Pierre Jarnac
Saleilles
France
27.07.1992.

Dear Sir,

I have been away for about 10 days and I am therefore hastening to reply to your kind letter.

After the article in ‘Le Grand-Albert’ by Jean Pellet and Gérard de Sède which appeared in 1972 (cf. ‘Les Archives de Rennes-le-Château, volume 1, pp. 247-248), it was René Descadeillas, in his ‘Mythologie du trésor de Rennes’ (1974), pp 141-145, who was the first to refer to the tomb of Poussin. He is mistaken regarding the burial of the American officer. In fact, he got mixed up with a memorial, which still exists, which is situated on the road from Limoux to Alet.

It was then the turn of Franck Marie to mention it in his ‘Rennes-le-Château, étude critique’ (1978), pp. 87-88. This is a very succinct account, but it is also the first correct information.

Franck Marie and I obtained our information from the same source. This was Adrien Bourrel, second son of Maria Bourrel, with whom Lawrence lived as man and wife. This second son, Adrien, confided in me alone, by sending me all the papers which he still in his possession which had belonged to his ‘stepfather’. It is from him and no one else that I have the various dates and pieces of information that I have published regarding the Lawrence story in volume 2 of the Archives. As for the year 1903 (see above) it was not the ‘tomb’ strictly speaking that was constructed in that year but only the ‘basic’ tombstone [dalle funéraire] covering a grave. The actual tomb – in other words the parallelepiped that bore so much resemblance to the tomb of Poussin – was only built around 1933. But there are no documents that actually specify this date and give details of its construction. In 1933 Adrien Bourrel would have been eight or nine years old.

I hope that these details will be of some use to you. I look forward to reading your article and thank you once again for the various communications that you have been so kind as to send me,

Yours,

P Jarnac.

Pierre Jarnac, Histoire du Trésor de Rennes-le-Château (1985)

This tomb, which is almost hidden by trees, was erected on the edge of a cliff, up by a little bridge that passes over the bed of a stream (now dried up) known as ‘Le Cruce’. It can be seen quite clearly from the road to Arques.

It takes the form of a parallelepiped [geometric solid whose six faces are parallelograms], surmounted by a truncated pyramid.

The story of how it came to be there, a story that people have felt it necessary to falsify for their own murky reasons, is actually quite simple.

Set back from the site of the tomb we find the Moulin des Pontils (‘Les Pontils Mill’). In 1880 this property was purchased by Louis Galibert, who came to live there with his wife Elisabeth. He had a plan: to transform this large house into a factory for the manufacture of epaulettes and braid for the use of military tailors.

As this little factory was located close to a watercourse, which was at that time in full flow, he constructed a barrage and placed there a dynamo to provide power for his factory and his several machines.

In 1903 the grandson of M. Galibert had a grave dug and a tomb [sépulture = burial place] constructed there by the stonemason Bourrel, from Rennes-les-Bains, on a hillock located some fifty metres from the road. The following year the remains of his grandmother were transferred there.

Twenty years passed before the Galibert family left for Limoux and sold their little estate. In 1921, Louis Galibert had the remains of the bodies that had been laid in the tomb of Les Pontils removed, since his wife Elisabeth, who had died several years before, had been buried there in her turn. A new tomb in the cemetery of Limoux would soon provide a home to the two bodies. The gate and the facings in freestone of the tomb of Les Pontils were removed and used to cover the tomb in Limoux.

Shortly afterwards, the buildings of Les Pontils were put up for sale. They were bought by Madame Emily Rivarès, a French woman born in Paterson in the United States and her son, Louis Bertram Lawrence, born on 25 October 1884 in Hartford (Connecticut). His father had been born in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Pierre Jarnac, Les Archives de Rennes-le-Château (1988):

His – Louis Lawrence’s – grandmother, Marie Rivarès, died on 28 November 1922, the year after moving to Les Pontils. In accordance with the wishes of the deceased, the body was ... embalmed!

It was there in the tomb [sépulture = burial place] prepared originally by the Galibert family that Louis Lawrence buried the body. Some time later, in 1931 or 1932, he did the same thing upon the death of his mother, Emily Rivarès, whom he laid to rest in the tomb [tombeau = tomb] with the remains of two cats, also mummified!

It was then that there was erected, on this site, a tomb [tombeau = tomb] in parallelepiped form, surmounted by a truncated pyramid. The whole structure was covered by a screed of cement. Nothing therefore served to distinguish it from those numerous funerary monuments that, at this time, one could still see in large numbers along the roadside.