Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [251]
“And what about the popelicans?”
“In Provins there had been some Cathars, who later were duly burned, and the grand inquisitor himself was a converted Cathar, Robert le Bougre. So it is hardly strange that a street or an area should be called the place of the Cathars even if the Cathars weren’t there anymore.”
“Still, in 1344...”
“But who said this document dates from 1344? Your colonel read ‘36 years after the hay wain,’ but in those days a p made in a certain way, with a tail, meant post, but a p without the tail meant pro. The author of this text is an ordinary merchant who made some notes on business transacted at the Grange, or, rather, on the rue St.-Jean—not on the night of Saint Jean—and he recorded a price of thirty-six sous, or crowns, or whatever denomination it was for one or each wagon of hay.’’
“And the hundred and twenty years?”
“Who said anything about years? Ingolf found something he transcribed as ‘120 a’...What is an ‘a’? I checked a list of the abbreviations used in those days and found that for denier or dinarium odd signs were used; one looks like a delta, another looks like a theta, a circle broken on the left. If you write it carelessly and in haste, as a busy merchant might, a fanatic like Colonel Ardenti could take it for an a, having already read somewhere the story of the one hundred and twenty years. You know where better than I. He could have read it in any history of the Rosicrucians. The point is, he wanted to find something resembling ‘post 120 annos patebo.’ And then what does he do? He finds ‘it’ repeated several times and he reads it as iterum. But the abbreviation for iterum was itm, whereas ‘it’ means item, which means likewise, and is in fact used for repetitious lists. Our merchant is calculating how much he’s going to make on the orders he’s received, and he’s listing the deliveries he has to make. He has to deliver some bouquets of roses of Provins, and that’s the meaning of ‘r...s...chevaliers de Pruins.’ And where the colonel read ‘vainjance’ (because he had the kadosch knights on his mind), you should read ‘jonchee.’ The roses were used to make either hats or floral carpets on feast days. So here is how your Provins message should read:
“In Rue Saint Jean:
36 sous for wagons of hay.
Six new lengths of cloth with seal
to rue des Blancs-Manteaux.
Crusaders’ roses to make a jonchee:
six bunches of six in the six following places,
each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all.
Here is the order:
the first to the Fort
item the second to those in Porte-aux-Pains
item to the Church of the Refuge
item to the Church ofNotre Dame, across the river
item to the old building of the Cathars
item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde.
And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whores’ street.
“Because they, too, poor things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making themselves nice little hats of roses.” “My God,” I said. “I think you’re right.” “Of course I’m right. It’s a laundry list, I tell you.” , “Wait a minute. This may very well be a laundry list, but the first message really is in code, and it talks about thirty-six invisibles.”
“True. The French text I polished off in an hour, but the other one kept me busy for two days. I had to examine Trithemius, at both the Ambrosiana and the Trivulziana, and you know what the librarians there are like: before they let you put your hands on an old book, they look at you as if you were planning to eat it. But the first message, too, is a simple matter. You should have discovered this yourself. To begin with, are you sure that ‘Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes’ is in the same French as our merchant’s? Yes; this expression was used in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, when the Rosicrucians appeared in Paris. But then you reasoned the way your Diabolicals do: