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 What did the Cathars do? Were they going to break down the walls?
Resignation was a Cathar virtue; they submitted themselves peacefully to their destiny and smiled sadly at their grave. They lived a little longer, but, one day, they ran out of everything! ‘Then’ – relates Antonin Gadal in a moving style; did he read these images in Nature’s memory? – ‘they gathered by families, in various compartments of the rocks…. For a while, above the pious murmur of the prayers, the voice of the bishop could still be heard confessing the Word which is in God and is God; he gave them the kiss of peace and fell asleep in his turn…. They all rested in sleep: and only the drops of water which slowly fell from the vaults troubled the sepulchral silence for centuries. The rocks wept over them!
The mountain which, as a tender mother, had welcomed them in her womb, religiously wove them a white ossuary with its tears, buried their sacred remains in the slowly woven pleats of the chalky shroud and sculpted their bones that no worm profaned : a triumphal mausoleum of stalagmites, marvelously adorned with urns, candelabra and symbols of life.
The Lombrives cavern, which for a short time harboured Monségur’s treasure, became, almost a century later, the last Tabor of Pyrenean Catharism.’
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