Acknowledgments
It is customary in acknowledgments sections to start with the professional, then move to the personal. A new millennium is beginning—let’s get our priorities straight this time.
I owe a very large debt of gratitude to Jill Pearlman, who has helped me at every stage of this project, as a fellow writer, an editor, a companion, a cheerleader, a spouse, and, perhaps most important, a cosurvivor of living in the middle of the countryside with two young and alarmingly vocal daughters, one of whom decided to come into our rural world on a memorable winter’s night. Without Jill’s support and astonishing ability to do several things at once, I could not have summoned the monomania necessary to complete this book.
My warmest thanks go to our hosts in French Catalonia, Vladimir and Roselyne Djurovic, who were unfailingly kind to the aliens in their midst. Our neighbor Henri Fabresse put his tractor in the service of sanity by plowing the land behind our farmhouse for a vegetable garden that had blessedly nothing to do with flaming heretics. Let no one ever belittle Catalan hospitality or wisdom.
In Languedoc, Jean-Pierre Pétermann was invaluable for giving me Catharized guided tours of Carcassonne and Toulouse that conveniently ignored any irrelevancies built in the last 800 years. Jean-Pierre even managed to sneak me into an off-limits archaeological dig to view the alleged bones of Count Raymond VI.
In Rome, the American Academy made available its resources to a seeker of Innocent III. Eli Gottlieb and Danella Carter, my hosts at the academy and longtime pals from New York, were gracious and patient with my medieval garrulity. Eli risked his eyesight by reading the entire manuscript in E-mail format in time to beat a deadline. While not a Perfect, he’s close.
My thanks as well to my immediate family—my parents for their support, my brother Kevin (my companion at Albi) for his unstinting encouragement of projects past and present, and my brother Donal for faxes of obscure troubadour lore—and to the many people who have helped along the way. Foremost among them is the late Matt Cohen, a friend who gave me hope, laughter, and one big push. Others helped in ways that are too diverse to detail: Liz and Kevin Conlon, Sandy Whitelaw, George Haynal, Doris Pearlman, Audrey Thomas, Valerie Chassigneux, Jean-Jacques Bedu, Bruce Alderman, Henri Salvayre, Heidi Ellison, Ruth Marshall, Randall Koral, Dawn Michelle Baude, Susan Adams, Patrick Cox, Zia Jaffrey, Mitchell Feinberg, Edward Hernstadt, Helen Mercer, Mark Hunter, Scott Blair, Niels Stoltenborg, Robert Sarner, Charles F. MacDonald, and Yovanka Djurovic. I would also like to acknowledge the invisible presence of two uncles who have been looking over my shoulder: Fathers Elisha and Damien O’Shea. It is a great pity that this book comes too late for us to sit down over a glass of brandy and have a meandering conversation about the Albigensians.
Thanks are also in order to the courteous librarians of the new and quirky Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, who, against all odds, never once failed to find the books I was seeking.
Publisher Scott Mclntyre deserves my gratitude for once again making a leap of faith, as does publisher George Gibson, who, along with editor Jacqueline Johnson, trained a textual trebuchet on the weak spots of my exposed prose. Any errors or lapses left standing are the result of my obstinacy.
Lastly, a tip of my hat to the café owners, restaurateurs, tourist office employees, hotel keepers, booksellers, museum guards, bartenders, and nuns of Languedoc, all of whom seem to have well-developed theories on who the Cathars were.