… and I’ve been taking full advantage of it. Not least in the Thermal Spa. And today’s verdict?

The Mudbath – same as yesterday (the mud had worn off during the night)
The Circular Shower – can’t see what this did that three friends with hosepipes couldn’t do (I, of course, don’t have three friends)
The Penetrating Shower – I was worried about this and when she said “lie face-down on the bed”, that did nothing to allay my fears. However it’s a horizontal bar of five or six very fine but high-pressure shower heads all aimed at your back.
In the jacuzzi, a rather large woman jumped in and landed right on my foot.
“I’m so sorry – was that your foot?”
“Yes it was” I replied “but don’t worry – I still have one left”.
I finished it off with a massage today. I was hoping for a young blond nymphette – I ended up with a retired former Soviet discus-thrower.
“I’ll massage your clavicles, shall I?”
“Not while I have my strength you won’t”.

Apart from that, I’ve been out and about again. This is the Chateau of Arques, about 15kms awy from here.

It dates from the aftermath of the Crusade against the Cathars and is said to control an important route used by transhumance farmers as they pass up and down to and from the higher slopes, but looking at its position here and how easily it is overlooked, it’s good that the transhumance farmers didn’t possess any cannon. A few bits of ordnance on the surrounding hills and the castle wouldn’t last long.

As it happens, it was a ruin up until about 120 or so years ago but has since had quite a decent renovation.


From there I went up to the village of Peyrolles. This is another place that features in all of these stories but there was nothing of interest to me.

That is except a plot of land (that wasn’t for sale, unfortunately) that had one of the best views that I have seen for a while – right up the Vallée du Salz past Cardou (on the left) and the ruins of the Chateau de Blanchefort (on the right) almost all the way to Rennes-les-Bains.


The modern road to Rennes-les-Bains is not the original road by any means, as I mentioned the other day.

The original road runs from Serres and goes over the river by this absolutely magnificent packhorse bridge, passing right by the foot of Cardou and then through the village of Montferrand to its final destination.


Now, does this road remind you of anything? It ought to do, because you have seen something similar before.

Do you remember when I wrote my magnum opus about Riccarton Junction back in 2007/2008? We found the road that went down there too and there were not half some striking similarities. It made me feel quite at home, I tell you


But as for Cardou itself, it’s a magnificent, awe-inspiring mountain and you can see why it’s featured so much in the folklore of many of these legends.

Despite the fact that there are dozens of other mountains around, one or two of which are higher that Cardou, it’s nevertheless the dominant feature all the way around here – see it from miles around.


But one or two of the legends of Cardou are not quite so wholesome and healthy. At least two writers have insisted that Jesus is buried somewhere up there in a tunnel and that the rockfall that you see there was engineered to cover the traces of the excavation.

Mind you, neither of these two authors explained in any kind of detail how this rockfall was engineered in the days before controlled explosive. The usual historical way of doing this, by piling the rock on a large wooden platform and then burning the platform, would not have been sufficient to have produced this fall.

But no matter what method they chose, it must surely have been an interesting experience for the watchers at the foot of Cardou.


Now if any place is ever likely to push Rennes-le-Chateau off the top of the pile of places about which more rubbish has been talked than anywhere else on the planet, then it has to be this place.

This is a lieu-dit (or hamlet called) Les Pontils on the road between Serres and Arques and it has a quite eerie claim to fame.


It may not look like much but on that flat platform over there was until 1988 a tomb that has been said by so many people to be the inspiration behind the painting Les Bergers d’Arcadie – “The Shepherds of Arcadia” – by Nicolas Poussin.

If this is so, then it’s a magnificent feat by Poussin seeing as how he painted his oeuvre in the 1630s, and yet all of the evidence available places the building of the tomb to … errr … 1903.

Someone did reply that there was an earlier, identical tomb here that was destroyed on royal orders later in the 17th Century but that begs the questions “how did they know that it was identical?” and “how did they know that this was the spot?” We’re dealing with a period before photography and GPS recording. And no-one as far as I am aware, has produced any kind of evidence to support this story of a royal order.

It’s connected with a phrase “Et In Arcadia Ego” which may people claim is bad Latin (there’s no verb) and hides an anagram or a coded message, but Latin is one of those languages where there is no pronoun (the verb is declined in order to reflect the doer of the action) but Ego is a pronoun and is used for emphasis or else in certain cases when there is no verb. And in that case it is put at the end of the sentence so the phrase would be something like “And I, in Arcadia”. That’s perfectly acceptable to say that in English and the construction is also good Latin.


But if you want a real mystery, one that no-one has picked up, go to the cemetery in Rennes les Bains. We have four main actors in this conspiracy – Saunière of course, his two friends Boudet and Gélis, and his servant girl Denarnaud.

And what do they all have in common? The answer to that is that each one of their families has a tomb in the cemetery at Rennes-les-Bains, although not one of the actors is buried in it.

You could make up a decent conspiracy theory about this too.


But that’s not all that’s exciting in the cemetery either. What about this?

This is a grave belonging to someone called Jean Vié and I bet he’s glad that he’s here because he must have been called some rotten names at school. His name is a phonetic expression of the pronunciation of the name of the month – janvier – January.

Not only that, the way that the date is expressed – 7 bre – is quite common masons’ shorthand for the month of September, but couple that with the emphasis of the date 1 (as in first), you could make up a date of 17 January – and that was a day upon which a lot of things happened during this mystery.

That would make a good conspiracy theory too – totally overlooked by everyone so far.


Our January man is said to be the predecessor to the Abbé Boudet and it is also said that Boudet officiated over his interment – which if he did, his appointment to the church here must have been extremely rapid.

And one thing that should be mentioned is that the January man is buried in the plot right next door to Boudet’s family plot.

Coincidence or what?