The Winter Ghosts (23 page)

By 1328, the medieval Christian heresy now referred to as Catharism had been all but destroyed. After the fall of Montségur in 1244 and the fortress of Quéribus in 1255, the remaining Cathars were driven back into the high valleys of the Pyrenees. Many Cathar priests -
parfait
s and
parfaites -
were executed, or driven into Lombardy or Spain.

Despite this, the early fourteenth-century saw a remarkable renaissance of Cathar communities in the upper Ariège, principally around Tarascon and Ax-les-Thermes (then known as Ax) and key villages, such as Montaillou. The Inquisitional Courts in Pamiers (for the Ariège) and Carcassonne (for the Languedoc) continued to persecute and hunt down the heretics (as they were considered). Those taken were imprisoned in dungeons known as Murs. Principal in this was Jacques Fournier, a Cistercian monk, who rose quickly through the Catholic ranks, becoming bishop of Pamiers in 1317, of Mirepoix in 1326, a cardinal in 1327, and, finally, Pope in Avignon in 1334, as Benedict XII. It is an irony that Fournier’s Inquisition Register, detailing all interrogations and depositions made to the courts on his watch, is one of the most important surviving historical records about Cathar experience in fourteenth-century Languedoc. The last Cathar
parfait
, Guillaume Bélibaste, was burnt at the stake in 1321.

During the vicious final years of the extermination of the Cathars, whole villages were arrested - such as at Montaillou in the spring and autumn of 1308. There is evidence that entire communities took refuge in the labyrinth network of caves of the Haute Vallée of the Pyrenees, the most infamous example being in the caves of Lombrives, just south of Tarascon-sur-Ariège. Hunted down by the soldiers in the spring of 1328, hundreds of men, women and children fled into the caves. The soldiers of the Inquisition realised that, rather than continue to play cat-and-mouse, they could use traditional siege tactics and block the entrance, bringing the game to an end. This they did, entombing everyone inside in some kind of medieval Masada.

It was only 250 years later, when the troops of the Count of Foix-Sabarthès, the man who was to become King Henry IV of France, excavated the caves that the tragedy was revealed. Whole families were discovered - their skeletons lying side by side, bones fused together, their last precious objects beside them - and finally brought down from the stone refuge that had become a living tomb.

It is this grisly fragment of Cathar history that was the inspiration for
The Winter Ghosts.
¹
The village of Nulle does not exist.

For those readers who want to know more about the final days of Catharism, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic
Montaillou
, first published in 1978, is the most complete and detailed explanation of the complications of life, faith and tradition in fourteenth-century Ariège.
De l’Héritage des Cathares
(available in translation as
The Inheritance of the Cathars
) by the French mystic and Tarasconais Cathar historian of the 1930s and 1940s, Antonin Gadal, is well worth dipping into. René Weis’
The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290-1329,
Anne Brenon’s
Pèire Authier: Le Dernier des Cathares
and Greg Mosse’s
Secrets of the Labyrinth
are all excellent.

Kate Mosse Toulouse, April 2009

Kate Mosse is an author and broadcaster. Her best-selling books include, amongst others,
Labyrinth
and
Sepulchre
. Kate is the Co-Founder and Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction and in 2009 was invited to be an Ambassador for the Aude Tourist Board, the region of France where much of her fiction is set. Kate lives with her family in Chichester and Carcasonne.

It was so cold in Paris in January 1891 that the beggars on the streets, the vagabonds and working girls in the Place Clichy said that the sun had died.

The Seine froze over. The poor and the homeless were dying, which prompted the reluctant authorities to open shelters in gymnasiums, shooting galleries, schools and public baths. The biggest dormitory was in the
Palais des Arts Libéraux
in the Champs-de-Mars, in the shadow of Monsieur Eiffel’s magnificent tower. Intended to symbolise all that was splendid, patriotic, modern about the Third Republic, the metal structure instead found itself presiding over dull, dark and soundless winter days. Masses of people huddled like refugees, fugitives from the cold. The scenes were reminiscent, the shopkeepers said, of the dark days of the Franco-Prussian war when German boots marched in the Champs-Elysées.

George Watson, formerly of the Royal Sussex Regiment, thought back to his own fighting days, to the heat of the Transvaal in December 1880, when they had subdued the uprising. Three months from start to finish. He had spent his twenty-first birthday with a rifle in his hand.

Throughout France the story of this winter was the same. In Carcassonne, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the River Aude burst its banks sweeping away the most vulnerable
quartiers
of Trivalle and Paicherou. In the Ariège, the villages were locked in by ice and snow. Even in England, he read in an edition of
The Times
some seven days old, a great blizzard had swept through the south in the spring.

Nature was fighting back.

But, for George Watson, 1891 was a year of wonder. It was a year of unaccustomed experiences. He arrived in Paris in the pale and wet spring, which came late that year, and stayed during the brief, bullying heat of summer. His father had died the previous year - a hero of Khartoum, he had received a full soldier’s send off - and George would soon have to take up his new responsibilities in England. But, for a few months, he was a free man. He was in France to come to a decision about his future and was in no hurry. Having resigned his commission, George set about transforming himself from a soldier into a
flaneur
, an artist, a philosopher. He had nothing in common with the poets and the artists and composers about whom he read in the newspapers, and he knew it, but he was determined to dip his toe in the water and fully experience the alternative, teeming, headlong metropolis that was Paris.

His father had not approved of opera. Now the old man was dead, George intended to make up for the lost years of music by attending every opera for which he could acquire a ticket. He was there at the premiere of Massenet’s
Griselde
, though found the bawdy tunes of Bizet’s
Carmen
more to his liking. He saw Meyerbeer’s
Les Huguenots
, Donizetti’s
Don Giovanni
, Rossinni’s
William Tell
, Ambroise Thomas’
Hamlet,
Halèvy’s
La Juive
and Gounoud’s
Faust.
And, though it was not all to his taste, he found himself infected by what they were calling the
fin-de-siècle
spirit
.
As George sat with his gloves and his top hat in the Palais Garnier, admiring the feathered adornments and white skin of the ladies around him, he vowed that he would never forget what it was to be young. How he would treasure these memories as stories to tell his children in years to come. How at the
Comédie-Française
passions stimulated by
Thermidor
, Victorien Sardou’s violently anti-Robespierre play, had been so intense that the Minister of the Interior had been forced to ban performances. How, when Wagner’s
Lohengrin
was staged at the Palais-Garnier
,
it was whistled and booed off stage, just as
Tannhaüser
had been some thirty years earlier.

In the drawing rooms overlooking the Parc Monceau
,
he visited friends of his father. Their wives and daughters were reading
L’Argent
, the latest in Zola’s epic
Les Rougon-Macquart
series, and George listened with a polite expression to their literary thoughts. Later, though, he sipped absinthe in a favourite café on the rue d’Amsterdam and read less socially acceptable books purchased from Edmond Bailly’s
Librairie de l’art indépendant
in the Chaussée d’Antin. Baudelaire had been dead more than twenty years, yet his words lived still in the salons and taverns of Montmartre where George found himself increasingly drawn. Not only for his poetry, full of raw-boned witches and blood red moons, juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay and horror. But also for his translations of the morbid poems of the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe.

George knew he did not belong, even on the periphery, of this
demi-monde
. He was a tourist. But he considered it part of his essential education and knew that, when he returned to England and proposed to Anne, as he supposed he should, marriage would put a stop to such indulgences. It would change things, as his father’s death had changed things. George could see how his life would go and was happy enough to go along it with. A good life, a solid English life, the life he had been born to. A son first he hoped, also to be called George, a son who would follow in his footsteps. A strong, brave boy, destined for the Army like him and his father before him. After that, he hoped for a daughter, Sophie or perhaps Fredericka, who would play the piano and share his love of books and opera and nature.

It was at the thought of these imagined children that George spent more months in Paris than originally intended, shoring up his memories for the dusty future. But finally the sojourn reached its end. As the scent of autumn was crisp in the air, George accepted it was time to move on. Despite his strenuous efforts at literary self-improvement, in truth his preference remained for the adventure stories of Mr Rider Haggard and Jules Verne. George had read
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
several times, seeing himself in the explorer-scholar role of Professor Von Hardwigg, and thought that the more violent landscape of the south of France might afford him some insight. He had seen dust in the Transvaal, he had seen heat, but he yet had to experience the claustrophobia of subterranean worlds where he felt his imagination might flourish. It was this that decided him upon the south where, he had been told, some of the largest networks of caves in Europe were to be found. Many were still closed, but the largest of them, Lombrives in Ussat-les-Bains, just south of the mountain village of Tarascon-sur-Ariège, had been excavated and was open to visitors by appointment. From there, he intended to travel into Spain, before returning to England in time for Christmas.