A brother of the congregation from Spain brought the Spanish Horse into use at the southern Priory of Carcassonne. It was rarely used at Roissy though.
The Chateau of Roissy was first built by the Order of The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon otherwise known as the Templars. It was built as a Priory to collect the rents of surrounding Templar properties and to supply food and wine to the main Temple in Paris. It was built by forced peasant labour and by slaves brought from the Levant, where the Templers traded in Moslem slaves. It was whispered that both slaves and the daughters of recalcitrant peasants suffered horribly in the hidden tunnels, rooms and passages under the Chateau.
In 1312, Pope Clement, at King Philip IV of France’s command, dissolved the Order under charges of heresy. The investigations were carried out by Dominicans and their sub-order, The Holy Congregation of Moral Discipline. The Congregation was formed of monks and lay-brothers who performed the actual physical maltreatment of the suspects as they were questioned. After the disbanding of the Templers, the Holy Congregation was rewarded with some of the Templar properties, including the Chateau of Roissy. The Holy Congregation used the Chateau as their Chapter House in Northern France because it was close to the King, his Court, and University at Paris.
Upset at losing property to their former sub-order, the Dominicans launched an investigation of the Holy Congregation and a generation after the suppression of the Templers, the Congregation shared their fate.
Readers may skip this paragraph.
The Holy Congregation of Discipline, sometimes Moral Discipline had first worked for the Holy Office of Inquisition and the Dominicans in the suppression of the Cathars in Southern France. It was then they acquired their Southern Chapter House at Carcassonne. During long hours of questioning and torture the Holy Congregation had acquired some Cathar doctrine but in a twisted and unique form. They came to believe that human bodies were inherently sinful and could only be purified by pain. Women attracted men to sin by their beauty and submission. Men attracted women by the strength and mastery. Resisting lust was futile, and the only way to salvation was to sin and be punished. Women would be punished in this world by men, and men would be punished in the next. Rumours of orgies and torture at Carcassonne and Roissy led to the Congregation’s downfall at the hands of the envious Dominicans.
The Dominicans were cheated out of Roissy though, by the schemes of Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem and Rhodes and of Malta who took over the Chateau and used it as their Paris base. Far from the eye of the Grand Master in Rhodes and later in Malta, Roissy was again the site of orgies and tortures and submissive rites. Like the Templers, the Hospitallers traded in slaves from the Levant and Muslim lands and acted as pirates on the seas. Many slaves, particularly women ended up in Roissy, living lives of pain and servitude. Others were traded to other dealers in slaves and flesh.
It was rumoured throughout this time that a remnant of the suppressed Holy Congregation still existed, hidden among the servants of the Chateau. Son followed father in service to the changing masters of the Chateau of Roissy. They were devout, but it was noticed never confessed or worshiped under a member of the Dominican Order. At night candlelight was sometimes seen from the hereditary servants’ private chapel and many of these servants addressed each other as brother. They participated in and encouraged the excesses of the Knights against the Moorish and Jewish woman that were slaves at the Chateau.
At this time the land immediately around the Chateau was turned into a woodland park, and surrounded by a high brick wall. Fewer screams were heard from the Chateau, but whispers continued.
Much gold and jewels were collected here, gifts of women to their lovers among the Knights who taught them that love was expressed by submission. Some of the gold and jewels found its way to Malta, there to be incorporated into a magnificent sculpture of a bird of prey. Each year the Knights of Malta owed a bird of prey to their landlord, the King of Spain, and they hit on the idea of sending a jewel encrusted solid gold statue of the bird. The statue never made it to Spain, some say the Galley carrying it sank, some that it was captured by Barbary Pirates and some that the Galley Captain and a couple of officers poisoned the crew, beached the ship and took off with the falcon. It has never been seen since, although some claim it was seen in San Francisco in the late 1930s having acquired a black enamel covering.
When all church property was forfeit at the time of the French Revolution, the Chateau ended up in the hands of Paul Barras, a noble who had joined the revolution. Barras was a soldier, an administrator, a banker and a libertine, working hard by day, and engaging in depraved activities at night. By corrupt practices he acquired a great deal of money. He extensively renovated the Chateau of Roissy, to serve as headquarters for his libertine activities using money that strictly speaking was not his. The orgies continued. The lay brothers who served the Knights became valets in the service of Barras.
When Napoleon came to power he retained Barras in his service, but relieved him of his mistress Josephine, and the little Chateau secluded in a woodland park near Paris. He gave the Chateau to his minister Talleyrand, a former bishop notorious for sensual living. Talleyrand used his exquisite taste to develop a Mansion devoted to pleasure. It was at this time that the kitchens were modernized and the library assumed its present shape. He left the cells and dungeons below the main floor largely undisturbed, although rumours of spies being questioned strictly and painfully by the Foreign Minister occasionally passed through Paris. Talleyrand retained Barras’ valets at the Chateau as they were useful in this work. But little information escaped the secluded brick walled park surrounding the Chateau.
After his disgrace, the Chateau passed into the hands of a Marshall of France, and it fell into disrepair as the Marshall of gone so often on campaign.
After the time of Napoleon, the Marshal was shot, and his heirs sold the Chateau to a private secretive group and it has not changed hands since.
After Napoleon’s fall, Englishmen flooded into France looking for pleasure. Some of these people were odd indeed, as were their pleasures. The notorious Hell-Fire Club was no more, but its offshoots and descendents still flourished, albeit more quietly and discreetly. Some of the gentlemen, having made England a little too hot to hold them, and needing some time abroad to let things cool down, made their way to Paris, where they met followers of a singular French Marquis.
This Marquis, famous for his writings of fiction and philosophy, had been in and out of prison most of his life. He was a proponent of extreme liberty, unrestrained by morality, religion, or law. There were numerous complaints from women about whipping and sodomy. He and his loyal valet ran away with his wife’s sister to Italy. Unsurprisingly under both Kings and Bonapartes he alternated time in prison with time in an insane asylum. He continued to write and publish and acquired followers who did not think that he was crazy to take what pleasures he wanted.
These followers of the author of Justine, met the Englishmen who were no longer welcome in the clubs of Pall Mall for attracting too much attention to activities which the ongoing Victorian age made less acceptable.
They formed a club on the English model and with generous subscriptions from the original members, purchased and refurbished the Chateau to its current state. It is still owned by this secretive group and little information about it is heard outside the high brick walls surrounding the woodland park of the Chateau of Roissy.
Edited 2016.03.03 to correct minor grammar and spelling mistakes and to consistently refer to the Congregation as the Holy Congregation.
Because the Knights of Malta were a sovereign order, even at Roissy they were largely outside French Law in the waning days of the French Monarchy. They could and did indulge themselves.
Because the Knights of Malta were a sovereign order, even at Roissy they were largely outside French Law in the waning days of the French Monarchy. They could and did indulge themselves.
A brother of the congregation from Spain brought the Spanish Horse into use at the southern Priory of Carcassonne. It was rarely used at Roissy though.
From the earliest days of its founding by the Knights Templar as a priory to supply the Holy Land and the Temple in Paris , the Chateau of Roissy had served as a place of terror for heretics, pagans, and those who owed the Templars money. Later witches learned to fear its dungeons. The Knights also engaged in discreet slave trading to and from the east.
Before going to bed, Father Antoine did some light bedtime reading.
Father Antoine was devoted to the history of the Congregation of Discipline.
The order of the Congregation of Discipline had been interrogators. They had owned Roissy in the 13th century having acquired it after the wreck of the Templars.
The Chateau of Roissy was first built by the Order of The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon otherwise known as the Templars. It was built as a Priory to collect the rents of surrounding Templar properties and to supply food and wine to the main Temple in Paris. It was built by forced peasant labour and by slaves brought from the Levant, where the Templers traded in Moslem slaves. It was whispered that both slaves and the daughters of recalcitrant peasants suffered horribly in the hidden tunnels, rooms and passages under the Chateau
In 1312, Pope Clement, at King Philip IV of France’s command, dissolved the Order under charges of heresy. The investigations were carried out by Dominicans and their sub-order, The Holy Congregation of Moral Discipline. The Congregation was formed of monks and lay-brothers who performed the actual physical maltreatment of the suspects as they were questioned. After the disbanding of the Templers, the Holy Congregation was rewarded with some of the Templar properties, including the Chateau of Roissy. The Holy Congregation used the Chateau as their Chapter House in Northern France because it was close to the King, his Court, and University at Paris.Upset at losing property to their former sub-order, the Dominicans launched an investigation of the Holy Congregation and a generation after the suppression of the Templers, the Congregation shared their fate. Readers may skip this paragraph.The Holy Congregation of Discipline, sometimes Moral Discipline had first worked for the Holy Office of Inquisition and the Dominicans in the suppression of the Cathars in Southern France. It was then they acquired their Southern Chapter House at Carcassonne. During long hours of questioning and torture the Holy Congregation had acquired some Cathar doctrine but in a twisted and unique form. They came to believe that human bodies were inherently sinful and could only be purified by pain. Women attracted men to sin by their beauty and submission. Men attracted women by the strength and mastery. Resisting lust was futile, and the only way to salvation was to sin and be punished. Women would be punished in this world by men, and men would be punished in the next. Rumours of orgies and torture at Carcassonne and Roissy led to the Congregation’s downfall at the hands of the envious Dominicans.
It would be his greatest success, It contained a rogue templar, Rebecca and Rowena facing torture, derring-do and due to the conventions of the time a happy ending. It would cement the connections of the Templars with satanic evil as even King Phillip had not. It would also connect them most firmly with torture and the torture of the innocent. And all because a Scottish lawyer had a free hour outside the Chateau of Roissy
As the lawyer’s tour moved to the dungeons down the steep old dangerous steps, the servants’ told him of the Templars, and how many had gone wrong and tortured women and men for their own purposes. The lawyer’s mind began to work as a novelist, considering a rogue templar, captives from despised populations, threatened with cold iron and hot fire in a merciless dungeon.
At Roissy, there were three gates. The part of the building to which one could not gain access without passing through one of these three gates constituted what was called, the main enclosure. The only ones who were permitted access to it were the associates or, more simply, the members of the Society. This closed-in area consisted of-on the ground floor, to the right of a large vestibule the library, a sitting room, a smoking room, a dressing room-bathroom; and to the left, the girls’ refectory and an adjoining room which served as the valets’ dormitory. A few rooms on the ground floor were occupied by the girls that members of the Society brought there, as O had been originally brought by Rene. Of course, below ground was the dungeon with its myriad cells. The other rooms on the floors above were occupied by Society members who were spending a short or longer period of time at Roissy. Within the confines of the restricted area the girls were only allowed to come and go accompanied by someone else, usually a member or a valet; they were absolutely bound to the rule of silence, even among themselves, and to keeping their eyes lowered at all times; at all times, too, they were obliged to be nude or if dressed bare breasted and to keep their skirts hoisted either in front or behind. A member could do with them as one desired. No matter what a member did with them, no matter what demands he made upon them, a girl could not refuse. A member could come three times a year or three times a week, stay for an hour or for a fortnight, simply have a girl strip for him or flog her till she was bleeding.
The second gate separated this central part of the building from a wing they called the little enclosure. It was in the extension of this wing that Anne-Marie lived, and it was here, too, that the “girls” who lived in the community had their quarters. These girls, who belonged as it were to Roissy, were lodged in double rooms, in that each room was divided by a semi-partition against which, on either side, the beds were placed back-to-back. They were ordinary beds, and not the fur-covered sofa which had graced the room where O had stayed on her first visit. The girls shared a bathroom, as they did a closet. The doors to their rooms could not be locked from the inside, and the members of the Society could enter them any time in the course of the night, during which the girls were chained. But aside from this rule by which they were obliged to spend the night in chains, there was no other basic restriction, although these “free” girls who stayed at Roissy were not usually treated as harshly as those girls deemed personal property.
On the other side of the third gate, which, as you faced the main gate, was to the left, the second gate being situated to the right, was located the quasi-public area of Roissy: a restaurant, a bar, small sitting rooms on the ground floor, with, on the floors above, the bedrooms. The members of the Society were free to invite guests to the restaurant and bar without having to pay any entrance fee. But anyone, or virtually anyone, could purchase a “temporary membership” which was very expensive but gave him the right to two visits. The only rights it gave him, in effect, as guests of members were allowed to use the bar, were to have lunch or dinner in the restaurant, to rent a room, and to use it with a girl of his choice. Each of the above items was payable separately. For the bar and restaurant there were a maitre‘d and a few waiters. The kitchens were in the basement-but it was the girls who waited on tables. In the restaurant they were usually dressed. In the bar, dress was optional. Most of the girls there were nude or nearly so, after all they were there waiting to be picked by a member or a guest. The restaurant and bar, as well as the hotel, were financially independent, their income covering their costs.
The money earned by the girls was divided according to fixed percentages: so much for Roissy, so much for the girl. Nor were all the girls paid on an equal basis: Some girls were paid double the base rate because they officially belonged to a member of the Society. These girls who were considered personal property usually were marked as such by piercing, tattoos, or a brand. Several girls were in this category: O, Julienne, Jeanne, and Blaise-Marie. If anyone chose to whip a girl, or have her whipped by one of the valets, there was a supplementary payment. The checks were paid at the hotel office; the tips were given directly to the personnel involved.
Its proximity to Paris, its princely yet discreet atmosphere, the impressive buildings and park, the comfort of the installation, the excellence of the restaurant, the theatrical aspect which the sometimes-costumed girls and the omnipresent valets gave to the place the combination of freedom and security in all relationships. Finally, the clear knowledge that what took place behind the gates, within the confines of the enclosure remained secret. This provided Roissy with a large clientele, made up primarily of businessmen, a goodly percentage of whom were foreigners. The public part of Roissy had no more official existence than did the clandestine part. In short, Roissy was officially ignored and unofficially tolerated.
