Henri Boudet, the Abbe' of Rennes-les-Bains (which neighbors Rennes-le-Chateau) who wrote The True Celtic Language and the Cromlech at Rennes-les-bains,[2] may have been the "brains" behind Sauniere. Lincoln thinks his book may offer the key to the mystery [3]. Boudet appears to argue in the book the silly thesis that the Celts spoke Anglo-Saxon, and that it - English, in effect - was the language which was spoken by Noah's sons before the Tower of Babel. But David Wood and Henry Lincoln conclude that the book may be averring something else - that perhaps there was a universal language before the Deluge: Number (or Measure). And that the "key" to the "Cromlech" of Rennes-les-Bains might be the old English mile [4]. Lincoln believes that metrology may play an important part in the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery. In any case, other authors have noted that Boudet died under strange circumstances, and that his book may have been sought out and destroyed by the Bishop de Beausejour. Boudet, a linguistic scholar, would have been a logical choice for Sauniere to approach with his curious Latin parchments.

There are a few grisly murders that have taken place in the area to add to the air of mystery[5]. One was that of the old priest Jean-Antoine-Maurice Gelis, who was parish priest for Coustaussa. Toward the end of his life he became a paranoid hermit and recluse; the only person he would admit to his presybtery was his niece, to bring him food. Despite his absurd precautions, someone surprised him on All Saints' Eve in 1897, bashed him with some fire tongs, delivered four blows from an axe, and then reverently laid the corpse on the ground with the hands crossed over the chest. Whoever it was ransacked the room, but took no money. A team of researchers found three corpses in Sauniere's garden in 1956, all of them shot. Were they World War II victims? Or something else..? Noel Corbu, who took care of Marie Denarnaud after her paralyzing stroke, and who may have learned of something from her incoherent dying whispers, was killed in a horrendous car crash in 1953 that some suspect was not an accident. Sauniere's "heart attack" in 1917 came on the suspicious date of January 17th (St. Anthony's day) and there are hints that the coffin had been ordered in advance. A courier who carried the secret dossiers found by Sauniere, Fakhur el Islam, was found dead on train tracks just outside of Melun, East Germany, in 1967.

There are many more tantalizing things about Rennes-le-Chateau. According to one researcher, it may be laid out in the shape of a "Ship of the Dead" with a helmeted warrior borne to sea. Yet another thinks that the Paris Meridian may have been drawn so that it quite deliberately passes, 'ley-fashion', straight through Rennes-le-Chateau, Arques, and Conques. Still others see links between the site and Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland or Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England. It is known that Sauniere took his parchments to the Abbe' Bieil, of the seminary of St. Sulpice, which was where the Abbe's nephew Emile Hoffet launched the Catholic Modernist 'rebellion' which would eventually land Modernist works on the Vatican's "banned" list. Through Hoffet, Sauniere apparently met important cultural figures active in the Symbolist movement of the time - the diva Emma Calve (who some say was his illicit lover), Maurice Maeterlinck, Stephen Mallarme, and Claude Debussy. Saint Sulpice's feast day, January 17th, is the date of Sauniere's sudden stroke. He was the bishop of Bourges, on the Paris Meridian, and in his seminary is an obelisk with a copper line marking the exact point of the alignment. His day is also the feast day of the 'hidden' saint, Rosaline de Villaneuve, daughter of the Catalan alchemist Arnold, and St. Anthony.