Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [58]
Souz la pasture d’animaux ruminant
par eux conduits au ventre herbipolique
soldats caches, les armes bruit menant....
“The hay wain is a legend,” I said. “And I would hardly
consider Nostradamus an authority in matters of historical fact.”
“People older than you, Signer Casaubon, have had faith in many of Nostradamus’s prophecies. Not that I am so ingenuous as to take the story of the hay wain literally. It’s a symbol—a symbol of the obvious, established fact that Jacques de Molay, anticipating his arrest, turned over command of the order, as well as its secret instructions, to a nephew, Comte de Beaujeu, who became the head of the now clandestine Temple.”
“Are there documents that bear this out?”
“Official history,” the colonel said with a bitter smile, “is written by the victors. According to official history, men like me don’t exist. No, behind the story of the hay wain lies something else. The Temple’s secret nucleus moved to a quiet spot, and from there they began to extend their underground network. This obvious fact was my starting point. For years—even before the war—I kept asking myself where these brothers in heroism might have gone. When I retired to private life, I finally decided to look for a trail. Since the flight of the hay wain had occurred in France, France was where I should find the original gathering of the secret nucleus. But where in France?”
He had a sense of theater. Belbo and I were all ears. We could find nothing better to say than “Well, where?”
“I’ll tell you. Where would the Templars have hidden? Where did Hugues de Payns come from? Champagne, nearTroyes. And at the time the Templars were founded, Champagne was ruled by Hugues de Champagne, who joined them in Jerusalem just a few years later. When he came back home, he apparently got in touch with the abbot of Citeaux and helped him initiate the study and translation of certain Hebrew texts in his monastery. Think about it: the White Benedictines—Saint Bernard’s Benedictines—also invited the rabbis of upper Burgundy to come to Citeaux, to study whatever texts Hugues had found in Palestine. Hugues even gave Saint Bernard’s monks a forest at Bar-sur-Aube, where Clairvaux was later built. And what did Saint Bernard do?”
“He became the champion of the Templars,” I said.
“But why? Did you know he made the Templars even more powerful than the Benedictines? That he prohibited the Benedictines from receiving gifts of lands and houses, and had them give lands and houses to the Templars instead? Have you ever seen the Foret d’Orient near Troyes? It’s immense, one com-mandery after the other. And in the meantime, you know, the knights in Palestine weren’t fighting. They were settled in the Temple, making friends with the Moslems instead of killing them. They communicated with Moslem mystics. In other words, Saint Bernard, with the economic support of the counts of Champagne, built an order in the Holy Land that was in contact with Arab and Jewish secret sects. An unknown directorate ran the Crusades in an effort to keep the order going, and not the other way around. And it set up a network of power that was outside royal jurisdiction. I am a man of action, not a man of science. Instead of spinning empty conjectures, I did what all the long-winded scholars have never done: I went to the place the Templars came from, the place that had been their base for two centuries, their home, where they could live like fish in water...”
“Chairman Mao says that revolutionaries must live among the people like fish in water,” I said.
“Good for your chairman. But the Templars were preparing a revolution far greater than the revolution of your pigtailed communists.”
“They don’t wear pigtails anymore.”
“No? Well, so much the worse for them. As I was saying, the Templars must have sought refuge in Champagne. Payns? Troyes? The Eastern