Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [250]
“Lia, you’re paranoid.”
“Me? You!”
“Maybe we’re both paranoid, but you have to grant me this: we started with the Ingolf document. It’s natural, when one comes across a message of the Templars, to want to decipher it. Maybe we exaggerated a little, to make fun of the decipherers of messages, but there was a message to begin with.”
“All you know is what that Ardenti told you, and from your own description he’s an out-and-out fraud. Anyway, I’d like to see this message for myself.’’
Nothing easier; I had it in my files.
Lia took the paper, looked at it front and back, wrinkled her nose, brushed the hair from her eyes to see the first, the coded, part better. She said: “Is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough for you?”
“More than enough. Give me two days to think about it.” When Lia asks for two days to think about something, she’s determined to show me I’m stupid. I always accuse her of this, and she answers: “If I know you’re stupid, that means I love you even if you’re stupid. You should feel reassured.”
For two days we didn’t mention the subject again. Anyway, she was almost always out of the house. In the evening I watched her huddled in a corner, making notes, tearing up one sheet of paper after another.
When we got to the mountains, the baby scratched around all day in the grass, Lia fixed supper, and ordered me to eat, because I was thin as a rail. After supper, she asked me to fix her a double whiskey with lots of ice and only a splash of soda. She lit a cigarette, which she does only at important moments, told me to sit down, and then explained.
“Listen carefully, Pow, because I’m going to demonstrate toyou that the simplest explanation is always the best. Colonel Ardenti told you Ingolf found a message in Provins. I don’t doubt that at all. Yes, Ingolf went down into the well and really did find a case with this text in it,” and she tapped the French lines with her finger. “We are not told that he found a case studded with diamonds. All the colonel said was that according to Ingolf’s notes the case was sold. And why not? It was an antique; he may have made a little cash, but we are not told that he lived off the proceeds for the rest of his life. He must have had a small inheritance from his father.”
“And why should the case be ordinary?”
“Because the message is ordinary. It’s a laundry list. Come on, let’s read it again.”
a la... Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6”...entiers avec saiel
p... les blancs mantiax
r...s... chevaliers de Pruins pour la... j. nc
6foiz 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a...120 a...
iceste est I’ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it li secunz joste iceus qui... pans
it al refuge
it a Nostre Dame d I ‘altre part d I ‘iau
it a I ‘ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste... la Grant Pute.
“A laundry list?”
“For God’s sake, didn’t it ever occur to you to consult a tourist guide, a brief history of Provins? You discover immediately that the Grange-aux-Dimes, where the message was found, was a gathering place for merchants. Provins was a center for fairs in Champagne. And the Grange is on rue St.-Jean. In Provins they bought and sold everything, but lengths of cloth were particularly popular, draps—or dras, as they wrote it then—and every length was marked by a guarantee, a kind of seal. The second most important product of Provins was roses, red roses that the Crusaders had brought from Syria. They were so famous that when Edmund of Lancaster married Blanche d’Artois and took the title Comte de Champagne, he added the red rose of Provins to his coat of arms. Hence, too, the war of the roses, because the House of York had a white rose as its symbol.”
“Who told you all this?”
“A little book of two hundred pages published by the Tourist Bureau of Provins. I found it at the French Center. But that’s not all. In Provins there’s a fort known as the Donjon, which speaks for itself, and there is a Porte-aux-Pains, an Eglise du Refuge, various churches dedicated to Our Lady of this and that,