Emily Rivarès Lawrence (1863-1932), an American of French origin, purchased the Les Pontils estate in 1921. She moved there with her grandmother, Marie Rivarès (1843-1922) and her son Louis Bertram Lawrence (1884-1954).

The body of Marie Rivarès was originally buried in an ordinary grave. When Emily Rivarès Lawrence died in 1932, she was buried in a parallelepiped tomb and the remains of Mary Rivarès were exhumed from her original grave and transferred into the same tomb – with two mummified cats – that was built by Louis Lawrence.

Louis Lawrence died in poverty in Carcassonne on 25 July 1954 having squandered his maternal inheritance (buried in Carcassonne, his grave no longer exists).

The Louis Lawrence tomb was demolished on 9 April 1988 by its owner, Monsieur Rousset, with permission of the local authorities, following persistent trespassing on his property by treasure hunters.

During the 1970s, the Louis Lawrence tomb became associated with a tomb depicted in Nicolas Poussin’s painting The Shepherds of Arcadia, located in Musée du Louvre, Paris, France and most famous for its inscription “Et In Arcadia Ego”.

Henry Lincoln first claimed that the tomb depicted in Poussin's The Shepherds of Arcadia was the same as the Louis Lawrence tomb in Les Pontils (The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem...? “Chronicle”, BBC 2, 31 March 1972). This was followed in the article by Jean Pellet and Gérard de Sède, “Le Secret de Nicolas Poussin” (Le Grand-Albert, Number 9, pages 46-48, July-August 1972). Gérard de Sède repeated this in his book, La Race Fabuleuse: Extra-Terrestres Et Mythologie Mérovingienne (1973). It was mistakenly claimed that the landscape behind the tomb in Les Pontils matched the background landscape found in Poussin’s painting.

Prior to this, Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey used the Latin phrase “Et In Arcadia Ego” within the framework of the myth of the Priory of Sion. Pierre Plantard claimed it was used as the motto of his ancestors and produced a coat-of-arms; it also featured on a tombstone linked to their framework of events relating to Rennes-le-Château.

In 1878 Louis Fédié wrote an article about the history and folklore of the Peyrolles area, starting with the area of Les Pontils – because a menhir existed in that location – the oldest man-made structure in the area. Had the Les Pontils tomb existed in 1878, it would have been mentioned thus by Louis Fédíe, but Fédié failed to mention the existence of any such tomb at Les Pontils in 1878 (“Étude Historique sur le des Haut-Razès”, Mémoires de la Société des Arts et des Sciences de Carcassonne, Volume 4, pages 42-92).

Menhir at Les Pontils