Didier Voyenne
After graduating from ESSEC and CNAM, where he has since taught concurrently, Didier Voyenne pursued a busy professional life in various industrial and service companies, specializing in accounting and finance. He has also co-authored technical books on the subject. For over twenty years, he played competitive chess. However, his personal interests lie in theater, film, and literature, and writing is his deepest passion. He has written four novels and three plays.
He won the AlterPublishing Prize 2020 for The Palindrome .
Didier Voyenne - The Twilight of the Templars
November 1323, Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Bérenger Frédol, the chamberlain, is dying. He is thirsty, just as Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charnay, the last two dignitaries of the Order of the Temple, were thirsty when he visited them on the evening of March 10, 1314, in the Temple prison. The next day, their fate will be sealed. Bérenger offers them, in exchange for their supposed treasure, their lives, even the freedom he claims to guarantee them. They refuse him.
Hour after hour, they try to understand why, at the height of their power, the open conflict between King Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V led to their downfall on a certain Friday the 13th. They recall their past glory, the events that landed them in this prison, their doubts, their mistakes, their regrets. Exalted, then dejected, and finally reinvigorated, they decide to proclaim their innocence once more and thus perish the next day at the stake. To face this ordeal, they renew their initiation as Knights Templar.
Bérenger recounts their torture, but the haunting memory of it drives him mad. He dies a miserable death, confronted by the burgeoning myth of the Templars.