The accounting of January 1896

From HERE.

The material is distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

With many thanks for Mariano in giving me permission to reproduce his excellent researches!

For some time, Saunière compiles daily and meticulously in a notebook in which he keeps a note of correspondence. The pages are divided into five columns: in the first, the name of the sender or recipient of the letter is noted; in the second, an "E" or an "R" appear depending on whether the letter was sent (Envoyée) or received (Reçue); in the third column the reason is recorded; in the last two columns appear the month and the day of reference. Here is an excerpt from the three pages related to the first month of the year:

The reading of the register allows us to accurately reconstruct the mechanism put in place by Saunière. In the first half of the month he sends a series of letters in which he proposes to celebrate one or more masses in the face of an offer. Next to the recipients of the proposals, writes out an E and the word 'Proposal of masses'. The list of 18 proposals he makes during January 1896 is easily taken out of the register; as you can see, they stop at the 18th of the month:

Following the proposals made, some send an offer for the celebration of one or more masses: Saunière annotes, next to the benefactor, an R and the inscription "Payment of masses". As you can see, some payments come following requests made in the previous month while others (this is the case of Valez, Sigé, Reynes and Mario) are subsequent to the proposal made during the current month. Once the offers have been received, Saunière shall send a letter of receipt to the benefactor on the same or the next day (in the list, the benefactors to whom he sends the receipt are indicated by an asterisk): In the face of 18 proposals, 13 benefactors (mostly priests) send him money to celebrate masses.

As you have seen, the correspondence notebook contains the annotations on the receipt of payments but not the number of requests. It is the notebook of the masses that provides us with this information: here Saunière records how many celebrations are ordered from him and at what cost. Here is an excerpt from this notebook:

The correctly recorded masses are 261. If you compare the payments received and the masses actually reported, you immediately notice that the names are missing: those of Degua, Pons, Cantegril and Cazal. Comparing the list with that of the month's income and expenditure, we can trace how many masses have been made to "disappear" by Saunière. Among the revenues of the month of January 1896 are, in fact:

We can therefore reconstruct the four lines that Saunière did not write down in the notebook of the masses (assuming a fixed cost of 1 franc):

To the 261 registered masses must therefore be added to the non-registered masses, ranging from a minimum of 95 to a maximum of 143: in January alone, therefore, Saunière receives payments for a number of masses ranging from 356 to 404, for a total of about 480 francs. If we continue in the analysis of Saunière's accounts, we see that 63 are missing from the notebook of the masses for the month of February of the same year. In other cases, when he entrusts some of the ordered masses to brothers, the figures shown in the mass notebook are missing from the income of the month: this is the case of the celebrations requested in February by Pech, Lasserre and Escargueil, which do not appear in the revenue. Other figures appear exclusively among the revenue, and not in the correspondence notebook nor in the mass notebook: these are in all probability generic donations, sometimes very substantial (in February 1896 they amount to 180 francs, in January 1897 they will rise to as many as 300!). The documentary proof is overwhelming: the one set up by Saunière is a real traffic of masses; as seen from the analysis of his notebooks, the parish priest does not limit himself to personally collecting requests, recording revenue and (until 1894) to taking note of the masses actually celebrated, but is actively explicitly requesting gifts and offerings throughout France, and even abroad: he sends to the religious newspapers of different European countries a series of announcements in which he invites the faithful to send him money for the church and offers himself to celebrate masses by suffrage of the deceased; there are news of his announcements throughout the country, but also in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and even in some Italian magazines₁. Jean Jacques Bedu, who was able to analyse Saunière's original documents, calculated that between July 9, 1892 and September 30, 1896 the priest collected, thanks to the sale of 7294 masses, about 9188 francs – and it should be taken into account that the figure does not include the gifts received, which should be calculated separately.

1. René Descadeillas, Mythologie du Trésor de Rennes, Editions Collot, 1974 (1991), p. 45. Among the French magazines, we can mention La Semaine religieuse, La Croix, L'Éclair, L'Express du Midi, L'Univers and Le Télégramme (Jean-Jacques Bedu, Rennes-le-Château, autopsie d'un mythe, Loubatières, Portet-sur-Garonne 2002, p. 131).