January 20, 2013. 3:30 p.m. Paris time. Agen, France.
Morse negotiated the Audi through the streets of the French city of Agen until he arrived at the old center of the town. Standing in a grove of trees was the twelfth century Agen Cathedral, known as the Cathedrale Saint-Caprais. Built in the form of a Latin cross, its white and gray stone walls surrounded a huge bell tower.
Morse parked the car and walked with his children into the inside of the Church. Zach and Zoey gaped upward, amazed at how tall the walls were inside. The interior of the Church was a wild crazy quilt of images and colors. Pictures of saints were painted on the walls in sky blue, orange, and avocado green. The vaulted ceilings were colored in alternating patches of midnight blue and gold. A religious figure or busy pattern adorned every inch of wall space. Ten golden, ornamental disks ringed with white candles dangled from overhead on gold chains, five on each side of the long rows of pews. To Morse, the church decor looked like a mess, like someone had taken out the wallpaper pattern book and, waffling on which pattern to choose, decided instead to choose them all.
Morse and the children proceeded down the main aisle between the pews, facing the altar ahead. When they got to the center of the rectangular cross in the cathedral, they turned north and went to the end of the giant hall. There, against the back wall, some fifty feet in the air, were the towering metal pipes of the Cathedral’s pipe organ. Morse took out his camera and took some pictures. There was an oak-colored wooden spire in the middle, with a tripod of ornate, wooden crosses at the top. Two slightly smaller identical spires sat as bookends on the right and left. In the middle of each spire were a group of metal pipes.
“Quite amazing, isn’t it?” said a voice behind them.
Morse and the children turned around to see a short, incredibly obese priest, with a bald head, unshaven chin, and thick black glasses. Zoey had her fair share of killer priests for one day, and was not about to trust this one. She grabbed her father’s arm tightly and eyed the priest suspiciously.
“Yes,” said Morse. “We were just admiring it.”
“This organ was a gift from the Empress Eugenie, Napoleon’s wife, in 1858.”
“Oh, really? 1858, you say? Hmm, I was wondering, is this the only organ in the cathedral? I had been told that there might be an organ dating from earlier times.”
“Oh, you must mean the chancel organ. That is much smaller. It is on the other side of the church. Follow me.”
Morse and his children followed the fat priest, who waddled to and fro like a penguin who had eaten too many squid. He continued to mop his brow with his handkerchief as he escorted them to the opposite side of the church, to an organ about twenty feet tall. The sides and top of the organ were mahogany, and it was shaped in the form of a very skinny house, generally tall and rectangular, with a pointed top. Some twenty large silver pipes, with their points pointed downward, were fastened to the middle of the organ. On either side of the organ was a red pillar, again with the wild decorations of a lunatic wall-paperer. There was a walking space on either side of the organ, and it appeared that one could walk behind the organ to a small space behind it, where other organ pipes lined the wall.
“This is the original organ, which dates all the way to the sixteenth century. The only French organ older than this is in the Basilica of St. Navaire in Carcassonne. With some exceptions where we have made repairs and replacements, these are the same pipes that existed centuries ago. We do not use this much anymore because we have the big organ and this one is in pretty bad shape. Sometimes, though, on Easter, if we have a priest who is visiting us who is also an organist, we may play both organs during services, but usually we use the big one. May I ask what your interest is in medieval organs? Are you a music historian? I am Father Gerard, by the way.” The priest extended his hand.
“I am John Morse, and these are my children Zach and Zoey. We are doing some sight-seeing. I have what you might call a hobby. I enjoy looking at old artifacts in buildings. I am a professor at UCLA.”
“Oh, how nice.” Father Gerard eyed Morse for a moment, considering his words. “Mr. Morse, pardon me, and I know this may sound somewhat strange, but I must tell you about the dream I had last night. I have never had one like it before. In the dream, there was a man in my church, with two children-- a boy and a girl, much like yourself, and the man was on a most dire mission—a spiritual mission, for God himself. And in my dream, I felt an overwhelming need to help this man and his children, in whatever way I could. And then I woke up. I thought it was most unusual, and somewhat disturbing if you want to know the truth, but I did not give it much thought until just now, as I was praying in front of the Intentions Altar for our Blessed Virgin, I turned around and there you were, just like in my dream.”
“That is most unusual,” remarked Morse.
“I must know if there is any meaning to this. Are you really just sight-seeing, or is there more to it than that?” The priest smiled, his rubbery red cheeks blushing.
Morse looked into the brown eyes of the pudgy priest. There was something to this man, a kindness about him. Zoey seemed to sense it too, and eased the grip on her father’s arm.
“As a matter of fact, we are on a quest of sorts, Father.” Morse relayed to the priest their experiences from the morning involving Nostradamus’ vault, leaving out the part about killing the priest. “And so the words of Nostradamus himself have led us here to your pipe organ,” concluded Morse.
“May I see Nostradamus’ letter?” The priest asked.
“Certainly,” said Morse, pulling out the letter and showing the priest the notes Morse had made.
“Ahh, he is most certainly speaking of our organ here. The ‘big game!’ Fantastic! You are right, it is all right there.”
“Actually,” said Morse, “That was one of the things we did not understand. The words that we could not find a meaning for were ‘big game,’ ‘human voice,’ and ‘pulling.’”
“That is because you do not play the pipe organ,” said Father Gerard, chuckling. “I would be happy to translate for you.”
Father Gerard took them over to an instrument that looked like a piano, but had dozens of strange-looking knobs and levers. “This is the keyboard for the pipe organ. A pipe organ makes music when wind passes over the hole in a pipe, much the same as if you take an empty glass soda bottle and lightly blow over the top of it. Pressurized air is constantly being pumped through the organ when the organist plays. The organist then pulls on a tab or knob on this keyboard and a valve is opened or closed, either letting wind in or closing the wind out. Obviously, if the wind passed through all the pipes at once, we would have an ugly mess of sound. So the organist closes a lot of the valves and only opens up certain ones to provide a certain sound or note. These knobs which let air in or closes air out are called ‘les tirants de jeux.’ In English, you would call these knobs ‘organ stops.’ So when our friend Nostradamus referred to ‘tirant,’ he did not really mean the present participle of the French verb ‘tirer,’ to pull. Instead, he was referring to these pull-knobs, the tirants de jeux.”
“Can I try it?” asked Zoey fascinated by another musical instrument.
“Certainly,” the priest said, scooting over on the bench and allowing Zoey to open and close some of the stops. Zoey played with some of the stops and made a very loud, obnoxious sound come from the organ. She giggled and looked at her dad.
“OK, that is one mystery solved,” said Morse. “But what is the ‘big game’?”
“Ahh, in order to understand that, you have to know that there are two main types of organ pipes, the ‘flues,’ and the ‘reeds.’ With a ‘flue’ pipe, near the foot of the pipe, the pressurized air is released in a flat stream, through a narrow slot. The longer the pipe, the lower the sound. Flue pipes are generally flatter and fatter. Reed pipes look very different. They are fatter at the top, and then taper down into a very narrow bottom. Near the foot of the pipe, the pressurized air must escape through two brass parts called a shallot and a tongue. Generally, reed pipes have a brighter sound than a flue pipe. When you allow several pipes to play at once, you get a mixture of sound. One of the beautiful, rich mixtures of reed pipes is called a ‘grand-jeu,’ or, in English, the ‘big game.’ In the context of playing an organ, it really means ‘the great play,’ or the ‘grand play.’”
“I see,” said Morse. “What about the ‘human voice?’ What does that mean?”
“The ‘voix humaine,’ or ‘human voice,’ is one of the smallest of the reed pipes, with a short cylindrical resonator, partially stopped. It is this pipe here. We distinguish that from some of the big pipes in the middle, which some like to refer to as the ‘Voice of God.’” The priest played the pipe. Father Gerard then grabbed a long stick with a light blue dust ruffle on the end, and raised it up to the pipes on the wall. The ‘voix humaine’ is that pipe there.”
“Father, I know this is a lot to ask, but this letter seems to be saying that there is a hidden message in that little organ pipe. Would it be possible for us to remove that pipe and examine it?”
“Well, I would normally say no, but given my dream from last night, and your incredible tale of Nostradamus, I am as interested as you in solving the riddle. We normally take the pipes down for cleaning once a year, so I know how to do it. Let me get my ladder and tool box, and we will see what we can see.”
A few minutes later, Father Gerard came over to their position pushing a large inclined metal stairway on wheels, and holding a red tool box. He pushed the stairway next to the organ on the left side, secured the wheel brackets to the floor and mounted the stairway. This took some time due to Father Girard’s girth and obvious lack of exercise. However, after a few moments he had scaled to the stair in front of the voix humaine. Unscrewing the supporting screws, he gently brought the tiny pipe down to Professor Morse for examination.
Morse looked on the outside of the pipe. He did not see anything jump out at him upon visual examination. He pulled out his magnifying glass from his nylon bag and set the pipe down on one of the stairs. Peering through the glass, he cleared off the dust on the pipe with a wet rage and looked for any markings. At first he did not see it. But after a few minutes of inspection, near the very bottom of the resonator, he could barely make out one French word in script:
Montre.
“Montre,” said Morse. “That means ‘show.’ Show what?”
“Let me see that,” said the priest, inspecting the pipe. “Incredible. All this time, and I have never seen that before. I guess I did not know to be looking for a secret message!”
“What does ‘show’ mean?” repeated Morse.
“Ah. This Nostradamus knew his organs,” said Father Gerard. “If you look at the organ, you can see that the pipes are encased in a brown wooden enclosure or casement called a ‘buffet.’ What you don’t know is that there are dozens of pipes behind the ones you see here that you cannot see unless you completely remove the pipes from the casement. These twenty or so huge flue pipes in the very front and center are the ones which ‘show’ the most, so for French organs, we call these big showy pipes in the front the ‘montre.’”
“Yes! That’s it!” said Morse. “So it appears that your message is inside one of these big flue pipes in the middle. Could you remove those for us?”
“I can, Mr. Morse,” said the cleric, “but I would think it highly doubtful that a message written hundreds of years ago would survive inside one of these pipes. These are cleaned once a year. If there were a scroll or something in one of the pipes, we would have either found it on cleaning or it would have made the pipe sound wrong. But I will check it for you anyway just in case.”
This project took considerably longer, because the pipes were large and towered very high in the air. The priest handed down the organ pipes one by one to Professor John Morse and his children.
Morse examined each of the organ pipes on the ground with his magnifying glass. His examination was quite thorough but failed to reveal any script or writing on the outside of the pipe. It must be on the inside, he thought. He looked through the pipe. There was nothing visible. He put two fingers inside the top of the pipe, searching for anything unusual. What he felt was strange. He expected the pipe to be smooth on the inside. But it felt rougher than he expected. He definitely thought he felt a small groove. He looked at the end of the pipe again, this time shining his penlight at the opening. He put his finger back inside several inches and felt again. He felt a small circle, with a line through the middle of it, almost like….the head of a screw!
“Zoey, come over here. I need someone with smaller hands.” Zoey came over to the pipe.
“Put your fingers inside there, and a few inches in, you should feel the head of a screw. Do you feel it?”
Zoey felt it. Morse handed her a small French coin. “Use this coin and see if you can undo the screw.” Zoey tried for a few minutes but did not have much luck.
“It might be a little rusted. Father, do you have any WD-40?” The priest looked through his tool box and produced a small blue bottle. Morse squirted gray liquid into the pipe from the red straw at the top of the WD-40 bottle.
“Now, try it.” Zoey tried for a few minutes but only budged it a little.
“Bounce, shorty,” said Zach. He knocked her out of the way, took the coin from Zoey and put his fingers in the top of the pipe. After a few minutes, Zach closed his eyes and bit on his lip. He just about had it.
“I think I turned it!” he said. Just then he dropped the coin in his greasy hands and the coin slid and clinked all the way to the bottom of the pipe. Morse handed him another coin.
Zach fiddled with the new coin for another minute or two, and soon felt the coin turning the screw inside the pipe. After a few seconds, the small screw fell into Zach’s fingers. “I did it.”
Zach reached back in and felt the sharp edge of thin metal which had been screwed into the top of the big pipe. The metal ribbon was about a half inch wide, and coiled twice along the inner walls of the top of the pipe. Zach pulled on the tape with his fingernails and soon yanked it out the top. It looked like a brass bracelet.
“Incroyable!” the priest exclaimed. “I cannot believe that tape was inside this pipe all these years.”
Morse put the small brass collar on the ground and gently unwound it, pressing down at the edges to make the brass ribbon flat. Holding the ends down with his fingers, he examined the metal tape with his magnifying glass.
“There are words on here!” Morse exclaimed. “It says:
A ma belle femme Henriette: Mille Regretz de vous abandonner
Or in English: “To my beautiful wife Henriette: A thousand regrets for abandoning you.”
“Is that it?” asked Zach.
“Who’s Henriette?” asked Zoey.
“Henriette,” said Morse, “is probably a reference to Nostradamus’ first wife, Henriette d’Encausse. While here in Agen, he married his first wife, Henriette, and had two small children. Then, later in life, he moved to Salon.”
“Why did he move to Salon?” asked the priest.
“Well, his wife and children died of some form of the plague. Shortly after that, Nostradamus had a falling out with his friend Scaliger. With his wife and children dead and his best friend mad at him, there was no reason for Nostradamus to stay, so he moved on to Salon-de-Provence.”
“Why did his friend get mad at him?” asked Zoey.
“No one really knows, Zoey. Most of the speculation is professional jealousy. Each of the men was a bit of an egomaniac. They probably got tired sharing the spotlight.”
Zoey looked thoroughly confused. “Huh? What spotlight? What do you mean?”
Morse tried to put his thoughts into musical terms. “It would be like if Madonna and Lady Gaga shared the same apartment. After a while, they are going to get tired of each other.”
“Oh,” said Zoey, smiling. “I get it. So this Nostradamus and this other Caesar guy were kind of like Divas?”
“Yes, in a sense. I think that is a very good description of them”
“So what about this thing about abandoning Henriette?” asked Zach. “You think that means he feels bad he abandoned the old lady and let her croak from the plague?”
“Probably so. There is some discussion in the books on Nostradamus that when his wife died, Nostradamus was away from home, traveling the countryside. Nostradamus had developed a special pill made from rose petals which he believed could cure the plague. We still have his recipe for the pills, because he wrote it in some of his almanacs. And if you concocted a batch of it today, I assure you, it would not cure anything. But Nostradamus and half the villagers in France believed his rose pill could cure the plague, so Nostradamus was summoned far and wide whenever there was an epidemic to cure the plague. Indeed, Nostradamus, who was convinced of his own skills as a doctor, probably felt a duty as a doctor to leave his wife and children and cure whomever he could. The horrible irony, however, is that Nostradamus, the one person who was reputed to be able to cure the plague, was not present to cure his own wife and children. He must have felt very guilty when he returned home and found them dead, believing that he might have been able to cure them.”
“But Pops,” said Zach. “Where do we go from here? How does this help us find the little Bible with the prophecy?”
Morse shook his head. “I confess I do not know where to go from here…. Hmmm. It says ‘1000 regrets.’ Father, is there anything about an organ relating to the number 1,000?”
“No, not that I can think of,” said the priest.
“How many pipes are there in an organ?”
“It all depends. The largest organ in the world is in Atlantic City, New Jersey and has 33,000 pipes. The organ at Notre Dame has 7,800 pipes. This organ has less than 1,000 pipes.”
“The number 1,000 must mean something,” Morse speculated. “What about the Roman numeral ‘M’ which represents 1,000. Is there a capital M written anywhere on the organ?”
“No,” said the priest. “Not that I know of.” The priest laughed. “But then again, I never knew these secret messages you found were on there, either.”
The professor walked up the ladder, looking at the pipes on the wall. He also inspected the wood casement. He could see no letter ‘M’ or anything looking like the number 1,000.
“The message talks about Nostradamus having regrets about his wife. Maybe the clue is telling you to go to the graveyard where Nostradamus’ wife was buried,” suggested Father Gerard, looking up at Morse on the ladder.
Morse replied, “I have no idea where she was buried. In all the books I have read on Nostradamus, I have not heard anything about Henriette’s final resting place. Father, I assume that there are not burial crypts underneath this cathedral, are there?”
“No, all we have down in the basement is folding chairs and dirt!”
Morse came down from the ladder and took out his notebook. In silence, he studied the words some more, biting his lip. This was a tough one. Abandonment. What if that was the key? Judas Iscariot had abandoned Christ.
“Father, in all these paintings on the wall, is there a painting of Judas Iscariot?”
“No, the Betrayer is not on the walls of our Church.”
“Not even in some kind of Last Supper drawing?”
“No, I have seen these walls many times. Judas is not pictured.”
“One of the gospels says that Jesus, just before dying, cried out, ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’ Is there anything painted on the walls of the Church which might show Jesus’ last words to God before he died on the cross?”
“Well, we have many crucifixes in the cathedral, of course, and many paintings on the walls of Jesus on the cross, but nothing that jumps out at me for that quote.”
“Perhaps the number 1,000, though, has something to do with the Bible. Father, do you have a Bible here?”
“Why of course, my son, I keep it with me always.”
He pulled a small black Bible from his pocket and gave it to Morse.
Morse looked up John, Chapter 3 in the Bible.
“Have you ever read the book ‘The Bible Code,’ Father?”
“No, I cannot say I have.”
“Well, there are some crackpots who claim that there is a hidden code in the Bible. Some of these people point out that John Chapter 3 is the 1,000th verse of the Bible, and 1,000 is supposed to be some kind of perfect number. It sounds silly, I know, but I wonder if that is what Nostradamus meant.”
“Pops, isn’t John Chapter 3 the sign that the crazy guys hold up at baseball games?”
“Very good, Zach. Yes, John 3:16 is the quote that says that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to save our sins. Many people think that John 3:16 is one of the most important passages in the Bible, and yes, sometimes true believers hold up a sign that says John 3:16 at public events like baseball games. But let me see what else is in John Chapter 3.”
Morse read the passage and then became excited. “Father, where is your baptismal font?”
Father Gerard pointed to a triangular-shaped stone podium near the cathedral’s altar. Morse ran over to the baptismal font. “In John 3, a man named Nicodemus questions Jesus how a man can be born again, thinking Jesus meant it literally. Jesus explains things to Nicodemus, and then he goes to Judea, where he spends the rest of his time baptizing people. Perhaps Nostradamus wants us to look in the baptismal font.”
Morse began crawling all over the stone podium, feeling for some kind of hidden latch or key.
Father Gerard was skeptical. “I do not think that is going to help you, Professor. That font was installed in 1956. I doubt that Nostradamus could have left a message in a font that was not installed until 1956!”
Morse was discouraged, and gave up his search. “I see your point.”
Zoey was studying Morse’s notes and the metal band taken from the organ pipe. “Hey, Daddy, you are not a very good speller.”
“What do you mean?” asked Morse.
“This piece of metal spelled the word ‘Regretz’ with a ‘Z,’ and you spelled it on your pad with an ‘S.’”
Morse looked at his notes and the metal band again. Zoey was right. The metal strip used a “Z” in the word “regretz.” Morse pondered that. The French word for “regrets” was spelled the same way as its English counterpart, with an “S,” not a “Z,” on the end. Perhaps that was how the word was spelled in old French, in the sixteenth century, he thought. Hmmm. He took out his laptop computer and juiced it up. After a few minutes, he had the Windows 7 screen up. He clicked in Internet Explorer and typed in “mille regretz,” and got this from Wikipedia:
Mille Regretz is a French chanson which in its 4 part setting is usually credited to the fifteenth-century musician Josquin des Prez….
Morse scanned down further.
Translations of the song differ in their interpretation of the words ‘fache/face amoureuse’ in line 2 (variously ‘amorous anger’ or ‘loving face’):
“Mille regretz de vous abandonner
Et d’eslonger vostre fache amoureuse,
Jay si grand dueil et paine douloureuse,
Quon me verra brief mes jours definer.”
“A thousand regrets at deserting you
And leaving behind your loving face,
I feel so much sadness and such painful distress
That it seems to me my days will soon dwindle away.”
“That’s it!” Morse exclaimed. “Zoey, you are genius! He was obviously referring to a song which was popular at the time called Mille Regretz, about a man who is deeply regretful about the loss of his wife. The first line of the song is a direct quote from the line on the metal strip. So the clue must somehow relate to the song.”
Zach was not enjoying the praise being heaped on his stupid sister. “Oh, yeah, she is a real genius. Mrs. Straight C-Minus. OK, Genius, what are we supposed to do with this stupid song now that we have it?”
Zoey thought for a second. “Maybe we should just play the song?”
Morse stared at Zoey. Then he stared at Zach. Then he stared at the priest. Could it be that simple? Quickly, he began searching on his computer for free sheet music to the Josquin song Mille Regretz. On a Hartford University site, he found the music.
“Father, if I prop up my laptop over here where you normally keep your sheet music, do you think you would be able to play this song?”
“Is the Pope Catholic?” the priest laughed and settled himself on the bench before the three rows of piano-like keys. He put on his reading glasses, cracked his knuckles, looked at the laptop, and began playing.
The song was very mournful and slow. It was quite fitting for a song about deep regrets and the loss of a loved one.
“That song is so sad,” said Zoey. The song went on for about a minute. When it got to the end, the priest pulled out a few organ stops and hit the last melancholy notes. As the last note was played, the priest heard a small click down by his feet. He bent down on his knees, and noticed that the mahogany panel just above the foot pedals had opened on the right side three inches, like a small door.
“Your not going to believe this,” said the priest, “but a door just opened down here!” Morse got down with the priest, pulled open the panel all the way and shined his penlight into the hollow chamber beyond. He reached in his hand and pulled out a stack of several time-worn parchment scrolls, tied together with twine. Morse could barely breathe, he was so excited.