Montségur

by Emily Monaco | 2011

For five years, I've been spending my summers in Paziols, a small village on the border of the Aude and Languedoc-Roussillon regions of southern France, too far west to be anywhere near the glitzy Côte d'Azur and too far east to be part of the surf culture that is French Basque Country. Instead, hidden amongst the mountains and valleys of the French Pyrenees, Paziols simply exists, the way it has for centuries, amongst château-topped hills and legends of knights and treasure.

This is Cathar country, the part of France where the religious Cathars—Christians who called themselves and one another "Good Men"—lived, refused to fight and were eventually killed for their beliefs, beliefs that hard work and love should be held above all, and that power and social status could not coexist with this way of life. The châteaux that dot this countryside are marketed as "châteaux cathares,"—Cathar châteaux—but the locals here know better.

I've visited several of these castles over my summers here—Aguilar, Queribus and Peyrepertuse are nearby and easy to scale in an afternoon, with incredible views into the valleys and towns below. When a local friend of mine cites her favorite, Montségur, a two-hour's drive away, I'm more than happy to come along for the ride.

The scenery changes as we drive towards the castle, up into the mountains, where a strange mist seems to cover everything, even in the hot and usually dry days of July. Rows of vines and trees are replaced with thick green forests and steeper drops off the side of the road. We drive until I have no idea where we are, and still we continue, until we come to Montségur.

The town that shares the château's name is quaint and real at the same time, with houses that seem far too cute to actually exist, and people wandering, enveloped in the nonchalance that comes with not knowing how perfect your world is to an outside eye, as though to prove that they can and do... exist, that is.

We wander into a shop called Esclarmonde—Catalan for "light up the world"—and I allow myself to pretend, for a moment, that I believe in the restorative powers that crystals and semi-precious stones promise in this tiny world filled with incense. It's easy when you're surrounded by it, as though the rest of the world has disappeared into a puff of heavily perfumed sandalwood smoke.

We drive up to the base of the mountain, but the château is entirely hidden by fog; if you didn't know, you'd have no idea it was there. We know, though, and as though it's hidden just to beckon us, we start the march up the side of the mountain, quickly growing out of breath and wondering how much higher into the mist we'll have to climb before reaching our goal.

By the time we arrive, a group of people is already sitting silently in a wide semicircle in the middle of what would have been the entry hall, if the château still stood. As it is, it's just several half-walls in a haphazard rectangle at the summit of this mountain; it's lucky, then, that Fabrice Chambon can fill in the blanks with words.

Fabrice is an attaché culturel at Montségur, and his experience in archaeology and history make him the perfect person to bring the Cathars to life, especially considering that written archives from their time do not exist.

Tolosa is a small town that is unremarkable in the way that only small, provincial towns can be: I, as a foreigner, exclaim over the most trivial of things: the way that the laundry hangs out the window of the apartments looking over the parking lot, the ETA graffiti on the tunnel that lies on our path to the local market (our destination).

"Everything we know has come from the Cathar's protectors," he says, standing in the middle of a "Cathar château," which was actually owned, used and defended by Catholics, as were the other "Cathar châteaux" in the area. These Catholics defied Rome in protecting the Cathars from those who considered them to be heretics, even during a siege on Montségur in 1243, when 10,000 troops surrounded the castle for over a year.

"It was only at Montségur that there were last-minute Cathars," Fabrice explains, noting that more than 200 Catholics converted to Catharism once the château had fallen to Rome, even in the face of certain death. The crowd is silent.

"What's good about Montségur is that we know things, but not everything," Fabrice continues. He tells stories about brave souls who died for their beliefs, of men, women and children who refused to renounce their religion, no matter how much they suffered. I'm certain I'm not the only one who didn't know this morning that I would be having an impromptu history lesson, but the entire crowd is hanging on Fabrice's every word, and it's a constant battle for me between trying to scrawl down everything he says and soaking it up as I watch him bring these ruins to life.

Perhaps the most interesting Cathar legend to modern-day travelers is a mythical "Cathar treasure," lost during the 1243 siege. But what was this treasure? No one knows... perhaps money or gold; a report of three men sneaking out in the night and burying it in a cave has made its rounds with the old wives' tales of the area, but Fabrice doesn't seem convinced.

Of a château that was once 80% wood, there is very little to see today; "just that little wisp of wind remains." As though he's cued it, the region's infamous Tramontagne wind picks up and whips through what were once windows and doors to wrap around us. I catch a stranger's eye and sense the same wonder and awe in him as I feel, hugging my sweatshirt closer to me.

"It's the only thing they couldn't steal from us," Fabrice says. It's as though we can see the wind itself, beneath the mist that looms above and around us. "Faith was the Cathar treasure."

He grins as he watches us calculate, sure that some would rather not relinquish a legendary treasure. As we get lost in our own thoughts, he leads us out behind the château, to where we can peer over the sheer cliffside that the Catholic troops climbed during their siege to look into the valley. The wind surrounds our group without threatening us, as though to remind us it's still there; if I don't look too carefully at the anachronisms of the modern world around me—cameras, polar fleeces, iPhones—I can imagine this cliff in another time, when being 1059 meters in the air wasn't frightening but safe, when the pacifist Cathars would have chosen these strong walls to save them from the certain death at the hands of people who hardly understood what they were fighting for.

We climb back down the pedestrian-friendly side. My hiking boots slip and side along the mud, but I tell myself it's nothing compared to the sheer drop on the other side. By the time we arrive at the bottom, the mist has cleared; the château is visible from the ground, towering high above us. As we drive back down through the green forests, back to the garrigue that I know so well in Paziols, I allow the visions of Montségur to slip into my memory, to save for another day.

See more photos on Monaco's flickr page >>
Read more tales of food on her food blog, Tomato Kumato >>

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