The newly revised, illustrated edition of this international bestseller, “ . . . a book that will be hotly denounced and widely read.” —Financial Times A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of the Pyrenees that enabled him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. Beginning with buried treasure, the tale then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story — a modern Grail quest that stretches back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth century, and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The authors’ conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material wealth, but a secret — a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village to encompass the whole of Western civilization. Its repercussions reach all the way to contemporary politics, and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than the Holy Grail.