|
|
The Sabarthes is a region of mountains full of impressive caves at the foot of which flows the Ariège river.
Roamed, age after age, by various populations whether Celts, Iberians or Visigoths, it constitutes a veritable book of secret history. Tarascon upon Ariège, guardian of the high peaks of the Sabarthes, has seen the Cathar Parfaits walk along its paths in silent lines.
It is there, in the heart of the Sabarthes, that Antonin Gadal was born in 1877. There too, his forefathers had lived.
|
A few steps from his house, there lived an old man that the inhabitants of the area liked to call ‘the patriarch of the Sabarthes’, the historian Adolphe Garrigou (1802-1897).
He was a historian well-known in the Ariège at the time. Around 1840, he had begun to deliver his 'Historical Studies on the Country of Foix and the Couserans'. He was deeply convinced that Napoléon Peyrat’s tales, that writer nicknamed ‘Michelet of the middle’, were founded on true facts, forgotten by official history. A historian and a protestant pastor, Peyrat had sounded the ‘Cathar awakening’ in a way. He had published his 'History of the Albigenses', an immense chivalrous epic dedicated to the religious and patriotic martyrs of the Albigenses and a lashing criticism against tyranny and oppression, particularly of the Roman clergy.
|
|
|
|
|