The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau (Keys of Antiquity)
Gerard de Sede born Lioux, France 5 June 1921; married Sophie; died 29 May 2004. De Sede was responsible for introducing the world to the mystery of Rennes-le-Chatteau, a real life historical detective story, set in the Languedoc in south-west France.  In 1967, de Sede wrote L'Or de Rennes, ou La Vie insolite de Berenger Sauniere, cure de Rennes-le-Chateau ("The Gold of Rennes, or The Strange Life of Bereger Sauniere, Priest of Rennes-le-Chatteau"), which later appeared in the J'ai Lu paperback series as Le Tresor maudit de Rennes-le-Chateau (translated as "The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau". De Sede was initially published as a surrealist writer in 1941 during the German occupation of France, and at the age of only 21 he was a member of the Surrealist group known as "La Main a Plume". De Sede himself has named the group in trucating a phrase from Rimbaud, "La main a plume vaut la main a charrue" ("the hand that writes is equal to the hand that ploughs"). His L'Incendie habitable ("The Inhabitable Fire") appeared in 1943 as the third of 12 issues of the group's periodical.  He received 2 citations for his activity with the Forces Francaises de I'Interieur (FFI) during the liberation of Paris. Following a wide ranging career in the 1940s and 1950s, which embraced newspaper selling, tunnel-boring and journalism, he became an "agrictulteur" in 1956. Several of his publications, from the 1960s onwards, were written with his wife, Sophie.  More recently, de Sede looked critically at the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. In Rennes-le-Chateau: le dossier, les impostures, les phantasmes, les hypotheses (1988) he surveyed some of the publications which had appeared over the previous 20 years, analysing the theories and their proponents.  Through his more than 40 works, de Sede's writings on "alternative history" have remained controversial. Some authors have even suggested that the entire Rennes-le-Chateau "mystery" may not be real at all, but instead an elaborate prank hatched in the 1950s by de Sede and a coterie of friends. Whatever the secret may be, as de Sede himself pointed out in Le Tresor maudit, quoting Andre Breton, "The imaginary is something that tends to become true".  (Extracts from Marcus Williamson's obituary - http://news.independent.co.uk)