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... So I went to [Saint-Sulpice]. It was NOON. My eye noticed a sunbeam which fell onto a hole in the 'ROSE S' and followed the gilded line of the gnomon [the part of a sundial that casts the shadow] which was set in the paving and which pointed towards the 'P'. A shadow suddenly fell across it – it was that of a surly-looking priest.

"Looking for something?"

"Good day to you, Alexandre."

Surprised, he took a few steps backwards.

"And where exactly did we make your acquaintance?"

"Step aside a little please, so as not to block the SUN, as DIOGENES said to ALEXANDER THE GREAT. I am often mistaken for DIOGENES."

By the sort of coincidence that one associates with games of chance the irritating ecclesiastic's first name really was ALEXANDRE. I continued:

"I'm looking for medals."

"If they're lost medals, then talk to SAINT ANTHONY OF PADUA."

"What about ones that have been found?"

"Take yourself off to RUE LOBINEAU, the house of HENRI COMTE DE LÉNONCOURT. He's a specialist in such matters.

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Slowly and yet with a strange hurrying movement, ALEXANDRE took himself off to the sacristy.

LÉNONCOURT! The name certainly rang a bell. My family had some connections with his family back in the mists of time. But to actually turn up on his doorstep to discuss medals which I didn't need and about which I understood absolutely nothing, that was quite another matter. And where exactly in Rue Lobineau did the Count live? ALEXANDRE hadn't told me. Neither the Bottin directory nor the telephone directory in the office in the nearby Rue de RENNES made any mention of a HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT. The last part of this name suddenly surfaced from my memory: there's a character in Balzac with that name – he appears in "LE LYS DANS LA VALLÉE." Good heavens, we seem to be on the right track anyway: "LE CERCLE DU LYS DANS LA VALLÉE" (The Circle of the Lily in the Valley). I really should read more Balzac!

Traced out on the former market-square of SAINT-GERMAIN, Rue LOBINEAU is 160 metres long. It would be the very devil if, before sundown, I hadn't worked out who all the inhabitants of the street were or found any trace of DE LÉNONCOURT.

At the third bistro I came to the rather elderly proprietress said that the name wasn't unknown to her, but that she couldn't remember the precise address. Coming out of the bistro the drunkenness that was causing a whole host of medals to spin around on my retina brought me to the fountain of Bonne Source, close to the Count's very door: "Knock and enter" it said.

"Not another one!" he said.

This great-great-uncle of mine, who I had never seen in my life before (and nor had my father, who was his great-uncle, or my grandfather, who was his uncle) was obviously not in the best of moods.

"Swiss television, in the person of Monsieur MATHIEU PAOLI, has been violating my privacy, the Vatican also in the form of Father VEREAL, and then the CIA through an American whose name for the moment escapes me. And that's not to mention Dr. JEAN DELAUDE."

"You mean the guy who published "LE CERCLE D'ULYSSE"?"

"It doesn't matter who he is. I've told them everything I know about the Merovingians. There are limits to my senility and I would kindly ask you not to force an old man of 86 to repeat himself ad infinitum. Good day, Monsieur."

"Actually I've come about some medals."

The frown disappeared from his face.

"You're interested in medals?"

"No, not at all – it was ALEXANDRE who sent me."

The old Count was gob-smacked. He asked me to return the following day.

THE WAR OF THE BUTTONS

On this day of 23 August 1977 the old Count was sitting in a wheelchair in front of his desk. Big? Small? I think I recall that the desk was a small one. His hair was white and sparse. He gave the impression of someone who had led a passionate but honourable life – someone who had lived life very much to the full. He had his telephone within reach – he was certainly ex-directory. A painting of a woman on the wall attracted my attention. Her face was not unfamiliar to me. Now that I was here in front of him, what exactly was I going to say to him?

The evening before I'd found his name in my notes. I knew that he'd travelled extensively throughout the Rennes area between 1958 and 1964 collecting old coins. Everything about him seemed OK. Some of the coins would have been worth almost nothing, but others could have been priceless. He took all of them willy-nilly – a "Grande Rafle" if you like RENE DESCADEILLAS arrived on the scene too late, manifesting his rancour and vexation against this "...hard-to-fathom character, who was colourless, secretive, cunning, but talkative enough when it suited him, a person about whom everyone who got close to him said that he remained enigmatic..." and again: "this person is the author of the Lobineau Papers."

The inhabitants of Rennes however have seen this Count HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT, who preferred to call himself HENRI LOBINEAU, coming towards them with a tape-recorder in one hand and a camera in the other, asking all sorts of questions – and recording the answers!

One is always wise after the event, as the old saying goes – but the wisdom came too late for me.

It was with the subject of the recordings that I decided to open the conversation.

"Ah! the recordings," said HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT, drawing my attention to an entire window-display of tapes. "There's the whole range there, from RENE DESCADEILLAS refusing a reader an opportunity to inspect the book by the HENRI BOUDET, one of NOEL CORBU with his version of the treasure, or the statements of MARIUS FATIN regarding the tortuous dealings of the municipality of Rennes-le-Château. But my best recording is certainly that of Monsignor BOYER, the diocesan vicar-general, negotiating a potential nest-egg with a researcher who was none other than – MYSELF!"

"You're sitting on a keg of dynamite, Count."

"I'm not sure about the buttons."

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An amused smile lit up the old man's face as he drew from a hiding-place in his wheelchair a dozen buttons, which he poured out onto the desk in front of me.

Instinctively I looked down at my jacket which was missing a button. In fact the same type of button was among those on the desk!

"If fate places a button within your grasp, then make sure you don't do what some people in the Languedoc do – sew it onto your jacket. The buttons you see in front of you are actually microphones, transmitters with a range of 300 metres and made in Germany for more than 20 years now."

THE GOLD OF RENNES

The conversation turned to old coins.

"I love old medals very much. They've fallen on so many pieces of marble, so many fingers have touched them, so many woollen stockings have helped preserve them for so many families, heads against tails, they've jingled about in so many pockets."

He fell silent, looking thoughtful. Then he glanced at the portrait of the woman and said:

"And am I a miser? Certainly not. MYRIAM DAVID advised me to sell my collection to my friend LEO SCHIDLOF, who was an expert on miniatures and medals. There are no medals here. I don't have any."

"People say that you pretty much cleaned out the Rennes area."

"Yes, well I suppose I did. The people down there kept coins of every period. Everything from Greek tourists to people taking the waters in the time of NAPOLEON III. You find everything there. As if this coin-dust was really enough to distract people's attention from the goose that laid the golden egg."

"You believe in the treasure then."

"No more than you do. We don't believe – WE KNOW. What we know is neither belief, nor faith, but a credibility that goes way beyond the credulity experienced by other people."

We returned to the affair of the three parchments found in the wooden tubes which were themselves discovered by BERENGER SAUNIERE. "The most important of the three", the Count stated, only had an indirect connection with a buried treasure. This was a deed of 1243 signed by BLANCHE DE CASTILE and bearing her seal. Certain dreamers have tried to pretend that this document of the White Queen was in code and revealed the hiding-place of a sizeable treasure. The truth is that in 1243 the Queen of France enacted a document of strategic importance to re-establish the rights of the turbulent JEAN VII, Count of Rhedae, the husband of ELISANDE DE GISORS. By recognizing the Merovingian origin of the Counts of Rhedae she made the area of the Razès into French territory, as it were "backdated" for five centuries. THIS WAS NOT AN ANNEXATION, BUT A LIBERATION OF THE CATHAR ASCENDANCY. There's really quite a lot of local history in that area between the Razès and the Vexin. But you'd need to be a RENE DESCADEILLAS to be interested in it.

"So the rather anodyne wording of these parchments is worth much more than their content?"

"Certainly. The family-tree of JEAN VII which appears there shows the line of the Counts of Rhedae going back five centuries, from DAGOBERT II, King of Austrasia, until the signing of the deed in 1243. It's one of those rare deeds that makes it possible to draw up a family-tree that's about as unchallengeable as a family-tree can be."

I pointed out to HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT that his 1243 document, which reappeared in the hands of BERENGER SAUNIERE in 1891, had disappeared without trace.

"Wrong! The Marquise D'HAUTPOUL DE BLANCHEFORT, the Chatelaine of Rennes, allowed HUGUES D'HOZIER DE SERIGNY to make a copy in 1781 of these parchments whose inheritor he was, as he was also the beneficiary of the will of HAUTPOUL. Until the French Revolution HOZIER's copy remained a state secret. A coin collector called ABBÉ PICHON, formerly CANON FRANÇOIS DRON, found the HOZIER deed and sent it to ABBÉ SIEYES, and it was completed by a family-tree running from 1600 to 1790 and bound in red leather. In the time of the Directoire the VICOMTE DE BARRAS nabbed the document (called henceforward the "Red Book of BARRAS") and, appreciating that he was holding a time-bomb in his hands, placed it in the secret drawer of the Basilica of SAINT-CLOTILDE in Paris. It was then that it was forgotten about – it was then that there came the silence. Then, in 1939, ABBÉ PIERRE PLANTARD, curate at the Basilica, having been ordered by the curé to renovate the archival cupboards, rediscovered in the secret drawer the Red Book of BARRAS. He then traced the genealogy from 1792 until the date of his discovery. This interesting task fascinated the priest all the more because his great-grandfather appeared in the lineage. His completed work was produced in two copies, one of which was lodged with the BN while the other was placed in a more secure location.

"But have you yourself drawn up such a family-tree?"

"I never finished it. In 1954 MYRIAM DAVID, who taught my grandson history, told me that she had studied the work of ABBÉ PLANTARD in the BN, and she sent me a copy which

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revealed to me the entire history of the Merovingians down the centuries. You must understand that in days gone by whoever possessed this document could demand the very greatest favours from the titular King but would also fear that the any wrong move could land him in the Bastille."

The Count DE LÉNONCOURT searched for a document in a file and then continued:

"Since 1956 two copies of my work have been available to the general public. One is in the Geneva Library in Switzerland, the other in the BN in Paris. Here are the two deposit receipts. The one from the BN was addressed to me in Geneva at Place de Molard, B.P. no. 22, the same post-office box, by a strange coincidence, that OSWALD WIRTH, the author of the "TAROT DES IMAGIERS DE MOYEN-AGE" used to have."

The old Count was certainly correct. It is obvious that without the parchments of Queen BLANCHE DE CASTILE and the testaments of HAUTPOUL it would be impossible to establish as ancient and as accurate a genealogy (although that hasn't stopped the mythomaniacs from writing books like "AUJOURD'HUI, LES NOBLES" and claiming to be descended from Pope CLEMENT V). Even so, I remarked to HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT that the work that appears in the bibliography of GERARD DE SEDE bears the title: "DOSSIERS SECRETS DE HENRI LOBINEAU" with the address 17 Quai de Montebello, Paris.

"The copies in the libraries in Geneva and Paris were not lodged under the name of HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT but under the pseudonym HENRI LOBINEAU, from the name of the street where you encountered me today. Anyone can call themselves Monsieur LOBINEAU, but the "DOSSIERS SECRETS" which GERARD DE SEDE refers to came from PHILIPPE TOSCAN DU PLANTIER, of 17 Quai de Montebello, Paris 5. He was totally unknown to me. The French Secret Service had him locked up shortly after publication – for drug trafficking! Look, read this press-cutting dated 17 April 1967 stating that he has been locked away in La Santé prison:

- However, in 1971 GERARD DE SEDE wrote this:

"That's not correct, in the sense that PHILIPPE TOSCAN DU PLANTIER was the AUTHOR, not a publisher. It's correct that after his spell in jail he left France. But to pick up the thread again, my work entitled GENEALOGIE DES ROIS MEROVINGIENS and published in 1956 when I was in Geneva in Switzerland, is based on the HOZIER document."

"OK, but what about the 1243 original?"

"The Marquise D'HAUTPOUL DE BLANCHEFORT arranged for it to be hidden by ABBÉ BIGOU in the church in Rennes-le-Château. It was discovered by ABBÉ SAUNIERE, who never

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parted with it. It was his niece, Madame JAMES de Montazels, who inherited it in February 1917. She sold it in 1965 to the Ligue Internationale de la Librairie Ancienne, and she could not have known that one of the two distinguished purchasers was Captain RONALD STANSMORE of the British Secret Service and the other SIR THOMAS FRAZER, the "eminence grise" at Buckingham Palace. Currently the parchments of BLANCHE DE CASTILE are in a deposit-box of LLOYDS BANK EUROPE LIMITED. In Great Britain, since the article in the DAILY EXPRESS which had a circulation of some 3,000,000, no one can be unaware of the demand for the recognition of Merovingian rights made by SIR ALEXANDER AIKMAN, SIR JOHN MONTAGUE BROCKLEBANK, MAJOR HUGH MURCHISON CLOWES and 19 other people in 1955 and 1956 in the chambers of P.F.J. FREEMAN, Notary with Royal authority."

The Count de LÉNONCOURT rolled his wheelchair towards a safe, opened it and drew out a bundle of papers. He then gestured to me to come and examine them.

"Here are photographs of the documents. You'll note that the French Consulate certified them as authentic in 1955 under the signature of OLIVIER DE SAINT GERMAIN and in 1956 under the name of JEAN GUIRAUD."

"But what's the story in France?"

"For 60 years now there has been a Merovingian party: LE CERCLE DU LYS. The real founder was JEAN-STEPHANE DE HABSBOURG, known as "Monsieur de Chambord", but SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, in her book "LA FORCE DE L'AGE", mentions a different founder: LIONEL DE ROULET. This very exclusive club has about three or four hundred members in Paris."

I emerged dizzy from my encounter with HENRI DE LÉNONCOURT.

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I had just finished this collection of documents when on 30 June 1978 I saw the following: