In the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château, a special place is reserved for a firm called Giscard from Toulouse. Four generations of Giscards specialized in the manufacturing of religious ornaments. Giscard delivered almost all of the ornaments during Saunière’s restoration of the Church of St. Mary-Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château. In 2005, Giscard handed its archives over to the city of Toulouse. As a result we can now have a look at what their collections looked like. At the same time it takes away part of the mystery. Many of the alleged anomalies in Saunière’s refurbishments of the church appear to be statues and ornaments straight out of a catalogue. Now, the game has begun to discover what Saunière’s additions to the original design really were and what they could signify. From 11,000 feet it appears that only the statue of the crouched devil and the large fresco were made specifically to order, where the latter was a sculpted copy of a picture in a well-known book of the time.

The catalogue can be downloaded (50 mb) by clicking this link.

This catalogue has become available through the tireless work of Jean-Pierre Garcia, my valued colleague-webmaster of www.rennes-le-chateau-archive.com. The catalogue was copied with permission from the private collections of Franck Daffos and Didier Héricart de Thury.