Speaker 1: Okay, so I want you to imagine for a second
a place that feels like it's just completely fallen off
the edge of the map. Right we are in the
foothills of the French Pyrenees, and the time is the
late nineteenth century, let's say, around eighteen eighty five.
Speaker 2: And the landscape there is it's not gentle, it's rugged,
it's aggressive, almost hostile, but beautiful in this really raw way,
and it is incredibly remote.
Speaker 1: Exactly, So we're zooming in on this one tiny, really
impoverished village perched right on top of a hill. It's
called Rendles Chateau.
Speaker 2: And it is a place that I mean, by all accounts,
history just should have scrolled right past. It should be
a footnote at best, not even that. Yeah, we were
talking about a population of what maybe three hundred people max.
If I out there, snow, running water. The roads aren't roads.
They are just these rough mule track dirt paths that
kind of snake up the hillside.
Speaker 1: It is the absolute definition of a backwater, it really is.
And right there, in this dusty, forgotten corner France, we
find our main character, our protagonist, a humble village priest
named baronje Sonier. And when we first meet him, he
is earning a pittance, I mean literally nothing. He's living
in a presbyteria that is falling down around his ears,
and he's presiding over a church that is, for all
intents and purposes, are ruined.
Speaker 2: Oh, it was worse than a ruin. The sources are
pretty clear that the roof was leaking so badly that
you know, when it rained outside, it was raining inside
the church.
Speaker 1: No way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, birds were flying around, nesting in the sanctuary. The
windows were all blown out. It was a complete disaster zone.
Speaker 1: And then almost overnight, the entire script.
Speaker 2: Just flips completely.
Speaker 1: This poor priest, this guy who was counting every single
penny just to buy bread, he suddenly starts spending money.
Speaker 2: And we're not talking small money.
Speaker 1: No, I don't mean he bought a nice new coat money.
I mean he starts spending what would be the modern
equivalent of millions, millions of dollars.
Speaker 2: It's an explosion of wealth.
Speaker 1: He builds a mansion, he builds this massive, grand tower.
He lays out these lush, beautiful gardens and a place
that barely has water to begin with. He's importing rum
from the Caribbean and feasting on lobster, and.
Speaker 2: Of course the entire village and then eventually the entire
region starts asking the one single obvious question.
Speaker 1: Where on Earth did the money come from?
Speaker 2: That's it, That's the question.
Speaker 1: That is the question that launched a thousand ships, or
in this case, a thousand conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: A thousand is probably an understatement.
Speaker 1: Probably, yeah, did he find the lost treasure of the
Knight's Templar? Did he stumble upon the Holy Grail itself?
Speaker 2: Or and this is the big one, did he discover
a secret so damaging, so earth shatteringly explosive that the
Vatican itself paid him a massive fortune just to keep
his mouth shut, right, blackmail. It's a mystery that has
just captivated people, treasure hunters, writers, filmmakers, for what over
seventy years.
Speaker 1: Now at least.
Speaker 2: And what's truly fascinating to me, what makes this story
so special is that, this one specific story from this
tiny village of rend Lsiateau, it's essentially patient zero for
some of the biggest pop culture phenomena of our time.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the Da Vinci Code.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, if you've ever read the Da Vinci Code, or
if you've ever gone down that rabbit hole of theories
about Jesus having a bloodline, it all traces back here.
It starts with this one priest in this one tiny village.
Speaker 1: So welcome to thrilling threads. I am, I have to say,
absolutely pumped to get into this one. We do because
we are unraveling a conspiracy theory that actually has a
factual ending, which, let's be honest, is so rare in
what we do.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly rare. Usually we're left hanging with a
you know, maybe it was Aliens, maybe it was the government.
But here, here we have a complete narrative.
Speaker 1: Art, we have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're going to look at how a local scam
spiraled into this global mythology involving Jesus's bloodline.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is it's simple, but it's ambitious.
We are going to trace the money, the myth, and
the massive hoax of ren les Chateau. We're going to
find out what really happened to baron Ja Sonier, and
I think.
Speaker 2: Maybe even more importantly, we're going to look at the
psychologies of belief. Why do we want the myth to
be true, even when all the evidence points to something well,
something much grubviier.
Speaker 1: Okay, so grab your shovel and your skepticism and let's
get into this. We really need to set the stage
properly here. Yes, let's go back to eighteen eighty five.
Baron Jay Sognier arrives in town. Paint the picture for us.
What is he walking into and who is this guy? Really?
Speaker 2: Well, to understand Sognier, I think you really have to
understand the context of France in eighteen eighty five. Okay,
this isn't just about a guy getting a bad job posting.
France at this time is politically just tearing itself apart.
You have the secular Republic on one side, which is
very anti clerical and wants to separate church and state
completely and on the other and you have the Catholic
monarchists on the other who are desperately trying to restore
the king and bring back the power of glory of
the church.
Speaker 1: So it's a full blown culture.
Speaker 2: War, a massive one. And Sanier he's young, he's thirty
three years old. He's apparently very handsome, robust, energetic, and
he is a militant monarchist.
Speaker 1: So he's not a quiet, you know, retired to the
countryside kind of priest, not at all.
Speaker 2: He is fiercely ambitious. He sees himself as a player.
He wants rise in the ranks of the church.
Speaker 1: But instead of a grand cathedral in Paris or Lyon,
he gets rindless chateau.
Speaker 2: Exactly for him, this is the end of the line.
He's walking to a professional dead end. The village is,
as we said, in a state of severe decay, and
the church itself, the church which was originally this private
chapel for the local lords, you know, dating back centuries,
it's barely usable.
Speaker 1: And it gets worse for him, doesn't it. Because of
his politics, it.
Speaker 2: Gets much worse. He is so outspoken that he actually
gives a fiery sermon telling people how to vote against
the republic.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And for that his state salary gets his bended for
a while.
Speaker 1: So he's not just poor, he's actively broke and he's
in trouble with the government from day one.
Speaker 2: He is desperate. I mean he's literally living on handouts
from parishioners who have almost nothing themselves.
Speaker 1: And for a man with his level of ambition, his ego, yeah,
that has to be a crushing humiliation, the daily one.
Speaker 2: And he is stuck in a crumbling building with a
congregation of you know, peasants, and he has zero prospects
of advancement. It's a prison.
Speaker 1: But he's not the type of guy to just sit
there and accept his fate, is he. It sounds like
he's a hustler at heart.
Speaker 2: He definitely has what we might today call a monetizable mindset.
Speaker 1: Uhh. I like that.
Speaker 2: He's always looking for angles, He's looking for a way out,
and he's not alone in this this isolation. He hires a.
Speaker 1: Housekeeper, right, a housekeeper named Marie dan Arnaud. And Marie
is well. The sources are pretty clear that she wasn't
just a housekeeper who was, you know, dusting the pews.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's putting it mildly. This is absolutely crucial to
the story. Marie dan Arnaud becomes his close confidant. She
moves into the presbytery with her family.
Speaker 1: Actually, oh really, with her whole family.
Speaker 2: Yes, and she remains by his side for his entire life.
The implication, which is heavily supported by the villager's accounts
and the historical record, is that they were partners in
every sense of the word.
Speaker 1: So likely lovers, almost.
Speaker 2: Certainly lovers, and definitely co conspirators in everything that follows.
Speaker 1: So you have this ambitious, frustrated priest and his loyal
writer die partner stuck together in a ruined village on
top of a mountain.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect setup for something dramatic to happen.
Speaker 1: Now, the church itself it's dedicated to Mary Magdalen, is
that significant.
Speaker 2: It is hugely significant, especially for the later myths that
spring up and for the whole atmosphere of the place.
Ow So you have to understand the regional obsession. The
south of France, and specifically this region called the Lang Duck,
has a deep, deep seated obsession with Mary Magdalen. Right
there are centuries old traditions and local legends that claim
she didn't just vanish from the biblical narrative after the resurrection.
Speaker 1: This is the legend that says she fled Palestine right.
Speaker 2: Yes, that she traveled across the Mediterranean, maybe bringing the
Holy Grail with her, and she landed in the south
of France to live out her last days as a
hermit in a cave.
Speaker 1: So Sonia is operating in a landscape that's already just
primed for mystery completely.
Speaker 2: This isn't like finding a mystery in I don't know,
a suburb of Ohio. This is a land of heretics,
of the Cathars who are brutally suppressed by the Church
in the Middle Ages. It's a land of buried secrets.
The very soil is fertile for these kinds of stories.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the stage is perfectly set. He's broke, he
wants to fix his ruined church. He has a partner
in crime, and he's surrounded by ancient legends.
Speaker 2: Check, check, and check.
Speaker 1: So let's fast forward just a little bit to eighteen
eighty six. He manages to screep together a small amount
of money.
Speaker 2: Right he claims he got a donation from the Countess
of Chamber.
Speaker 1: And he uses this to start some very basic renovations.
And this right here is where the movie really starts.
This is the inciting incident, it absolutely is.
Speaker 2: He decides to focus on the main altar. The altarstone
were supported by two ancient pillars, one of them was Visigothic,
incredibly old and likely hollowed out.
Speaker 1: Over time, and he orders the workman to move it.
Speaker 2: He does, and during this work, we have a witness.
Speaker 1: This is the bell ringer.
Speaker 2: Yes, the bell ringer, a local man, is there in
the church and he sees the wooden pillar that's supporting
the pulpit or some sources say the altar. He sees
it either collapse or break open, and inside, hidden away
in a hollow space, is a small glass file.
Speaker 1: It's a literal secret message in a bottle, but inside
a church pillar. I mean, you absolutely cannot write this
stuff better. It's straight out of National Treasure.
Speaker 2: You really can't. Now. The bell ringer sees this vial
and he sees that inside it there are rolled up parchments,
old papers.
Speaker 1: So what does Sonia do? Does he open it up
in front of everyone and read it?
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. His reaction is immediate, and it's very very telling.
He snatches the vial, of course he does, and he
tells the workers, oh, don't worry about this, it's just
an old relic, nothing of value, just some old church dust.
But he doesn't throw it away. He pockets it instantly.
He immediately treats it like as a treasure map.
Speaker 1: That is the classic nothing to see here move. I mean,
if it was trash, he would have tossed it exactly.
Fact that he hit it means he thought it was
valuable from the first second.
Speaker 2: And then very shortly after this, he orders the floor
of the church to be lifted up. He's now convinced
that whatever that parchment said, it points to something under
the building.
Speaker 1: This is where fact and folklore start to get a
little blurry.
Speaker 2: They do, but we still have witness accounts for this
next part too. Under the floorboards, right near the altar,
he finds a pot, an old clay pot, a pot
of gold, a pot filled with gold coins and other
shiny objects. The workers see it, they see the glint
of the gold.
Speaker 1: And what does Sonya do this time? Does he say Allelujah,
the church is saved. Drinks are on me boys.
Speaker 2: No, once again, he goes straight into damage control. He
creates a cover story on the fly.
Speaker 1: What does he say?
Speaker 2: He tells the workers that the clients are just worthless
medallic counters, you know, meaningless brass tokens from the French
Revolution or something similar.
Speaker 1: These are the droys you're looking for.
Speaker 2: Precisely, But and here's the big tell, he pockets them.
He keeps every single.
Speaker 1: One, right if they were worthless brass. Why keep them?
Speaker 2: Why would you? It's classic misdirection. But the workers, you know,
they aren't stupid. They're peasants. Maybe they're uneducated, but they
know what gold looks like.
Speaker 1: And they know when they're being cut out of a deal.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. But Sonia is the priest. He holds all the
authority in that village. He is already managing the narrative.
He's creating a secret.
Speaker 1: And this discovery, it seems to trigger something in him.
He becomes convinced that this little pot of gold wasn't
the main event, It was just an appetizer.
Speaker 2: He thinks there's more, a lot more.
Speaker 1: He thinks there's a massive horde hidden somewhere.
Speaker 2: Nearby, specifically in the graveyard just outside the church.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story gets a little grim.
Speaker 2: It gets very grim.
Speaker 1: We're talking about a priest, supposedly a man of God,
going out into the church cemetery at night.
Speaker 2: It's like something out of a Gothic horror story. He
goes out there with Marie jan Arnault. They have lanterns
and shovels and they are out there in the pitch
black digging.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine looking out your window in this tiny,
superstitious village and seeing your priest digging up graves at midnight.
Speaker 2: The villagers were terrified, and they were furious. Of course,
you have to remember these are their ancestors' graves. He
is desecrating them. He's moving headstones around, he's shifting bones
into a chaotic ostuary, just a clear space. It got
so bad the villagers filed formal complaints with the local prefecture. Wow,
they say, he locks himself in the cemetery for hours
at a time.
Speaker 1: What on earth is he looking for?
Speaker 2: He's looking for the lord's tomb, the crypt of the
ancient lords of Ren, the Hotepool family.
Speaker 1: Why there.
Speaker 2: He must believe that the parchment or the pot or
something gave him a clue that the real treasure is
hidden in their crypt.
Speaker 1: And does he find it?
Speaker 2: Well, we have his diary. This is a primary source,
written in his own hand. Okay, And in September eighteen
ninety one, he writes a very short, very evocative entry.
It's just forwards in French.
Speaker 1: What does it say?
Speaker 2: Translated? It says discovery of a tomb evening rain.
Speaker 1: Discovery of a tomb evening rain. Wow, that gives me chills.
It's so cinematic, isn't it. You can just see it,
the rain slicking the headstones, the lantern light reflecting off
an open stone slab.
Speaker 2: It is the absolute pivotal moment of the entire story.
We are convinced, based on all the evidence that he
found a crypt. Now, whether that crypt was filled with
gold or jewels, or whether it was just an entrance
to some other subterranean space, that remains the question.
Speaker 1: But his behavior changes completely after that rainy evening, instantly
and forever, because that's when the spending starts. That is
the moment the poverty ends for good.
Speaker 2: That is the moment Barge Soonier, the poor country priest dies,
and the king of endles Chateau is born.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this transformation, because it's not like
he just fixes the church roof. He goes full blown tycoon.
It's like he won the lottery.
Speaker 2: He absolutely transforms almost immediately. He has one hundred thousand
francs sitting in the bank. Now we really need to
put that number in context. Okay, in rural France in
the eighteen nineties, a school teacher or maybe a skilled
laborer might earn between one thoy fifteen hundred francs a year.
Speaker 1: A year, so he has roughly seventy or eighty years
worth of a normal persons salary just sitting there in cash.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's a staggering life altering fortune for a man
in his position. And he immediately starts building his own
little kingdom. He buys up land all around the church.
Speaker 1: And he builds the Villa Bethania.
Speaker 2: Yes, a beautiful Renaissance style mansion. It is not a
priest's house. It's a bourgeois manor. It has its own chapel,
It has reception rooms, multiple guest bedrooms. It is designed
for entertaining high society. He wants to show off.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Tormagdala. This is the iconic image
of ren Les Chateau, the thing you see on all
the postcards.
Speaker 2: The Magdala Tower. It's this beautiful Neo Gothic library tower
and it's perched right on the edge of the cliff,
overlooking the entire valley.
Speaker 1: And he names it after Mary Magdalene.
Speaker 2: He does, and he builds this covered walkway, a promenade,
connecting the tower to a glass conservatory. It is a
place for him to retire you know, read his books,
smoke expensive cigars and look out over his domain like
a feudal lord.
Speaker 1: The gardens too. I love the details about the menagerie.
This wasn't just him planting a vegetable patch.
Speaker 2: No, he was not growing carrots. He built this huge
ornamental garden with fountains and exotic plants that would have
been incredibly expensive to maintain. And he kept animals. He
had monkeys, monkeys in the French Pyrenees, which.
Speaker 1: Is just it's absurd.
Speaker 2: And the lamas he had. Lamas, he had lamas. Could
you just imagine the villagers who are barely scraping by
watching their pre least walk a lama on a lead
through a lush garden while monkeys are chattering in the trees.
Speaker 1: It's surreal. It is the behavior of an eccentric millionaire,
not a humble priest.
Speaker 2: Completely, and the lifestyle matched it. The food. The sources
mentioned he was ordering lobster and Langistine's to.
Speaker 1: This remote village.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, and rum. He was ordering fifty liters of
rum at a time, shipped directly from Martinique, fifty leaders.
He was buying crates of the finest wines. He was
entertaining distinguished guests. We're talking local politicians, opera singers. There
were even rumors of royalty visiting incognito.
Speaker 1: And he's treating them to these lavish banquets.
Speaker 2: The finest, and he's producing postcards of himself.
Speaker 1: Yes, I love this part. He has professional photos taken
of himself and Marie posing in the gardens and he
has them printed as postcards, which he then sells or
gives away to his guests.
Speaker 2: That is basically nineteenth century Instagram. Yeah, he's an influencer.
He's building his brand.
Speaker 1: He is. He's not hiding this wealth at all. He's
flaunting it. Behaves like a medieval aristocrat, not a parish priest.
He becomes the seigneur of the village, the lord.
Speaker 2: But he also does something really weird with the church renovation. Yeah,
he doesn't just fix it up a code. He decorates
it in a very let's say, a very unique style.
Speaker 1: Unique is a very polite way to put it. I'd
say it's bizarre. It's unsettling.
Speaker 2: That's probably more accurate.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell us about the devil, because when you walk
into a Catholic church, you expect to see I don't
know Saint Peter or an angel or Jesus.
Speaker 2: Right at Rendles Chateau when you walk through the door,
the very first thing you see, the thing that is
supporting the Holy water stoop.
Speaker 1: The little basin where you dip your hand to.
Speaker 2: Bless yourself exactly holding that up is a terrifying crouching demon.
Speaker 1: It's a statue of a devil right at the entrance.
Speaker 2: Specifically, it's believed to represent as Modeus. Now in demonology,
as Modius is the keeper of hidden treasures, and he
was the demon who supposedly helped build Solomon's temple.
Speaker 1: That's a very specific choice.
Speaker 2: It is. He looks like he's being crushed under the
weight of the Holy water, but his eyes are wild
and he's scaring right at you. It is incredibly jarring.
Speaker 1: And then there's the mural.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, he commissions this huge fresco to go above
the altar. It's supposed to be Christ preaching on the mount,
but the details are all wrong. How So, the landscape
in the painting looks exactly like the view from Rendless Chateau.
And if you look very closely at the bottom of
the painting, there's a money bag.
Speaker 1: A literal bag of money in a painting of Jesus.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the bag has a hole in it and
the single gold coin is peeping out about to fall.
Speaker 1: Okay, it feels like he's trolling everyone. It feels like
he's leaving breadcrumbs for people to find.
Speaker 2: It does, doesn't it? It feels like a taunt, like
he's saying, I found the treasure. It's right here in
front of you can see it. Or maybe the very
foundation of the church is built on gold, so.
Speaker 1: Naturally people start to whisper. Is the devil a clue
to the treasure's guardian? Is the money bag map?
Speaker 2: Or is it just the incredible ego of a man
who found a pot of gold and wants to immortalize
his good luck. But the symbolism is just so heavy.
Sonia knows exactly what he's doing. He is building a
myth around himself. He wants people to wonder.
Speaker 1: But you know, the party can't last forever. You can't
just spend millions of francs and have a pet monkey
without the boss noticing. Eventually, the Catholic Church is an
organization that really likes order and accountability.
Speaker 2: And eventually the church strikes back in nineteen oh two,
the old easygoing bishop dies and a new bishop arrives
in the region, a man named Monsigneur Bosagour.
Speaker 1: And Bosezour is different, very different.
Speaker 2: He's a strict administrator, a buy the book guy, and
he's not amused by Sonier's antics. He sees this lavish lifestyle,
this open defiance, and he demands an answer to one simple.
Speaker 1: Question, where did the money come from?
Speaker 2: Show me your accounts justify this?
Speaker 1: And Sonyor says nothing.
Speaker 2: He completely stone walls the bishop. He basically says, my
possessions are here, I'm staying here. Mind your own business.
I owe you no explanation.
Speaker 1: Wow, that takes some serious nerve. He's talking to a
superior officer, essentially.
Speaker 2: It does, and it leads to a massive, protracted conflict.
The bishop demands he leave the parish. Sognyeer refuses to go.
This escalates to an ecclesiastical trial that goes all the
way to the Vatican in Rome.
Speaker 1: A trial in Rome. This is big time.
Speaker 2: It is and it lasts for six years. Sonya is
so wealthy by this point that he hires these very
expensive cannon lawyers to fight the Vatican on his behalf.
But he never actually attends the trial himself.
Speaker 1: He's too busy enjoying his villa and his rum pretty much.
And what's the final verdict?
Speaker 2: He loses eventually he is charged with simony, which is
the buying or selling of spiritual things, and we will
definitely get to that later, and also with disobedience. He
is stripped of his priesthood. He is suspended into venice,
which means it means he can no longer say mass,
he can no longer administer sacraments. He's fired for a priest.
That's the ultimate punishment.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't leave the village.
Speaker 2: No, he is defiant to the very end. He says, fine,
I'm not the priest of the official church anymore, then
I'll be the priest in my house. He sets up
a private altar in the glass conservatory of his villa,
and the villagers, the villagers who adore him, they stop
going to the official church with the new priest, and
they start coming to his villa for mass instead. He
literally creates a schism in a village of three hundred people.
Speaker 1: That is incredible charisma. He really was the king.
Speaker 2: But then the end comes. The year is nineteen seventeen.
We're in the middle of World War One.
Speaker 1: How does he die? Is it mysterious?
Speaker 2: Not really? The high life just catches up with him.
He suffers a stroke which leads to heart failure, probably
with complications from cirrhosis of the liver. All that rum
and rish food. He's sixty five years old.
Speaker 1: But here is the real shocker. When he dies, everyone
expends a massive inheritance. The villagers, the church, even his
distant family. Everyone thinks he's sitting on a gold mine.
They're ready to fight over the.
Speaker 2: Millions circling like vultures.
Speaker 1: What do they find.
Speaker 2: The cupboards are bare. He is officially on paper penniless.
There is nothing in his name zero.
Speaker 1: Where did it all go? Did he really spend every
last franc He spent a.
Speaker 2: Lot, But no, he also hit it. He was clever.
He had transferred everything, the villa, the land, the tower,
the cash into read Dinarnoud's name. He is housekeeper, his partner.
He did it years prior as a legal strategy to
stop the Church from being able to seize it if
he lost the trial.
Speaker 1: So the priest dies and the housekeeper inherits the entire kingdom.
Speaker 2: And now Marie is the queen of Rendlely Chateau.
Speaker 1: A very lonely queen, it sounds like.
Speaker 2: Very She lives on in that big mansion for decades.
She becomes a recluse. The money, it seems, eventually runs
out by the postwar years in the forties. She's really
struggling just to pay the taxes on the property.
Speaker 1: But there are these little glimpses, these hints that suggest
the mystery didn't die with Sonyer.
Speaker 2: Story is fascinating. I love this image.
Speaker 1: It's so evocative, isn't it tell us?
Speaker 2: Yes, the neighbors would sometimes see her, this old woman,
out in her garden, and she would be wearing the
most incredible antique jewelry. We're talking gold necklaces, bracelets encrusted
with gems, just hanging on her arms, shimmering in the sunlight.
Speaker 1: Like she just pulled them out of a chest exactly.
Speaker 2: She looked like a relic herself. But if anyone complimented
her on the jewelry, or even got too close to look,
she would panic. She would run inside, hide it away
and they'd never see it again.
Speaker 1: And she would make these cryptic promises to the villagers.
Speaker 2: She did. She was famous for it. She would tell people,
don't you worry about me. With what the abbe Signiere left,
we could feed this whole village for one hundred years.
Speaker 1: She kept the flame of the mystery alive. She implied
that she held the key, that she knew where the rest.
Speaker 2: Of the treasure was buried, Which brings us to the
next chapter of our story.
Speaker 1: The myth maker right, because Marie eventually gets old, she
gets frail, and she needs help. She can't possibly maintain
this huge, crumbling mansion all by herself.
Speaker 2: Enter Noel Corbu. The year is nineteen forty six, the
war is over. Corbu is a businessman, an industrialist from
the city of Perpignon, and he's also an aspiring novelist.
He's a bit of a dreamer, a romantic very much so.
He takes his family for a drive one day, stumbles
upon this incredible estate up in the mountains and just
falls in love with it. He meets Marie, who by
now is an impoverished elderly woman living all alone in
this decaying.
Speaker 1: Mansion, and they struck a deal.
Speaker 2: It's a classic Vagier arrangement, which is quite common in France.
Corbu agrees to pay off all her debts. He moves
his family in and he takes care of her for
the rest of her life and in return, in return,
he inherits the entire estate. When she dies, but there's
a carrot, a huge carrot is dangling in front of him.
Marie promises him the secret.
Speaker 1: She tells him wait until I'm on my deathbed, exactly
those words.
Speaker 2: She says, Monsieur Corbu, you are a good man. You
are good to me when I know I'm dying, and
not a single moment before, I will tell you a
secret that will make you a rich and famous man.
Speaker 1: Oh man, imagine living with that anticipation. Korbu is caring
for her, feeding her, fixing the leaking roof, all while
waiting for the jackpot for years, and then the anti
climax of the century.
Speaker 2: It's brutal. In nineteen fifty three, Maurice suffers a massive stroke.
She completely loses the ability to speak or to write.
She is locked inside her own body.
Speaker 1: Oh No.
Speaker 2: Corbu sits by her bedside for weeks, just desperate, hoping
for a lucid moment, a whisper, a scribble on a
pad of paper, anything, But she dies in total silence.
The secret, if there even was one, goes to the
grave with her.
Speaker 1: That is just devastating. Poor Corbu. He's left with a
crumbling mansion, no gold, no map, and he's spent years
of his life taking care of this woman.
Speaker 2: But Corbu is an entrepreneur. He's been handed a lemon,
a very big, very expensive lemon, and he decides he's
going to make the most famous lemonade in history.
Speaker 1: What does he do?
Speaker 2: He converts Sevilla Bethania into a hotel and he opens
a restaurant in the gardens. But here's the problem. Rend
lu Chateau is in the middle of nowhere. The road
is still terrible. Why would anyone drive all the way
up there just to eat dinner.
Speaker 1: You have to give them a story, You have.
Speaker 2: To give them a mystery. Korby takes the fragments of truth.
He knows the rich priest, the sudden spending, the village rumors,
and he spins a yarn. He becomes a master storyteller.
He invents the Blanche of Castile theory.
Speaker 1: Blanche of Castile, the queen of France from the Middle Ages, the.
Speaker 2: Very one, the mother of Saint Louis Coorbu claims that
Sannier didn't just find a pot of coins. He found
the lost royal treasury of Queen Blanche.
Speaker 1: And how much was that worth.
Speaker 2: According to Corbu's story, it was eighteen million gold pieces
buried in the thirteenth century to hide it from rebellious barons.
Speaker 1: That's a good story.
Speaker 2: It's a great story. It sounds romantic, it sounds historical,
and most importantly, it sounds like there's still more gold
down there, just waiting to be found.
Speaker 1: And it works. People buy it.
Speaker 2: It works like a charm. He records a tape. This
is fantastic detail. He records a dramatic narration of the
whole story on a real to real tape player, and
during dinner service at his new restaurant, he plays the
tape for all the guests.
Speaker 1: Listen to the mystery while you eat your duck.
Speaker 2: Confit precisely, and tourists start flocking. Journalists start coming up
the mountain. Treasure hunters arrive with metal detectors and shovels.
Corbu even gets to play the role of Sognier in
a TV documentary in nineteen sixty one. He becomes the
face of the mystery he created.
Speaker 1: So he saves his business by selling the legend he does.
Speaker 2: But in doing so, Corbu accidentally starts something much, much
bigger because the treasure hunters who come, they don't just
look for gold, They start looking for meaning.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story completely jumps the shark.
Speaker 2: This is where it goes into orbit. The village becomes
honeycombed with holes. People are literally using dynamite to blast
open the ground. The government actually has to ban all
excavations in nineteen sixty five because the village is looking
like Swiss cheese and historic buildings are threatening to collapse.
Speaker 1: But the nature of the treasure itself, it starts to shift.
Speaker 2: It does. We are moving from pot of gold to
Jesus bloodline.
Speaker 1: And it all starts with a French journalist named Gerard
de Said.
Speaker 2: Right in nineteen sixty seven, he publishes a book called
The Gold of Wrin. He takes Nol Corbu's story and
he just amplifies it. He claims Sonia found parchments with
secret codes. But des Said isn't working alone. He's being
fed information by a very strange man named Pierre Plantard.
Speaker 1: Plantard, this guy is the key. He is the architect
of the entire modern myth. He's the one who pivots
the story away from treasure.
Speaker 2: Pierre Plantard is a fascinating character. He is a career
con man, a fantasist, an anti Semite, and a man
who is pathologically obsessed with status. He doesn't care about money.
Speaker 1: He wants to be royalty and how does rendle Chateau
help him with that.
Speaker 2: He claims that the document Sonya found weren't a treasure map.
He claims they were genealogical charts that prove the meri
of engine royal line, specifically, King Dagobert the Second, who
was assassinated in the seventh century, didn't actually die out
and let.
Speaker 1: Me guess, Peer Plantard is the last living descendant.
Speaker 2: Surprise, surprise, Peer Plantard claims to be the direct living
descendant of dagbart At the second and therefore the one
true rightful king of France.
Speaker 1: So the priest didn't find gold, he found Plantard's birth certificate.
Speaker 2: Essentially yes, but Plantard needs proof, so he fabricates an
entire secret society from a whole cloth. He calls it
the Priory of Scion. He claims this ancient society has
existed for a thousand years, all for the sole purpose
of protecting this sacred blood line. And he lists famous
past members like Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugos.
Speaker 1: This is literally the plot of the Da Vinci Code.
Speaker 2: It is exactly the plot because Dan Brown took this
complete hoax and presented it as factual history in the
introduction to his book.
Speaker 1: But Plantard went to incredible lengths to sell this, didn't
he Blans.
Speaker 2: He and his friend, a man named Philippe de Cherrez,
actually forged documents. They typed up these fake genealogies on
old paper to make them look authentic. They created fake
historical records. And then this is the most brazen part.
They walked into the National Library in Paris, a BiblioTech Nationale,
and they physically planted these files in the archives.
Speaker 1: He planted them like, just snuck them onto the shelves
when no one was looking.
Speaker 2: Yes, they just slid their forged papers into the existing folders,
so that later when researchers went to check on his story,
they would find the documents. Oh look, here's the proof,
it's right here in the National Library.
Speaker 1: That is analog hacking. It's brilliant and it is totally insane.
Speaker 2: It is I mean, honestly, you have to respect the
hustle that is commitment to the bit. It really is,
and it creates this perfect feedback loop of false information.
But then the story jumps across the English Channel to Britain.
A scriptwriter for the BBC named Henry Lincoln is on
vacation in France and he reads Dessaid's book and he
is hooked, completely hooked. He becomes obsessed. He thinks he
sees hidden codes and geometric patterns in the parchments that
Plantard forged.
Speaker 1: He's finding patterns that aren't really there.
Speaker 2: He is, and he takes the creative leap that changes
everything forever. He looks at the medieval French term for
the holy grail, sangril, right, and he breaks the words
differently and says sangreal holy grail. He reinterprets it as sangriel,
royal blood, royal blood, and suddenly, in a flash of inspiration,
the treasure isn't a cup, it's not gold, It's a blood.
Speaker 1: Line, the blood line of Christ.
Speaker 2: Henry Lincoln, along with two co authors, writes the book
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in the early eighties,
and they argue that Baron Gerisagnier didn't find treasure. He
found proof that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married, had
a child, and that their sacred blood line became the
mayor of Vingie, Kings of France.
Speaker 1: And that the money Sonya had was blackmail money from
the Vatican. Pay me to stay quiet, or I will
tell the world that Jesus had a kid. And your
entire religion is built on a lie.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It explains the money, it explains his secrecy, it
explains his defiance toward the bishop. It fits perfectly. Yeah,
if you completely ignore the fact that the foundational documents
were forged by a wannabe king named Peer Plantard in
the nineteen sixties, it is.
Speaker 1: Just mind blowing to trace that chain of events. A
priest scam some money, his lover keeps the secret. A
hotel owner invents a treasure story to sell rooms, a
narcissist hijacks that story to pretend he's a king, and
then a writer turns that into Jesus had.
Speaker 2: A baby, and millions and millions of people believe it
is true. It is a master class in how myths evolve.
You layer a lie on top of a scam, on
top of a hope.
Speaker 1: Well, let's bring it all back down to earth, because
we promised everyone the grubby truth.
Speaker 2: You did so.
Speaker 1: If there was no Blanche of castile treasure, and if
the Jesus bloodline was a fantasy made up by Pierre Plantard,
where did Sonia really get the money? We need to
follow the money.
Speaker 2: And the answer isn't in a crypt and it's not
a secret dossier. It's in the paperwork, the boring stuff,
the boring stuff. We have Signier's account books, we have
the records on the ecclesiastical trial. We know from post
office records that Marie was picking up one hundred and
fifty letters a day, one.
Speaker 1: Hundred and fifty letters a day in a village of
three hundred people. That is a red flag the size
of the Eiffel Tower, it is, and.
Speaker 2: The contents of those letters reveal the whole scam. Soignier
was engaged in a practice called trafficking in masses.
Speaker 1: Okay, we need to break that down. What does that
actually mean? Trafficking in masses? How does that generate millions
of francs?
Speaker 2: So in the Catholic church, a person can pay a
priest to say a mass for a specific intention. Usually
it's for the soul of a deceased loved one to
help them get out of purgatory faster, and it's standard
practice to offer a small stipend a fee to the
priest for this service. At the time, the going rate
was about one and a half.
Speaker 1: Francs, so lunch money. It's not a lot, right.
Speaker 2: It's negligible, but there are very strict rules. Canon law
says a priest can only set payment for a maximum
of three masses per day, because that's all he can
physically say. You can't get paid for a mass you
don't actually perform.
Speaker 1: So how to son your scale it?
Speaker 2: He turns it into a mail order business, an international
mail order fraud. He buys a directory of every Catholic parish,
convent and hospital across Europe. He then places advertisements in
religious magazines in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, all over France.
Speaker 1: And what did the ads say?
Speaker 2: He styles himself as a poor priest and a poor
village with a church on the verge of collapse, who
will pray for your salvation. He creates this elaborate sob story.
Speaker 1: He basically invented crowdfunding.
Speaker 2: He did, and because he was a priest, people trusted
him implicitly. They sent him money orders, Please say a
mass for my late husband, Please pray for my sick child.
The money just poured in. We have records showing tens
of thousands of.
Speaker 1: Requests, but he couldn't possibly say all those masses.
Speaker 2: It would have taken him hundreds of years to say
all the masses he was paid for. He received payment
for something like one hundred thousand masses. He just took
the money, he pocketed it, and he threw the requests
in a pile.
Speaker 1: It was fraud, pure and simple. He was running a
Ponzi scheme with prayers.
Speaker 2: That is perfect analogy. He was selling a spiritual product
that he had absolutely no intention of ever delivering.
Speaker 1: And that explains the scale of the wealth.
Speaker 2: Exactly one and a half francs isn't much, but one
and a half francs times one hundred thousand, that's one
hundred and fifty thousand francs. That builds the villa, that
buys the lamas, that buys the rum from Martinique.
Speaker 1: And that explains the secrecy. It all clicks into place.
Speaker 2: Yes, why did he refuse to tell the bishop where
the money came from? Because I found a pot of
gold is a romantic story. Even I found a hidden
tomb is mysterious and exciting. But I am systematically ripping
off pious widows across Europe via mail fraud that.
Speaker 1: Gets you excommunicated and thrown in jail.
Speaker 2: It is a shameful, sordid, grubby crime.
Speaker 1: And this explains Marie's behavior after his death too.
Speaker 2: Yes, why did Marie lie all those years? Why did
she tell Noel Korber about a great treasure? Because the
truth was a crime. By calling it treasure, she made
it almost legalish in France. If you find treasure on
your own land, it's yours. If you steal money, you're
a criminal. She was protecting Sonya's legacy in her own safety.
Speaker 1: And then later she lied to Korbu just to ensure
he would take care of her in her old age.
She was, as the source says, singing for her supper.
Speaker 2: She was a survivor. She was smart. She knew Korbu
wouldn't pay off her debts and look after her if
she just said, oh, by the way, the money's all gone,
and it was all stolen anyway. She had to promise
him a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,
just to keep a roof over her head.
Speaker 1: It's actually quite tragic when you look at it that way.
Everyone in this story is just desperate for something.
Speaker 2: It's a story of human longing, isn't it. Sonnier is
desperate for status and wealth. Marie is desperate for security,
Corbu is desperate to make his mark. Plantard is desperate
to be royalty.
Speaker 1: We all want to be more than we are, and
we are.
Speaker 2: All willing to believe beautiful lies to get there.
Speaker 1: And yet tens of thousands of people still visit rendles
Chateau every single year, even though we know about the
mass trafficking, even though we know for a fact Plantard
forged the documents, even though the da Vinci Code is fiction,
people still go.
Speaker 2: Because, as the source material so perfectly puts it, who
needs the truth when we can have a mystery, right,
There's a deep psychological need in us to believe in
something bigger. People want to stand in that weird little church,
look at that creepy devil statue and feel a shiver.
Go down their spine. They want the world to be magical.
They don't want the world to be about accounting fraud.
Speaker 1: Confirmation bias plays a huge role here, doesn't it. Once
you're looking for a mystery.
Speaker 2: It's everything. Absolutely. Once you believe there is a secret,
everything looks like a clue. The devil statue isn't just
a piece of bad art, it's a code. The money
bag in the fresco isn't a brazen confession of greed,
it's a map. The weirdly patterned floor tiles are celestial coordinates.
You see what you want to see.
Speaker 1: It is just fascinating that this small time grifter, just
by being greedy and having a really good poker face,
inadvertently created a religion shaking global conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: He was the tree that hides the forest. As the
documentary so nicely puts it, the real story isn't about
what he found, It's about what we as a culture
projected onto him. He provided the blank canvas a rich
priest in a poor village, and for seventy years we've
been painting our own obsessions onto it.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us?
Speaker 2: Then?
Speaker 1: What's the takeaway?
Speaker 2: I think it's a powerful reminder to always question the narrative.
We love a good story, we are hardwired for it.
We love the idea of hidden bloodlines and ancient treasures.
But usually the real answer is much more grubby. As
you said earlier, it's usually just about human nature, about money,
and about deception. It's Okham's razor. The simplest explanation he
stole the money is almost always the right one.
Speaker 1: But you have to admit, standing in that village, looking
out from the tour Magdala over the valley, it does
feel like something special happened there.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, the village is still there, The bizarre atmosphere
is still there. The story, even though we know it's
a lie, has changed the world. It changes literature, It
changed tourism, It changed how millions of people view history
in a way. Sonier did achieve immortality.
Speaker 1: That's a great point.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be a bishop, but he became a
legend instead, just not in the way he ever could
have expected.
Speaker 1: He wanted to be the King of Wren, and now
he's the undisputed king of conspiracies. Before we wrap up,
I want to leave our listener with a final thought,
even though we've pretty thoroughly debunked the gold in the bloodline,
the magical atmosphere of Rendles Chateau remains. The mystery itself
became the real treasure. The entire economy of that village
today runs on the mystery.
Speaker 2: That's the great paradox, isn't it. The lie became far
more valuable than the truth ever could have been. If
he had just been a rich priest who got caught,
no one would care today.
Speaker 1: And so here is a question for you, the listener,
and I want you to really think about this. Put
yourself in Noel Corbu's shoes. It's nineteen fifty three. You
spend years of your life and your savings caring for
this elderly woman, expecting a fortune. She dies, you find
out the secret was a lie. You are broke. You
have a family to feed and a crumbling mansion to maintain.
Would you have told the truth and lost everything? Or
would you have done exactly what he did, invent a
spectacular treasure story to save yourself.
Speaker 2: It's a real test of integrity versus survival. It's so
easy for us to judge him from our chairs, but
in that moment.
Speaker 1: That's a tough call, it really is. Let us know
what you think. Would you spin the yarn, drop us
a comment, or send us a message.
Speaker 2: I would love to hear the answers to that one.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Thrilling Threads. Keep pulling out those
loose ends. You never know what you'll unravel until next
time