He enrolled in the René Simon drama school in 1946 where he started his actor's training,[1] and his most notable film appearance was in Jeux interdits in 1952.
From the mid-1950s local hotelier Noël Corbu circulated a story to boost trade, that the 19th century priest Bérenger Saunière of Rennes-le-Château had discovered the treasure of Blanche of Castile.
[2] In a letter dated 2 April 1965 to his girlfriend, de Chérisey wrote: "Don't tell anyone, but I'll be setting out again for four days in the Pyrenees with Plantard to see if we can get any closer to Mary Magdalene.
The parchments hinted at the survival of the line of the Frankish king Dagobert II, that Plantard claimed to be descended from, as well as attempting to verify the existence of the 1000-year-old secret society, the Priory of Sion.
[5] A second document by de Chérisey entitled Pierre et papier ("Stone and Paper") provides a more detailed explanation, giving the more complicated decoding technique to one of the parchments by using a Knight's Tour 25-letter alphabet, omitting the letter "w", which can only be known to the forger.
[7] The text of parchment I was copied from Codex Bezae,[8] an Old Latin/Greek diglot from the 5th century CE contained in the book by Fulcran Grégoire Vigouroux, Dictionnaire De La Bible (1895).
[9] Philippe de Chérisey's reason for copying the passage from the Codex Bezae was his interest in the phrase "In Sabbato Secundo Primo", also found in the Gospel of Luke 6:1.
According to an investigation into the Priory of Sion hoax by the American news program 60 Minutes, parchment II was copied from a 19th-century version of the Latin Vulgate published by John Wordsworth and Henry J.
White Novum Testamentum Domini Nostri Iesu Christi latine secundum sancti Hieronymi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889–1954),[11] and the original forged parchments are now in the possession of Jean-Luc Chaumeil, a French writer, who states that he had their age analyzed, and it was confirmed that they were merely decades old, not centuries.
In an interview during the 1970s with author Jean-Luc Chaumeil, Philippe de Chérisey asserted: "the parchments of the Gospel according to Saint Luke fabricated by me and for which I pinched the uncial text from the work L'archéologie chrétienne (Christian Archaeology) by Dom Cabrol at the National Library, section C25".
His death was announced by Gino Sandri in number 10 of Etudes Mérovingiennes (August 1985), the journal of the association Cercle Saint Dagobert II.