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The Languedoc was once the centre of European culture, virtually an independent country, with its own language and even its own religion. Then for centuries it was a provincial backwater, the butt of “Irish” jokes in the metropolis. Less than 20 years ago, Toulouse was not considered a safe place to walk at night. Now, it is France’s Seattle, home of high-tech industries, with the second-largest university in France and all the smart shops, clubs, bars and restaurants that you could possibly want.

Prosperity has only come recently, and when other European cities were tearing down beautiful buildings and replacing them with eyesores, Toulouse could not afford to join in. There is only one ugly building in the city centre, a concrete multistorey carpark, but its ground floor houses one of the best food markets in France. For a big city, Toulouse has surprisingly little traffic, and life appears to be conducted with an almost inexplicable calm. The narrow streets smell of roasting coffee and baking cakes. In late summer and autumn, the squares smell of magnolia.

Almost every building is made of orange-pink bricks. La Ville Rose, 'the rose-red city', is half as old as Petra. The other distinctive colour of the city is the pale pastel blue of woad. Once noticed, you begin to see it everywhere. If you haven’t been to Toulouse, you could spend your whole life thinking that woad was something that ancient Britons put on their bodies and you wouldn’t have realised that that there was a woad boom in the 16th century. Fortunes were made and fake castles built on the proceeds until the trade collapsed with the arrival of indigo from India. There is also violet, which is made into sweets and a sickly local spirit, the kind you buy a bottle of to take home and later wonder why you bothered. The local Michelin-starred chefs use violet to colour and flavour mashed potato, and you might prefer that they didn’t.

The most famous dish of Toulouse is cassoulet, the kind of peasant food that works out prohibitively expensive if you try to cook it in London. My only attempt to find le vrai cassoulet in Toulouse was not a success, but it is doubtless worth persevering, though it probably tastes best only after a hard morning’s work in the rain.

The other famous dish of the area is brandade de morue, a liaison of olive oil and salt cod, which used to take two people an afternoon to make, and was highly esteemed. Now that it can be whizzed up in a blender in five minutes, it seems to have gone out of fashion.

From the 11th to the 13th century, Languedoc was one of the main European centres of the Cathar heresy, which believed, among other things, that Satan created the world, that all matter was evil, that souls that failed to escape the snares of the material world were reincarnated, that Jesus was entirely divine and did not suffer or die on the cross, that angels and demons walk among us in human guise.

The stricter adherents, called parfaits, were committed to a regime of poverty and service to others, abstaining from meat, alcohol and sex, but ordinary believers were allowed much greater freedom. Sex was permitted with no particular strictures against extra-marital sex, but conception was discouraged, and so they practised contraception, abortion and, it was widely rumoured, anal intercourse. The word “bugger” comes from “Bougre”, which was another name for Cathar, in turn deriving from “Bulgaria” which was also a Cathar stronghold. According to Anselm, canon of Liège, “they engaged in I know not what filthy acts”.

The pope did not approve of buggery, even less of non-payment of tithes, so in 1208 he declared a crusade against the Cathars, a call eagerly answered by the King of France, who was covetous of the wealth of Languedoc. The crusade was motivated by the usual mixture of self-righteousness and greed and conducted with extreme brutality.

When the armies of Languedoc were finally crushed, the Inquisition moved in and did such a good job that the heresy was almost totally eradicated. Of the thousands of sects that briefly had their day during the Reformation, few owed any of their ideas to the Cathars, who 300 years before had outnumbered Catholics in some parts of Europe. According to Jonathan Sumption, author of The Albigensian Crusade, the Cathars have “vanished without trace”.

However, a few years ago in the beautiful old town of Limoux, my father-in-law met an old lady who took him down to her cellar and showed him a Cathar shrine. “They thought they killed us all,” she said. “They didn’t.”

The people of Limoux claim to have invented champagne, although the evidence is unclear. But there is something about the cool, clear air of the mountains that makes you want to suspend disbelief, to believe that anything is possible.

There ought to be a word for the tendency to see patterns in random data, to find connections between coincidences, because five miles south of Limoux at Rennes Le Chateau, the mysteries of Languedoc have become a major industry.

Here, in the late 19th century, a parish priest called Bérenger Saunière somehow acquired great wealth and influence, spending his money on roads, houses and bizarre additions to the local church ― not least a painting of a Scotsman in a kilt at one of the stations of the cross and a font propped up by a lurid statue of the demon Asmodel (a minor fallen angel now better known as the baddie in the DC comics Day of Judgement and Justice League of America).

The least sensational theory is that Saunière profited from an early form of chain letter, but the evidence for this is tenuous, and if true would have spoiled a good story.

Worldwide interest took off in 1982 with the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which boasted the discovery of “the single most shattering secret of the last 2,000 years”. Professional historians regarded it with contempt, but this is not surprising as there is nothing professionals dislike more than outsiders coming into their patch and making a large amount of money. Unfortunately, you cannot get far into the book without being aware that corroborated facts are thin on the ground.

It picks up briefly in the second chapter when a retired Church of England vicar tells the authors rather sadly that Saunière had “incontrovertible proof” that the crucifixion was a fraud and that Christ was alive as late as 45AD. But on page 96, they meet a self-styled French aristocrat calling himself Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair and from then on the book goes rapidly downhill. You would expect the authors to be a little more sceptical when confronted by someone who, on no clear evidence, claims to be related to every noble house in France, a direct descendent of Jesus Christ and the head of a secret society whose previous heads have included most of the major figures of western civilisation.

It is generally a good idea to have as little as possible to do with the French aristocracy, and this is not difficult as most of them have no intention of having much to do with the likes of you. The only worthwhile French aristocrat of recent times was born on November 24, 1864, in the Hôtel du Bosc in Albi, a small town an hour’s drive north east of Toulouse which gave its name to the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars.

On May 13 1878 at the age of 13, he slipped in the hall and broke his leg. It never properly healed, and a year later he fell out walking and broke his other leg. In the months and years of convalescence, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec took up painting which took him to greatness, the Moulin Rouge, absinthe, an early death, José Ferrer and Baz Luhrmann.

The old centre of Albi is a warren of half-timbered houses, as quiet as an enchanted castle from a fairytale. Most of it is medieval, but some of the grander buildings date from the woad boom, also half timbered but with a few incongruous classical and renaissance details to demonstrate that the owners were not ignorant provincials.

Dwarfing the town is an enormous brick cathedral. From the outside, it looks more like a fortress or a power station, giving an unmistakable message of “Don’t fuck with us” to any passing heretics. Inside, the walls are painted all over with what looks like patterns for very expensive wrapping paper.

The Hôtel du Bosc can be found conveniently at the end of what is now called the rue Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. It is a pleasant enough house but not a large palace, as you might expect for a count’s town house. The sign on the wall says 1601, but the building is certainly more recent.

In fact, very little about the Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa family should be taken at face value. After the revolution, when titles no longer had any legal standing, it became increasingly common for aristocrats to adopt names that they were not strictly entitled to. Henri’s family were a very junior branch and his father should have called himself Monsieur not Count.

To protect what little remained of their wealth, the noble families of the area regularly intermarried, with predictable but disastrous consequences. Henri’s parents and two of his grandparents were first cousins, and his father’s sister later married his mother’s brother. Although the family blamed Henri’s misfortunes on incompetent doctors, there is no doubt that it was the result of chronic inbreeding. A chilling photograph of his mother’s family taken about 1885 shows that at least five members were seriously disabled. Henri’s cousin Fides is little more than a large head in a basket, staring unselfconsciously at the camera. Henri’s father’s family were seriously eccentric, unfit for any occupation except hunting, although many had a real, if undeveloped, artistic talent, possibly also a genetic inheritance.

After Henri’s death, his mother and his friend Maurice Joyant offered his pictures to the city of Paris and then to Toulouse. Both turned them down, but in 1922 the collection finally found a home in Albi in the old bishop’s palace by the cathedral.

Henri was not entirely the tragic figure of his popular image. He was, by all accounts, a witty and usually cheerful companion, he cared about the right things, and he was a genuinely radical artist, as soon becomes obvious as you walk round the Palais de la Berbie. It contains more than a third of his total output, as good a collection of a single artist as you will find anywhere.

A few doors down from the Hôtel du Bosc is the former home of the 18th-century explorer Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse, who circumnavigated the globe and said: “I believe my greatest happiness was was when I was in Albi with my wife”. His ship was lost with all hands in 1788 somewhere off the Solomon Islands.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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