The Forêt d’Orient is a large forest near Troyes that the novel repeatedly places at the intersection of Templar history and the men’s increasingly elaborate Plan. In the colonel’s account it is at once a conspicuous place the fugitives would avoid, a marker of Saint Bernard’s influence, and—later—a storehouse in a supposed system of power stretching across Europe.

Historical and Templar Associations

In the colonel’s reconstruction, the forest belongs to the historical landscape that helped make the Templars powerful. He links the counts of Champagne, Saint Bernard, and the order’s presence in the Holy Land, claiming that the Templars maintained contact with Arab and Jewish secret groups. The Forêt d’Orient stands near Troyes as part of this regional base: the colonel points to its great size and to the sequence of commanderies there as evidence of the order’s deep local presence.

The forest also anchors the colonel’s account of Saint Bernard’s patronage. He says Bernard gave the Templars advantages over the Benedictines, including directing gifts of land and houses toward the military order. In this telling, Champagne’s resources and the forest’s commanderies helped sustain an organization that supposedly operated beyond royal jurisdiction. These connections are the colonel’s theory, not independently established history within the scene.

Proposed Refuge and Its Rejection

When explaining where the Templars might have hidden after their suppression, the colonel considers Champagne because Hugues de Payns came from the region and the order had a long-standing base there. He dismisses Payns as too small, Troyes as too exposed to royal officials, and the forest as the first place royal guards would search precisely because the Templars owned it. He concludes that Provins, rather than the Forêt d’Orient, is the only plausible refuge.

That rejection gives the forest a distinctive role in the argument: its importance makes it an obvious, and therefore supposedly unsafe, hiding place. The colonel’s reasoning turns geographic prominence into both evidence of Templar power and a reason the fugitives would have avoided it.

From Regional Landmark to Storehouse

Later, as the Plan expands into a theory about telluric currents and hidden centers of power, the Forêt d’Orient acquires a new function. The three men imagine that the Templars used Gothic cathedrals as stations in a network that registered and transmitted subterranean forces. In the same speculative account, they claim that the order found silver in the New World and moved it toward the Portuguese coast; Tomar supposedly served as the distribution center, while the Forêt d’Orient became the chief storehouse.

The forest’s function thus shifts from a possible refuge that the colonel rejects to an imagined logistical node in the Plan. The claim is part of the men’s fabricated history, which recasts places associated with Templar wealth as components in a hidden system.

Place in the Plan’s Geography

The Forêt d’Orient also appears in the colonel’s proposed map of Templar esotericism. He connects it with Troyes and Saint Bernard, then places those sites within a line of centers that includes Amiens, Reims, Chartres, Rennes-le-Château, and Mont-Saint-Michel. By tracing the points differently, he says, the line can resemble a rune and the constellation of Virgo. The exchange exposes the flexibility of the method: the pattern depends on which stars or places are selected and how the lines are drawn.

Across these accounts, the forest is less a setting for narrated action than a geographical token repeatedly reassigned meaning. Its actual proximity to Troyes and its association with Templar holdings allow the colonel and the three investigators to make it support incompatible propositions: too obvious to shelter fugitives, yet important enough to anchor the order’s supposed wealth and secret infrastructure.