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 But time finally opened that huge ossuary. Two centuries and a half later, the Protestants who maybe were looking for ancestors in the wombs of the mountains, driven by vague and tragic memories, entered those funerary crypts.
We need not be surprised that, though not yet King of France, the future Henry IV, Count of Foix-Sabarthès, led by the long spiritual past of his ancestors, came to Lombrives at the instigation of three leading Protestants from Tarascon and discovered the ‘Cathedral of the Albigensians’ which nobody had dared to talk about for 250 years.
His ancestor, Loup de Foix – the deep root of the Bourbons through the House of the counts of Foix-Sabarthes – had said as he was kneeling before entering his ‘Oratory’: ‘One must prostrate oneself before the Most High before entering His Temple.’
With three of his aides-de-camp, the future Henry IV had the entry of the cave opened. They entered and arrived at Loup de Foix’s Oratory, climbed the ladders still up and discovered many people lying and asleep, almost petrified like in stone coffins.
‘The mountain which wept over its children had built stalagmite tombs with her frozen tears. Moreover, it had erected a triumphal monument and transformed the awful cavern into a basilica marvelously decorated with mouldings and symbolic sculptures.'
Some corpses would even have been found linked to each other by the hands and feet.
The huge necropolis of Lombrives was given back to history after 250 years of complete silence, but not of oblivion! Some words, some acts are never to be forgotten. ‘Does Osiris’ eye veil what it is destined to see?’
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