Audric Baillard
(dates not known)
Little is known about the man who calls himself Audric Baillard. Alleged to come from Figeac, Baillard is a renowned author of works on Catharism and the history of the Languedoc.
A specialist on Ancient Egypt also, Baillard reads hieroglyphs and other antique forms of writing, and is the biographer of Jean-François Champollion, the nineteenth century Frenchman who discovered the secret of decoding hieroglyphic writing.
Only his friend, local researcher and former teacher Jeanne Giraud, knows that Baillard fought alongside the Résistance during World War II under the Nazi occupation of southwest France, leading refugees and political prisoners to safety through the mountain passes of the Pyrenees.
Baillard has travelled widely and speaks many languages, but not even Jeanne, his closest friend, is sure where he lives or where he spends his time when not with her.
At the beginning of Labyrinth, Baillard is working on a history of a Cathar family – the Pelletier family - who lived in Carcassonne at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
