The Spy from Lyon by Lawrence Rose

Author:Lawrence Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lawrence Rose
Published: 2019-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16 In The Valley of the Aude

Ésperáza, The Languedoc, Southwest France, early summer.

It was listed in Relais et Châteaux. Marisol made the reservation. She thought it quite elegant and a great base for their work around Carcassonne, in the Languedoc. “Sleep in a Mansion in the Aude under the Shadow of the Mysterious Rennes-le Château! Land of the Cathars! Free Parking”. The hotel lay in the heart of ‘DaVinci Code’ territory, loaded with mystery, conspiracy, and tourists. They would visit the source of the Pyrénéean Confederation propaganda piece.

“It’ll be fun just being tourists here, our cover, and tomorrow we have to go to Alet-les-Bains and visit the printer.”

...

Marisol and Steven registered at Maison Barzan, an elegant hotel, built in the Parisian Mansard style, four hundred miles from Paris here in the small village of Ésperáza. The large house, a mansion, beautifully decorated in substantial furnishings and paintings of the Second Empire crowned a small hill over farmland and vineyards. Unlived in for 100 years, now it lived again authentically restored to its glory.

Their third-floor room gave out over the quiet old bridge, still the road used by farmers passing from vineyard to vineyard the home of Blanquette de Limoux, a sparkling light wine which predated the discovery of the Champagne process at Reims. A touch of the scent of roses, pinpoint effleurages. And inexpensive.

Traveling with Marisol ...everything always the best. Draped in red flocked wallpaper, (garish, but authentic), their room opened wide and the four-poster bed invited them to rest after the trip from Lyon. Chilled bottles of Blanquette soaked in a silver ice bucket.

...

The Barzan hat factory sitting in ruins down the road from the hotel, with remnant cracked whitewashed walls, and long-faded signs, decayed quickly after it was closed in 1902. The walls still, after one hundred years, smelled of the 1903 fire.

La Famille Barzan came to ruin. They invested in an enterprise in Algeria, a typical French bubble of those times, African palm oil. But then came the insurrection of Algiers, and the army’s reverses in the Sahara and the sahel, Burkina Faso, the Upper Volta, was not so easy to roll over....and the Barzans and thousands of others in France lost everything. It was another ruin to add to the long list of ruins in this part of France, the Occitanie.

“Marisol, please be certain! This is a powerful place. Important things have been destroyed here for millennia. Stay close to me, OK?” His fear of the place came upon him suddenly as he looked across the valley. He never felt this way here before. She was not the first woman Steven brought here.

...

The feeling came during this, his third trip to the hidden middle Aude Valley. It runs up from the walled and turreted city of Carcassonne to its source at a snow field in the high Pyrénées, near Sabarthès.

The valley is famous, covered in ruins... ruined castles, most of them stark and haunted places like Quéribus, Perpeytreuse, and Montségur, the cracked remnants of those

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