The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château, Part 5: The Man Behind the Curtain

Pierre Plantard in 1942, at age 22. This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It is possible to trace the Plantard family tree a fair ways back without relying on the Lobineau dossier, but not as far back as the time when the Merovingian kings ruled over the nascent nation of France. The real genealogical record shows that the Plantards were not a line of kings or demigods; they were rather ordinary laborers. The first trace we can find of them comes in the form of one Jean Plantard, who arrived from parts unknown to the town of Sémelay, about 300 kilometers southeast of Paris, during the first half of the seventeenth century. His descendants continued living in this region of France. A Pierre Plantard was born in the village of Magny-Cours on October 11, 1877. Following a stint as a coal miner and a term of service in the French Army, he moved to Paris early in the new century to become a…