Such tenacity would have served her well if she did indeed spend three decades in the cold and damp of the Provence cave. "This is known as a place of penitence," Le Hégaret said. "In winter it's austere. Very few people come up to the cave. The road is frozen for weeks. There is a great simplicity here." He chuckled. "There is a proverb among the brothers of Provence: At Sainte-Baume either you go crazy, or you become a saint." With Christian Vacquié, the warden responsible for the ancient forest at Sainte-Baume, I visited a much smaller cave in the same massif that had contained the remains of Neanderthals from 150,000 years ago. This cave and others nearby have a distinctly female-reproductive organ shape, leading some to believe that they were fertility-cult sites in prehistoric times. One can imagine barren Neanderthals performing fertility rituals many tens of thousands of years before the arrival of Mary Magdalene.