Noël Corbu (27 April 1912 – 20 May 1968) is best known as a former restaurateur in the Southern French village of Rennes-le-Château who, between 1955 and 1962 circulated the story that the 19th-century French priest Bérenger Saunière discovered the treasure of Blanche of Castile. Corbu changed his story about Saunière in 1962 (see below). Early life Born on 27 April 1912 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris to Désiré-Victor-Henri Corbu and Marguerite-Marie Corbu ( Rousseau), the granddaughter of François-de-Sales-Narcisse Rousseau (1810-1866), an attorney based in Clamecy, Nièvre who, in the aftermath of the French coup d'état of 1851, had been forced to flee into exile into Belgium to escape deportation to Cayenne. Corbu had an elder brother, ten years his senior named Charles-Pierre Corbu, an airline pilot employed by the Société Générale des Transports Aériens, who died alongside his mechanic, during a test flight of a commercial aircraft carrying no passengers at Le Bourget Airport, on 10 December 1927. The young Noël Corbu lived in Morocco due to his father being an attaché at the Embassy there, before obtaining the degree of Doctor of Science in Paris. While living in Perpignan, Corbu met his future wife, Henriette Coll, ten years his senior and a native of the town who was then living at 16, rue J. Tastu, where she ran her business of selling poultry, eggs and cheese. The couple married on 21 January 1935. In the following years, Corbu set up a pasta factory which he named les pâtes Claire after his eldest child, his daughter Claire, situated at route d'Elne, Perpignan. By the end of 1942, Perpignan became occupied by German troops. Rennes-le-Château It was soon afterwards that Corbu decided to send his two children, his daughter Claire and her younger brother, to a more remote and less accessible place, to the village of Bugarach. Corbu published his detective novel, Le Mort cambrioleur ("The Burglar Dead") in 1943. Through the intermediary of his children's school teacher (once Marie Dénarnaud's lodger), Corbu found out that Marie Dénarnaud was selling her estate in Rennes-le-Château. After two years of hesitation, Marie Dénarnaud finally agreed to sell her property en viager to the Corbus and by her Holographic will dated 22 July 1946, she named Corbu and his wife her sole legatees. Marie Dénarnaud could not afford to keep up her estate, which was in need of repairs and she had