[2] After two years of hesitation, Marie Dénarnaud finally agreed to sell her property en viager[3] to the Corbus and by her Holographic will dated 22 July 1946, she named Corbu and his wife her sole legatees.
In January 1956, the local newspaper La Dépêche du Midi serialised an interview with Corbu in who claimed that Father Saunière discovered the treasure of Blanche of Castile, and which 'according to the archives' consisted of 28,500,000 gold pieces.
This was the treasure of the French crown assembled by Blanche de Castile to pay the ransom of Saint Louis, a prisoner of the Saracens, the surplus of which she had hidden at Rennes-le-Château.
[6] Corbu also claimed Saunière had in 1892 discovered "parchments" whilst renovating his church "written in a mixture of French and Latin, which at first glance could be discerned passages from the Gospels".
In April 1961, the French Television Channel RTF made a documentary directed by Marina Grey entitled La Roue Tourne ("The Wheel Turns"), that cast Noël Corbu as Father Saunière.
In the revised edition of his book Treasures of the World published during the 1970s (not translated into English), Robert Charroux added the material given in the 1962 radio interview, but also retained parts of the original chapter on Rennes-le-Château that mentioned Blanche of Castile.
[16] Noël Corbu's account of the discovery of the parchments by Father Saunière was later quoted in the document Un Trésor Mérovingien à Rennes-le-Château (1966) attributed to "Antoine L'Ermite",[17] that for "stylistic reasons suggest that this was written by Pierre Plantard and/or Philippe de Chérisey".
[19] The text of the document attributed to "Antoine L'Ermite" was modelled on Charroux's account found in his book, Trésors du Monde, where he extensively quoted Noël Corbu.
[21] For example, when the then village mayor gave the go-ahead to excavate the Tour Magdala in 2003 he was subsequently threatened with legal action by the local body of Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (or DRAC) for doing so without gaining prior official permission and therefore breaching the French Code du patrimoine.