A Reflection on Reading Circuit - An Essay on Philippe de Chérisey and the Spirit of Circuit by Philomène de Clairmont

Therefore the thesis;

^{1) Cryptography as Rite of Passage}

BERGÈRE PAS DE TENTATION / QUE POUSSIN, TENIERS GARDENT LA CLEF / PAX DCLXXXI / J’ACHEVE CE DAEMON DE GARDIEN / A MIDI / POMMES BLEUES.

^{2) From Text to Topography: Saint-Sulpice and the Noon of 17 January}

^{3) Painters as Keepers: Poussin, Teniers, Delacroix}

^{4) “PAX DCLXXXI”: Number, Dynasty, and Esoteric Politics}

^{5) Wordplay as Method: From “Pommes bleues” to the Pommel}

^{6) Descent, Tomb, and the Roman Mask}

^{7) False and True Treasure: Gold as Temptation, Love as Grail}

^{8) Circle and Lily: Awaiting the Grand Monarque}

^{9) Structure and Genre: A Modern Grail Romance}

• Question → cipher: “What is the key?” answered by the knight’s tour.
• Procession → iconographic itinerary: Poussin, Teniers, Delacroix.
• Castle → Saint-Sulpice: a choreographed viewing that reveals a hidden “detail.”
• Wounded King / Waste Land → the self endangered underground; the land of corpses and lead.
• Right Question / Act of Compassion → renunciation of gold; the rescue and embrace by Marie-Madeleine.
• Grail → love and forgiveness (not object but relation).

^Conclusion

_{Biographical Sketch}

• He was born 13 February 1923 in Paris (France).
• Died 17 July 1985 in Paris. 
• He held the noble title “Marquis de Chérisey” (9th marquis) by family lineage. 
• From a family of old nobility (Lorraine/Champagne origin) with the surname de Chérisey.
• After the war, he trained as an actor (Cours Simon, 1946) despite family opposition. 
• He worked in radio humour (with the pseudonym “Amédée”), performed in film and theatre (for example in Jeux interdits (1952) amongst others) under his stage name.

^{Artistic, Literary & Esoteric Activities}

• He was associated with Surrealist and ‘pataphysical circles (he claimed links to the Collège de Pataphysique). 
• He wrote texts, radio sketches (“Grégoire & Amédée”), cabaret performances, and later books and manuscripts.
• Among his literary works:
  • Circuit (1968) — an allegorical novel referencing the treasure of Rennes-le-Château. 
  • L’Énigme de Rennes (1978) — a manuscript deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
  • L’Or de Rennes pour un Napoléon (1975) — also in his bibliography. 
  • 
    
• He engaged in document-forgery (or document-creation) relating to the myth of the Priory of Sion and the treasure of Rennes‑le‑Château: including the famous “parchments” purportedly discovered by the abbé Saunière. 
  • He admitted, or claimed, to have created some of these parchments for his friend Pierre Plantard. 

^{Key Themes & Interests}

• He had a fascination with code, cipher, mystery, esoteric traditions, sacred geometry, documents, and symbols. The “knight’s tour” cipher appears in his work. 
• He appeared to enjoy the blurring of hoax and truth, making documents that looked ancient but were modern, playing with paleography, forgery, and the idea of the secret society. 
• He was also a word-games enthusiast: e.g., he wrote about “circonflexe des propres” and “tréma et circonflexe” in AARevue.

^{Controversies & Forgery}

• The forged documents: some of the parchments used later in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail trace back to Chérisey’s work. 
• Some scholars point out errors in his “ancient” scripts (wrong uncials, incorrect Latin) which show the documents are recent fakes. 
• He claimed publicly to have made the forgeries (e.g., in a letter of 29 Jan 1974: “the parchments … were composed in 1965 … I took responsibility for being the author”). 

^{Legacy & Significance}

• He is often dismissed as “just a hoaxer,” but more recent scholarship suggests he made a metaphorical myth, not simply a forgery factory.
• His work influences: the Rennes-le-Château myth, the Priory of Sion legend, the cultural backdrop of The Da Vinci Code.
• His blending of humor, esotericism, and art suggests he was critically aware of symbolism, not just fakery.

^{What We Don’t Know / What Remains Unclear}

• Whether all his “documents” were intended as pranks or whether some were meant as genuine esoteric writing remains debated.
• To what extent Chérisey believed in the myth he helped create vs. playing at it purely as satire is murky. Some say he was more playful; others that he became serious.
• The full extent of his unpublished works (e.g., he was reported working on an “Encyclopaedia du Tréma” and a Balzac biography) remain obscure. 
• Exactly how much of the Priory / Rennes myth he authored and how much he “acted” for Plantard is disputed among researchers. 

^{Why This Matters}

• The Rennes-le-Château myth is not simply about gold and treasure — it is also about story-making, cultural mythologies, and symbolic transformation.
• Chérisey’s role shows how esoteric traditions often masquerade not as dry history but as playful, multi-layered art.
• His mixture of humour and mysticism invites us to ask: What is treasure? What is truth? What is the game? — exactly the questions i raised.

^{1. “When the voice of Amédée … fell silent … he continued to reason, reproduced by the radio, in his texts.”}

^{2. “This voice was made for storytelling … he never ceased to amaze, with the funny situations he suggested and the side roads he led us down.”}

• In life: digressions, wordplay, detours.
• In myth: the Rennes-le-Château labyrinth — a literal side road away from mainstream history.

^{3. “From the abundance of words and ideas, the originality of a tasty, inventive and curious work emerged.”}

^{4. The list of plays and films}

^{5. “Book for Sale” and the “Dictionary for the Defence and Illustration of the Diaeresis”}

• Book for Sale (a surreal radio play) ridiculed consumerism while celebrating imagination.
• The Dictionary is a mock-scholarly hymn to the forgotten diacritical mark — pure pataphysics: serious nonsense that conceals metaphysics.

^{6. “Memoirs of the Centaur Chiron … passage of the zero meridian … bestiary … fascination with numbers, dice, checkerboards, tarot, goose games, labyrinths.”}

• Mythological figures (Chiron, hybrid wisdom).
• Geometry and meridians (the gnomon of Saint-Sulpice).
• Animals (bees, doves — all appear in his Rennes imagery).
• Games and labyrinths (knight’s tour, chessboard, goose game).
  It reveals that these weren’t random inclusions in his esoteric writing — they were his lifelong obsessions.
  He saw the world as a patterned game, halfway between myth and mathematics.

^{7. “Unusual, his long silhouette, his nonchalant gait and his words – where the taste for facetiousness shines through.”}

^{8. “May his stories not be lost … this reminder arouse the desire to read them.”}

What this obituary ultimately tells us

^{1. He was a trickster in the classical, sacred sense—not a conman}

“What do I actually believe, and why?”

^{2. His “hoaxes” were a continuation of avant-garde art}

• Duchamp signing a urinal “R. Mutt.”
• Borges inventing scholarly sources that don’t exist.
• Nabokov writing a whole novel as a fake commentary (Pale Fire).

^{3. He was an erudite, not a drunk dilettante}

^{4. He never exploited his “forgeries” for gain}

^{5. He embedded moral and spiritual meaning inside the play}

Seek knowledge, but renounce greed.
Treasure is not gold but love.
The final key is compassion.

^{6. His contemporaries—actors, writers, broadcasters—saw the artist, not the hoaxer}

“His voice was made for storytelling… the originality of a tasty, inventive and curious work.”

^{So yes — dismissing him as a hoaxer or drunkard misses the essence.}

Can truth still speak through jest?

^{1. Because Rennes-le-Château was the perfect stage for his favourite themes}

• a rural priest and a mysterious fortune,
• coded parchments,
• lost Merovingian kings,
• a secret society guarding a royal or divine secret,
• art, geometry, and religious symbolism.

^{2. Because he and Plantard saw it as a surrealist experiment, not a criminal hoax}

^{3. Because he was drawn to the sacred dimension of the story}

^{4. Because he enjoyed the company of eccentrics and the thrill of the game}

^{5. Because he underestimated how literally others would take it}

^{6. Because he valued the symbol more than his own reputation}

^{7. Because he saw himself, subconsciously, as the knight of his own myth}

^{In summary}

• a fusion of code and mysticism,
• a playground for irony,
• a vessel for the sacred feminine,
• and a public theatre for a modern Grail.

^{1. He believed wonder was more important than certainty}

^{2. He used laughter as a shield for truth}

^{3. He created, not for gain, but for play and beauty}

^{4. He kept his tenderness}

^{5. He accepted being misunderstood}

^{6. He lived as a bridge between reason and mystery}

• He was born Philippe Louis Henri Marie de Chérisey on 13 February 1923 in Paris.
• His family came from Lorraine and Champagne; the line is traceable in the Armorial général de France and later in the Annuaire de la noblesse de France.
• The family was ennobled under the Ancien Régime and held minor landed status; it is described in genealogical sources as “de Chérisey, seigneurs puis marquis de Chérisey.”
• Philippe inherited the title 9ᵗʰ Marquis de Chérisey after his father’s death (his father was the 8ᵗʰ marquis).
  The title was traditional rather than legally recognised in the post-Revolutionary Republic, but such courtesy titles were (and are) still used socially among the French nobility.

• The family seat was once in Meuse, with branches in Meurthe-et-Moselle; their arms are blazoned “d’argent à trois bandes de gueules.”
• They were a respectable but not grand house — provincial nobles, supplying officers and magistrates rather than courtiers.
• After 1789, like many nobles, they kept their name and courtesy title but lost most feudal privileges.

• He used the style “Marquis de Chérisey” on official documents, in print, and even on his stage résumé, but never pompously.
  Friends and colleagues said he wore the title ironically, as a kind of self-parody, consistent with his humour.
• In interviews and letters he joked about being “a marquis without a château” — which suited his bohemian Paris life.
• Nonetheless, the education, manners, and cultural references of the vieille noblesse clearly marked him: Catholic schooling, classical learning, a sense of noblesse oblige, and that mixture of courtesy and detachment people noticed in him.

• The nobility was real in lineage, nominal in law, and lightly worn in spirit.
• Philippe de Chérisey was genuinely the 9ᵗʰ Marquis de Chérisey, descendant of a minor noble family of Lorraine, but he turned that inherited status into another of his paradoxes — both aristocrat and clown, heir and heretic, using his birthright as one more mask in his theatre of ideas. 
• The history of the noble Famille de Chérisey of Lorraine (and associated regions), based on available sources — along with important caveats about gaps and uncertainties.
• The estate of Chérisey (in Moselle, Lorraine region) is identified as their ancestral seigneury: «Seigneurs du lieu depuis le XIVe siècle… occupant le château jusqu’en 1950.» 
• The family is listed as “noble française subsistante d’extraction chevaleresque sur preuves de l’an 1400”, originating in Champagne and later established in Lorraine. Their heraldic arms (as given) are *« coupé d’or et d’azur, le chef chargé d’un lion issant de gueules, armé, couronné et lampassé de même ». They served as military and court nobility: e.g., members held lieutenant-général des armées and chef d’escadre des armées navales.
  • They were admitted to the Honneurs de la Cour (the formal practice by which noble families claimed precedence at the royal court in France) in 1767, 1768, 1783 and 1786.
  • Important historical points & caveats
  • The early origins (prior to the 14th century) are partly based on tradition or genealogical reconstructions: e.g., some sources claim descent from Gérard de Cherisy (seigneur de Quiercy) in 1083, but these are less well documented. 
  • The political geography changed: the seigneury of Chérisey became part of the Duchy of Lorraine (or its border territories) and thus the family’s status and obligations shifted (from direct feudal vassals of the king of France to vassals of the Duke of Lorraine) at various points. 
  • Like many nobles, the family’s power, domain and financial base were eroded by wars (for example the conflict in 1367 when the domain was destroyed). 
  • After the French Revolution and the dissolution of most feudal privileges, the family continued socially as “noblesse” but the nature of their power changed into landholding, service, military or court roles rather than secular rule.
  • Why this background matters for Philippe de Chérisey
  • Philippe (1923–1985) was born into this lineage: the title Marquis de Chérisey comes from this family background in Lorraine. 
  • His family heritage would have given him access to noble education, social networks, and a “sense of having a name” — even if by the 20th century those privileges were largely symbolic rather than feudal.
  • His involvement with myth, symbol, heritage (e.g., the Rennes-le-Château myth) can be seen as partially rooted in a family identity that had centuries of noble-service, heraldry, and estate-mindset.
  • Philippe Louis Henri Marie de Chérisey, 9ᵗʰ Marquis de Chérisey, occupies one of the strangest and most misunderstood corners of twentieth-century French culture. Actor, writer, humorist, and reluctant forger, he is remembered both as a participant in the Rennes-le-Château enigma and as a deeply original creative spirit whose work bridged comedy, mysticism, and philosophy. To dismiss him merely as a “drunkard and hoaxer,” as some early critics did, is to miss the complex integrity of a man who saw the boundary between art, play, and belief as a permeable field. Chérisey’s life and thought were guided by paradox: an aristocrat who laughed at nobility, a sceptic who longed for revelation, a prankster who treated mystery as sacred.
  • 
    
  • I. Heritage and Formation: The Last of the Gentle Nobles
    Born in Paris in 1923 into an old Lorrain family of chevaleresque extraction, Philippe inherited the courtesy title of Marquis de Chérisey, descending from seigneurs established in the Moselle region since the fourteenth century. Though by his time the nobility of France had lost its feudal privileges, the cultural and moral residues of noblesse oblige—honour, education, spiritual curiosity, and detachment from materialism—shaped his sensibility. Educated in Catholic schools, he was steeped in classical languages and biblical lore. Yet he wore his title lightly, often with self-mocking irony; friends described him as a “marquis without a château,” a modern Don Quixote wandering through post-war bohemia.This paradoxical mixture of refinement and bohemian freedom defined his character. The noble background gave him poise and a sense of historical continuity, but he treated it as a theatrical costume rather than a social weapon. He was, as one obituary put it, “a handsome actor, tall, nonchalant, whose words always shone with facetiousness.”
  • II. The Actor and the Writer: Play as Philosophy
    Chérisey’s professional life spanned theatre, radio, and literary experimentation. He performed in Axel by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, in works by Roland Dubillard and Carl Sternheim, and appeared in films such as Le Jardinier récalcitrant. His voice—warm, deep, slightly hesitant—made him a memorable storyteller. His written works, including Livre à vendre (with Dubillard) and Dictionnaire pour la défense et illustration du tréma, reveal an erudite humorist fascinated by language’s hidden geometries: puns, diacritics, riddles, and the metaphysics of grammar.For Chérisey, comedy was a form of metaphysics. Through paradox, he probed the absurdity of existence while preserving the sacred spark of wonder. His essays on numbers, labyrinths, and checkerboards show a mind equally at home in mathematics and mythology. He saw in formal beauty—dice throws, chessboards, meridians—a reflection of divine order.
  • III. Rennes-le-Château: The Myth and the Mirror
    Chérisey’s name is inseparable from the Rennes-le-Château affair, the enduring mystery surrounding the village priest Bérenger Saunière and his alleged treasure. Alongside Pierre Plantard, he contributed to the creation of the Priory of Sion documents and the so-called parchments of Saunière, later publicised by Gérard de Sède. While critics labelled him a forger, Chérisey’s intent was closer to literary performance than fraud. The fabricated parchments were, in essence, surrealist interventions—artworks inserted into the machinery of history. In Rennes-le-Château, Chérisey found an ideal canvas for his obsessions: cryptography, sacred geometry, biblical allegory, and the fusion of myth and reality. The “Pommes bleues” motif, the chessboard ciphers, and the Merovingian riddles all bear his playful yet mystical signature. What others treated as conspiracy, he conceived as poetic theatre—a living allegory of France’s lost sacred imagination. Yet the game escaped him. Plantard’s political fantasies and later sensationalists turned the legend literal. Chérisey, the artist, became the “forger.” He accepted this misreading with irony, perhaps recognising that myths, once born, no longer belong to their authors.
  • IV. The Inner Vision: Faith Through Irony
    Behind the humour lay a genuine metaphysical yearning. His Circuit text (an allegorical narrative about cryptograms, knights, and resurrection) is transparently autobiographical. The character Charlot’s descent into the tomb, rejection of gold, and resurrection by Marie-Madeleine mirrors Chérisey’s own descent into the labyrinth of the Rennes myth and his rediscovery of meaning through love and humility. The religious imagery—Mary Magdalene, the angel, the tomb—reveals not blasphemy but reverence. He understood the Gospel not as dogma but as living symbolism: resurrection as renewal of the self, the Grail as the union of reason and love, and the Magdalene as the eternal feminine principle of forgiveness. Beneath his wit was a profound intuition that the divine hides best in paradox—the same conviction that guided his art.
  • V. Character and Legacy
    Philippe de Chérisey emerges from history as a figure of charm, intelligence, and gentle eccentricity. His contemporaries remembered his kindness, his generosity of spirit, and his childlike curiosity. He embodied the fading world of cultured nobles who valued play, beauty, and thought above ambition.His tragedy was that the world read his ironies literally. Yet his dignity lay in refusing to retaliate. He allowed myth to live, even at the cost of his reputation, because he believed that imagination itself was sacred. In retrospect, he appears less a forger than a modern Hermes—a messenger between reason and mystery, laughter and revelation. He showed that the line between fraud and fiction, parody and prayer, can be as thin as a page of parchment. 
  • Conclusion
    Philippe de Chérisey’s life was a parable of twentieth-century disillusionment and faith. Descendant of knights, he fought his battles with wordplay and wit; mocked by journalists, he outlived them as a symbol of the artist-trickster who guards the world’s forgotten magic. To study him is to be reminded that truth may sometimes need a mask, and that irony, when pure, can be a form of prayer. He died in 1985, misunderstood but serene, having found—like his alter ego Charlot—the real treasure: freedom, humour, and love.The French adjective chevaleresque comes from chevalier, meaning “knight.”
    So literally it means “knightly,” but its meaning in French (and in English when borrowed) goes beyond medieval costume — it describes a whole ethos, a moral and aesthetic code.Literal historical sense
    In aristocratic or genealogical language — as used in descriptions of the famille de Chérisey—famille d’extraction chevaleresque
    means “a family of ancient knightly extraction.”
    That is:the family’s nobility dates from before the fifteenth century (so-called noblesse d’extraction),originally based on military service as knights, not on later royal office or purchase of title.It’s a technical term in French heraldry and genealogy:
    “chevaleresque” marks a noble line as older and more martialthan one ennobled by letters patent.Moral and cultural sense
    Beyond genealogy, chevaleresque means having the spirit of chivalry:honor, courage, loyalty,ourtesy toward others (especially women and the weak),
    • generosity,
    • refinement combined with bravery.
    To call someone chevaleresque in French implies an old-fashioned gallantry, a noble idealism, sometimes even a touch of naïve romanticism.For example:Il avait des manières chevaleresques → “He had the manners of a gentleman-knight,”
    i.e. courteous, honourable, perhaps quixotic.
    Applied to Philippe de Chérisey
    So when we say that his family was d’extraction chevaleresque, we mean that it was a true old knightly line from Lorraine.But when we say he himself was chevaleresque, we mean something deeper:
    • He acted according to a personal code of honor, not social convention.
    • He defended beauty, humour, and imagination like a knight defends his lady or his cause.
    • His irony, his politeness, even his eccentric gallantry were all forms of that same chivalric grace.
    • In short
    
    Chevaleresque = both born of knights and behaving like one.
    It captures exactly the dual nature of Philippe de Chérisey: a literal descendant of chevaliers, and a spiritual one — a knight of paradox, defending imagination against mediocrity.