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Pour ceux qui lisent l'anglais, un article du Guardian du 17 mai, concernant Baigent..... La perte de son procès contre Dan Brown lui a coûté.... cher !
Michael Baigent will carry a cross for the rest of his life. The sign on it reads, "The man who sued Dan Brown - and lost." The extraordinary thing is that he is so merry. He is exhausted by the book marketing treadmill, just back from Germany and his third visit to the States in a month, on his way to Ireland, promoting his new book, The Jesus Papers. Yet he is almost unrecognisable to anyone who watched him through an excruciating week in March at the high court in London. There is a bounce when he walks, a spark in his eye, an unexpected giggle when he recalls his young days in New Zealand - where he was born in 1948 - as the worst truck driver in the world. Contrary to the gleeful reporting of his defeat, he hasn't had to sell his nice house in Winchester.
The case became an international media circus thanks to the reclusive Dan Brown's daily appearance in court, as neat as if he had just been boil-washed and steam-ironed. Another piquant aspect was that Baigent and Richard Leigh, co-authors (with Henry Lincoln, who took no part in the action) of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, were not in fact suing Brown for breach of intellectual copyright, but their own publishers. After a string of takeovers in the trade, Random House ended up with both the Holy Blood - and eight other Baigent-authored or co-authored books - and the worldwide phenomenon that is The Da Vinci Code book, T-shirt, audiobook, and blockbuster Hollywood movie, which premieres in London tomorrow.
Both books - one allegedly fact, one allegedly fiction, 20 years apart - hang on the plot that Christ married Mary Magdalene, had at least one child by her, that their blood-line continues, and that this truth has been suppressed by the Catholic church for the last two millennia.
Baigent was cross-examined by John Baldwin, Random's QC, every day for most of a week. It was like watching a man being flayed alive. Day after day Baigent seemed to grow thinner and paler, watched by his lawyer daughter and elegant wife, through the agonising silences as he struggled for answers. One one occasion, when he was invited to examine a passage in The Da Vinci Code and point out exactly which words proved the plagiarism from his own book, the silence lasted for two minutes and 30 seconds, during which time you could hear a clock tick, pages rustle, pens squeak across paper. It seemed as if he might, like the scene in a horror movie when daylight streams through the Gothic windows, crumble into a heap of dust. At last he sighed, and looked up at the judge: "No, you're right. It's not there."
Mr Justice Peter Smith's final judgment was as savage to Baigent as the case had been: "Mr Baigent was a poor witness. Those are not my words: they are the words of his own counsel in his written closing submissions. Those words do not in my view do justice to the inadequacy of Mr Baigent's performance. His evidence was comprehensively destroyed."
Baigent recalls it with a shiver: "I could hardly bear it. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was expecting it to be tough, but I was not prepared for the intensity, the ferocity and the personal quality of the attack. There were days when I had to fight the impulse to stand up and walk out of the court and just keep walking."
Their costs - all their own legal expenses, and 80% of those of the stupendously wealthy Random House - are £1.8m. He and Richard Leigh spent last week cashing in assets to make the first payment of £350,000. Why, in the name of the mystic triangles formed by the chalice and the sword, did they do it?
"Because we had to. It seemed such an open-and-shut case, we had to. We never intended to go to court; we thought we would just point out what seemed so obvious, get a proper acknowledgment of our work, and that would be that. But we couldn't even get them to talk to us, so in the end we had to. We worked out that we could afford it, just, so we had to."
He had expected that other writers and journalists would see the case was about authors' rights to their own work, and offer their support: the deafening silence surprised and saddened him. "We weren't just trying to get a bit of Dan Brown's money, and we were certainly not doing it for the publicity. I find that the most astounding suggestion. I've calculated that I'd have to sell an extra nine million copies of the Holy Blood to pay the legal bill - that's very expensive publicity indeed. But what have writers got except the intellectual copyright in their work? We've done very well - not as well as Dan Brown, but very well - so we could afford to stand up to one of the biggest publishers in the world, and so we had to. I believe that the protection for all writers has been seriously weakened, in Britain at least, by this judgment. If we had to do it all again, we would make the same decision."
Not surprisingly, The Jesus Papers has a new publisher, Harper Collins, who must be lighting candles in front of their favourite saints in gratitude for the publicity they have been handed.
Baigent speaks with real, almost unstoppable passion about the new book. He says he wrote it because he realised that in all his previous work about how the officially sanctioned Christ of the Catholic church obliterated the truth of the historical Christ, he had forgotten to set out his spiritual message - a message of peace and tolerance that he is touchingly convinced could reconcile Christian, Muslim and Jew, if only he could promulgate it widely enough.
The book has been very well received, he insists, and he has had "some excellent debates" about it. This is not precisely how it looks from the outside.
The dustjacket alone carries three what ifs, two whats, two wheres and a who. These add up to a hypothesis too far for many reviewers: "A book that will appeal to conspiracy theorists and militant secularists - well, to thick ones who have no friends," Bryan Appleyard sniffed in the Sunday Times. "Nothing in this book need concern grown-ups."
Baigent has been much mocked for the proof that endlessly eludes him, the manuscripts in the bank vault that are never seen again, the photographs that vanish at the British Museum, the collector who never phones back, the two letters - the Jesus Papers of the title - that are put into his hands but that he cannot read.
What the critics missed is a strange elegiac quality in the book, almost of Prospero breaking his staff: the proof is out there, he believes, but he himself will probably never find it.
He is impatient to crack on with the next book, for which he has already gathered a mass of material. He thinks it will cover the period of the Renaissance to the present day, and that it will not have anything to do with Christ, or Leonardo da Vinci: "Oh God, I hope not."
Meanwhile, almost unbelievably to anyone who has read the judgment, Baigent and Leigh have applied to appeal. "I hate unfinished business. If we are refused leave to appeal, I will draw a line under that, pay Random House all the money we owe them, and get on with my life."
The last twist of the court case was the coded message that Mr Justice Peter Smith concealed in his 70-page judgment.
Baigent frowns. "What was that about? This was a judgment that may cost us £1.8m - was it really just a joke? Was this an appropriate place to make a joke?"
And then, most unexpectedly, he guffaws.
The weird thing, so weird that it almost needs a blast of the X Files theme tune, is that Richard Leigh got it at once. As soon as the judge mentioned that the code turned on a centenary, Leigh told Baigent it could only be Dreadnought. The judge's secret message turned out to be "Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought" - an apparently arbitrary tribute to the admiral who commissioned the first of the great battleships, the actual HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906.
Richard Leigh is obsessed with the history of the Dreadnoughts: Baigent once suffered, a speechless bystander, when they met the actor and writer Michael Bentine, and he and Leigh spoke for a solid hour about the precise construction details of the Dreadnought hull. "I never knew rivets could be so interesting," Baigent says weakly.
Coincidence? Psychic spark leaping between between judge and plaintiff across the court room? And which man is guilty of plagiarising another's lifelong obsession?
· The Jesus Papers by Michael Baigent is published by Harper Element, price £16.99.
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