«Du nom de Narbonne et exemples d’interprétation de mots gaulois par les racines saxonnes de l’anglais»

 

How to fake… even to the last detail

A series of documents have been with us since the beginning of the enigma of Rennes-le-Château, from the time when Gérard de Sède wrote “L’or de Rennes”, in 1967. Since then, the case has been made more and more explicitly that we are in front of several faked documents. But can we really conclude that all documents have been faked solely so that the author could propose his hypothesis and the book in which he penned it down? Though at first this may seem tempting, in retrospect it is clear that this cannot be the case. The fabrication of so many faked documents takes an enormous amount of time. Furthermore, he would have to start his work several years before he could even consider transforming all the faked material into the basis for a book. Unless, of course, this endeavour had been planned for many decades… But in that case, the creators of those documents knew that the “experts” would soon discover their game… so? All of this for nothing? Just a bit of “fun”?

Perhaps… unless, of course, the work involved in creating the faked documents has had the desired result… which would thus equate with the situation in which we find ourselves now. For, in truth, even though certain documents have been labelled a fake, the interest in the mystery has remained, and judging from the endless books that are currently appearing on the subject, the fact that these fakes have kindled a genuine interest, cannot be denied…

When we look at the faked documents themselves, it is clear that each of these is crafted from a historical basis. But to this, other “details” have been added that are either totally untrue, or unverifiable. To this very day, no-one has ever tried to measure what truths and which lies they contain. Perhaps, indeed, we are faced with a type of document that merely served as a launching pad: once the mystery had taken off, it was no longer required, and thus becomes useless for the remainder of the mission. Only when the rocket is on the launch pad, are they of vital importance.

Many years have passed since the documents were first launched in the public domain. Those researchers that are still working on the material today are very few and far between… One of these is Thierry Garnier, whose analysis of the famous parchments that Saunière allegedly discovered in his church, has revealed that the origin of these documents is more complex than whether they are genuine documents, found by Saunière, or modern fakes, created by Philippe de Chérisey, the “assistant” of Pierre Plantard in the promotion of the Priory of Sion. Finally, let us note that this enormous quantity of documents stems from “authors”, most of whom have used pseudonyms, and of which only a few have been identified…

… and a genuine manuscript by Henri Boudet

As a welcome change, in the middle of all of this creative authorship, there are some works that were cited from the very beginning by Gérard de Sède, of whom the authors are clearly established and which can therefore not be easily dismissed as “modern fakes”. One of these is the manuscript by Henri Boudet, priest of Rennes-les-Bains and a close friend of Bérenger Saunière. The work is titled « Du nom de Narbonne et exemples d’interprétation de mots gaulois par les racines saxonnes de l’anglais », or « On the name of Narbonne and examples of how to interpret Gaul words through the Saxon origins of English”.
The work was never published and has remained a manuscript; the date of writing is unclear. Once again, Boudet offers us an insight into how his mind works, once again using phonetics and word games, so lavishly used in his well-known book, « La vraie Langue Celtique et le Cromleck de Rennes-les-Bains », or “The True Celtic Tongue and the Cromlech of Rennes-les-Bains”, published in 1886.
Some consider the “Name of Narbonne” to be the first written work by Boudet, whereas for others it was the last. Whenever it was, this work sits within the same framework of the “True Celtic Tongue” and thus deserves to be studied by the researchers interested in the mystery of Rennes-le-Château and its annexes.

The work contains 19 pages, all written and without any illustration. The work has many interesting aspects. Of course, it is a manuscript written by Boudet. Furthermore, we need to ask why the manuscript was never published, or why it never appeared in any of the magazines or publications that regularly ran articles by Boudet.
Franck Marie has produced a version of the manuscript in which certain small drawings (a spider and a small tomb similar to that of the famous “Poussin tomb”, which once stood near Arques) have been added, as if they are part of a cipher. It quickly became clear that these little illustrations were created as a little game, with F. Marie finding himself on the receiving end. But perhaps we should also ask whether perhaps there was something more to it, whereby someone tried to “show” something to F. Mark, a possibility that perhaps needed to be “extracted” from it, by “inserting” some drawings… some “illumination”.
Irrelevant of the latter suggestion, the document is represented here in its original – French – format, to serve as a tool for those researchers and interested parties, to make use of at their own liberty.

André Douzet