Crusade Against the Grail - Rennes-le-Chateau Research and ...

176 PART FOUR
fleeing or resorted to the endura; they wanted to be an example to the world of
how one should die for his country and his faith. Frequently, Cathar doctrine has
been compared—to denigrate it—with the pessimism of Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche. Strange pessimism, that can only be compared in the history of
humanity with the heroism of the first Christian martyrs! Catharism was no more
pessimistic than early Christianity, which it attempted to imitate.
At the start of the day, the castle surrendered to the "armed fraternity." The
archbishop of Narbonne demanded that the Perfect Ones renounce their beliefs.
Two hundred and five men and women—among them Bertran En Marti and
Esclarmonde de Perelha, preferred death in the blazing pyres that Pierre Amelii
had prepared on the place that is still called the camp des cremats, the field of
fires.
The knights were dragged to Carcassonne in heavy chains and thrown in the
dungeon under the same tower where, thirty years earlier, Raimon Roger, the
Trencavel de Carcassonne, was poisoned, and Raimon de Termes perished so
miserably. A few decades later, the Franciscan friar Bernard Delicieux succeeded
in getting the last survivors out of that tomb in the Tower of the Inquisition.
Peire-Roger de Mirepoix was the only one who could abandon the castle a
free man. He took with him his engineer, doctor, and all the gold and silver that
were found there, and headed for Sault, to the house of Esclarmonde de Alion, the
niece of the great Esclarmonde, and from there to the castle of Montgaillard,
where he died at a very old age. Until his death, Peire-Roger was the secret guide
of the outlawed knights of Occitania, knights who found their last refuge and their
deaths in the caves of Ornolac.
The night of the fall of Montsegur, a fire was seen on the snowy summit of
Bidorta. It was not an execution pyre, but a fire of happiness. Four Cathars, of
whom three are known to us—Amiel Aicart, Poitevin, and Hugo—were signaling
the Perfecti of Montsegur, who were about to die, that the Mani was safe.
From the documents of the Inquisitors of Carcassonne, it is surmised that
these four Pure Ones, covered in wool blankets, descended on ropes from the
summit of the promontory to the bottom of the Lasset gorge to hand the treasure of
the heretics to a Son of Belissena, Pons-Arnaud de Castellum Verdunum, in the
Sabarthes.