The story opens in 1885, when the Catholic church assigned Sauniere, thirty-three years old, handsome, well-educated--if provincial--to the parish at Rennes-le-Chateau. Sauniere set about restoring the town's tiny church, which sat atop a sacred site dating back to the sixth-century Visigoths. Under the altar stone, inside a hollow Visigothic pillar, the young cure discovered a series of parchments. There were two genealogies dating from 1244 A.D. and 1644 A.D., as well as more recent documents created by a former parish priest during the 1780s. According to Lincoln and his co-authors, these more recent papers contained a series of ciphers and codes, some of them "fantastically complex, defying even a computer" to unlock their secrets.

Sauniere took his discovery to the bishop in nearby Carcassonne, who dispatched the priest to Paris, where clerical scholars studied the parchments. One of the simpler ciphers, when translated, read: TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD.

Whatever it all meant, apparently it became Sauniere's entree into a new world, with the accent on worldly. For during his short stay in Paris, Sauniere began to mix with the city's cultural elite, many of whom dabbled in the occult arts. Contemporary gossip had it that the country priest had an affair with Emma Calve, the famous opera diva who was also a high priestess of the Parisian esoteric underground. She would later visit him frequently in Rennes-le-Chateau.