Saint-Pierre-de-Frugie (France) (AFP)
Science has spoken and "Ernest" is not "Ernest". A carbon 14 analysis made it possible to date this skeleton, exhumed a century ago in the Dordogne, 600 or 700 years ago, sweeping the local legend that designated a gentleman of bad reputation who lived in the nineteenth.
"Ernest", as he was nicknamed by the local novel, was discovered in 1913 under 20 cm of earth by masons who were digging a cellar in an outbuilding of the manor of Montcigoux, in Saint-Pierre-de-Frugie, in the confines of the Dordogne and Haute-Vienne, in full green Périgord.
For a century, he was at the heart of a myth firmly anchored in the collective imagination. Many curious and passionate stories leaned in the bedside of this amazing tenant, now sealed in his glass coffin, hoping to know "who is Ernest?"
Thursday, science has wiped out some of the popular beliefs: an expertise in Carbon 14 financed by private funds and conducted by an independent Bordeaux laboratory, Ciram, reveals that the skeleton is not that of Ernest de Fontaubert, master of Montcigoux manor house that lived in the 19th century, but that of an individual who lived between 1278 and 1388.
"Ernest is not Ernest," Marc Wilmart, a former journalist and author of a 1987 film about Ernest, and Bernard Aumasson, an amateur genealogist who has been investigating the skeleton since 2011, said on Thursday. "invention" and "manipulation", they say.
"It's a hypothesis among many, but it could be a soldier who fought, sieving the castle during the Hundred Years' Wars", killed and "hastily buried," says Bernard Aumasson, who evokes also the presence of an abandoned cemetery near this site in full line between the English and the French.
Thanks to science, Bernard Aumasson and Marc Wilmart now hope to restore the honor of a family that has been "dirty, dragged in the mud".
- Walking place -
At the time of its discovery, the authorities are not interested in the skeleton and it is therefore the castellan who inherits the remains unknown.
"Ernest" falls a little forgotten but the case bounces in 1933 when a chronicler of the "Courrier du Center", Antoine Valerie, says that the skeleton is that of Ernest de Fontaubert, the former master of the places, left in 1850 in California with his sister Ernestine.
On his return from the Gold Rush, his younger brother Arthur would have murdered him with a blow of an ax, a crime inflamed by jealousy and disgust for the incestuous relationships that the couple would have maintained.
This legend will be passed down from generation to generation. In 1958, she inspired Robert Margerit in his novel "The Land of Wolves", and in 1987 the film Marc Wilmart, "Stories of a crime" offers him a new sounding board. The medieval tower where the coffin is stored has even become "a place to walk": "every summer vacation, the descendants of villagers come to visit Ernest," smiles Gilbert Chabaud, mayor of this village of 450 inhabitants and owner since 1977 from the manor.
At the end of 2011, during the Journées du patrimoine, Bernard Aumasson is inhabited by doubt and decides to investigate.
For the mayor, the investigations are now "closed". But "it is certain", the legend will survive "with a lot of conviction".
© 2019 AFP