and encase it in a concrete mausoleum to deter rapacious treasure hunters.
The cemetery has also been closed after tens of thousands of tourists swamped Rennes-le-Chateau, in southeastern France, where a 2,000-year-old local mystery inspired the plot of the best-selling religious thriller.
Legend has it that the area, known as the "Valley of God" and once a remote Roman outpost, conceals an remarkable collection of religious relics and treasures. They are said to range from simple pots of gold to the body of Jesus Christ, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant.
Hidden documents are rumoured to hold clues that would challenge religious doctrine by proving that Jesus did not die on the Cross but survived, married Mary Magdalen and fled to France - one of the central claims made in The Da Vinci Code.
Until recently the mayor of the village, Jean-Franois L'Huilier, seemed to be winning the battle against fortune-seekers who tried to disinter bodies and dynamite holes in the walls of its 11th-century church looking for relics.
Now, however, Rennes-le-Chateau has become the latest victim of The Da Vinci Code fever. Since its publication 20 months ago, Dan Brown's heady mix of fiction, fact and legend has sold more than nine million copies in 42 languages.
"The world has gone mad," said Mr L'Huilier. "It's a well-written book but it's a novel, not a historical document. It astonishes me that some readers get to the end and think it's true.
"It's a Philistine minority but they come here and stomp all over the place with no respect for anything or anyone. Last year they even tried to tunnel into the church. It was like something out of a prison escape film. They began digging in the night, put the soil in bags and put the bags in the hole which they covered with a layer of earth so nobody would see during the day. It was only when someone noticed the flower beds moving that we discovered what they were up to."
The legends were fuelled in the 1880s when Abbe Berenger Sauniere, an impoverished Roman Catholic priest assigned to the parish, became inexplicably wealthy. Sauniere - whose name is shared by one of the protagonists in The Da Vinci Code - set about renovating the church, which is dedicated to Mary Magdalen. Above the door he installed a stone inscribed: Terribilis est Locus Iste - "This Place Is Terrible"; inside, a grotesque figure of the devil in a green robe bears the holy water.
Some believe that the irreligious symbols contained hidden codes either to "treasure" or to damaging documents that Sauniere used to blackmail the Vatican. He took the secret of his fortune to his grave in 1917, aged 65, but the mystery has endured.
"At the height of the madness in the 1970s, and it was complete madness, people were using explosives to blow holes all over the place," said Mr L'Huilier. "They got into the sewers, dug into burial areas and smashed through stone walls. It had calmed down a bit. Then the book came out and put Rennes-le-Chateau back on the map again.
"Just two months ago someone pushed over a skull-and-crossbones keystone at the entrance to the cemetery. Luckily it wasn't broken."
Although many villagers believe that there was no need to move the priest's body, at the request of his descendants it has been reburied in the grounds of the museum that adjoins the church.
"He's lying at peace at last under a 3.5 ton sarcophagus surrounded by five cubic metres of concrete. It'll take one hell of a lot of explosive to get through that," said Mr L'Huilier.
While the grave robbers are unwelcome, tourism as a whole is a boon for the tiny, 152-strong community. Last year, the number of visitors surged by 50 per cent to 120,000. Even on grey, rainy days, visitors keep coming up the winding road leading to the village. Last week, Amanda Zizzi-Knight, 48, who comes from Bath but now lives in Spain, said that she and her husband Richard, 46, wanted to come after reading The Da Vinci Code and noticing similarities between the plot and local myth.
"It's a shame that some visitors are causing problems but it seems extraordinary that they've exhumed the priest and buried him somewhere else," she said. "Still, there are a lot of strange people about."
Marie-Laure Busquet, the head of the tourist office, said: "Lots of people are coming here because of The Da Vinci Code. I don't have a problem with them or the book - just the interpretation some put on it, and the damage they do. Some don't seem to realise that it's just a story."
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Can someone sum The Da Vinci Code story up for me?
For those incapable of reading the book as a novel, your time is better spent reading "The DaVinci Deception", by Erwin W. Lutzer.
Simply amazing. Hordes of deeply stupid people who can't tell fact from fiction.
Rennes-le-Chateau alert ;-)
It's just like Morse Code, only it's in Italian.
Yo! It's a freakin' MADE-UP FICTION NOVEL!
It's how they used to order pizza delivery before the phone.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
The last Gabriel Knight game is about the mystery of Renne les Chateua, it was pretty good
Please go here:
http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/plot.html
I liked it when the conspiracy nonsense was made into a computer game (Gabriel Knight 3) but to go out in real life and dig up graves is just pathetic.
One popular theory is that he stumbled upon a fortune left by a secret Christian military order such as the Templars who took their money from the Middle East and buried it in France and then conveniently forgot or were unable to dig it back up. Another is that the priest stumbled upon conclusive proof that Jesus Christ survived the Crucifixion, sailed to France and founded the French dynasty that lasted until the French Revolution. Under this theory, the Vatican would not be too happy for this to get out and bought him off. Naturally, there are all sorts of clues involving details in old paintings, gravestone inscriptions, mysterious individuals of the time and the like.
People who believe this stuff will believe anything, but there are a lot of them out there.
".. your time is better spent reading "The DaVinci Deception", by Erwin W. Lutzer."
Or THE TRUTH BEHIND THE DA VINCI CODE by Richard Abanes.
Harvest House Publishers.
Just an anomaly noted in passing.
Who was on the grassy knoll?
Thank You
Nine million suckers.
People can be SO stoopid. At the cafeteria table at work one day, some co-workers were discussing the book "Lovely Bones." One of the women actually said she loved the book, and "I never realized heaven would be like that."
Hello? It's fiction, a storybook for cryin' out loud!! No wonder a goof like Michael Moore can have his way with people.
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