The murder at the end of the little essay in the “information balloon” above is intriguing. “I like it, le murder, because this is courage,” Dali told Victor Bockris in a 1974 interview. He was talking about murder in general, of course.

“It is anti-bourgeois. Le murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming rrrremords de conscience [remorseful], one prays, one opens le sky, and le angels say, ‘Good morning!’”

The French news media were the first to pick up on the coincidences between Dali’s paintings and the murders in Perpignan of 19-year-old Moktaria Chaib, found in December 1997 with face to the ground and both breasts cut away, and 22-year-old Marie-Helene Gonzalez, discovered six months later with some of her internal organs placed in a box and head and hands missing, and the subsequent disappearance of 17-year-old Tatiana Andujar.

Stephen Bourgoin, dubbed by the press France’s leading expert on multiple murder, discounted any link, but he put the case this way: “Dali has done his work of art. Now the serial killer of Perpignan is doing his gruesome work of art.”

Still, the murder at the railway station is a mere red herring in the great Dali saga. Far more intriguing — and merely hinted at in the typo-marred Jpg-image balloon created for Google Earth — is the matter of Europe’s abduction, the imminent catastrophe, and the mystery of the abandoned village of Perillos.

Dali’s pronouncements about the centre of the universe and the continent’s coming destruction were not about to be left alone, and several writers have carried the ball from there.

Philip Coppens, who looks hopefully into all manner of supernatural beliefs, has a relatively measured essay on Dali’s “scientific” approach to life’s mysteries on his website, and between him and André Douzet, whose Société Perillos maintains the online guide Perillos.com, you can venture far into Da Vinci Code territory with Saunière, Rennes-le-Château and the Priory of Sion.

There’s a ruling dynasty with secrets to hide and, seemingly inevitable in these ventures, the tomb of Jesus, right outside Perpignan. Has anyone even notified Dan Brown?

In this photo from Le Point magazine, Dali and Gala visit the station in a din of excitement in August 1965, two years after he had his “precise vision of the constitution of the universe” there. And this is where the universe would begin to converge.

Cynics will insist that, by “centre of the universe”, Dali meant that Perpignan station was where his artwork originated — the place from which he shipped everything out to the world, since the Spanish red tape at Figueras station was too fussy. It’s clear, though, that Dali meant far more than that.

Coppens bases his observations on the writings of Roger Michel Erasmy, who investigated Dali’s prediction of an apocalypse of sorts being born in the region. Erasmy cited the “catastrophic writing” that Dali jotted in a 1982 booklet and his revelations the following year to his childhood friend and final companion, Antonio Pichot.

On Halloween 1983, Dali dictated to Pichot the details of four hallucinations he’d had at the end of ‘82. In one of these René Thom, pictured here, a mathemetician he admired and had once met, had appeared and told him of the upcoming catastrophe, a matter of Europe’s “disappearance, or abduction”, beginning at a spot between Salses and Narbonne.

After making the films “The Andalusian Dog” and “The Golden Age”, Dali and Luis Bunuel planned but never carried out a third, called “Babaouo”, which had to do with the legend of Babau heard in Rivesaltes, and there’s another, similar yarn about Babaos that’s linked with Perillos.

The hero of both stories is one of the lords of Perillos (influential advisers to the kings of Aragon, despite meagre earnings from their estates), who was victorious over some terrible monster. Erasmy noted that the postal code for the region of Rivesaltes and Opoul-Perillos is 66600, but there’s better evidence for a genuine occult mystery here than a fleeting allusion to the Mark of the Beast.

Dali once visited Opoul, signing the guest book at the mayor’s office, but nothing is recorded about his reason for being in the area.

Also in 1983, Dali painted “Topological Abduction of Europe — Homage to René Thom”, in which one of Thom’s mathematical equations appears on an otherwise near-blank grey field. Two lines bisect the canvas, and a cross, or “X”, is marked.

Erasmy realised that the line on the right mimicked the route of the A9/E15 motorway between Salses and Narbonne, and the one on the left that of the smaller D611 between Tuchan and Durban-Corbières. If this were a map, the “X” would be close to Perillos.

Below is the area as seen on Google Earth, and below that the same view with the painting superimposed and the “X” highlighted. It’s not easy reconciling the lines on the painting with the roads, but the are “close”, just as the “X” is close-ish to Perillos.

Erasmy asked Pichot if Dali had painted with a map in hand and was told he did not. And from there the story drifts far and wide, without ever coming close to explaining what Dali suspected about Perpignan.

Coppens and Erasmy seem to think Dali was, right from youth, a genuine mystic visionary who could “download” information from some other realm. Coppens goes as far as to suggest that the “madness” ascribed to the maestro in his final years — his alleged suicide attempts — could have been information overload. “Was the gate from the other realm wide open and was Dali unable to regulate it?”

Noting Dali’s fascination with Thom, Einstein and Heisenberg, Coppens wonders if Dali’s science might have also extended to alchemy and the occult arts, and whether he was an initiate.

In the 1979 painting “Searching for the Fourth Dimension”, writes Coppens, “we see the alchemist at work: there are allusions to Einstein’s space/time theories, by means of the wheels next to the cave — both concave and convex — and the sprawling soft watch.

“But what to make of the couple with their backs to the painter, a reference to Plato and Aristotle in ‘The School of Athens’ by Raphael — which in itself has a rich history of esoteric acclaim?

“And why did he believe that Europe would be ‘abducted’ from Perpignan, where centuries before an apocalyptic preacher, Vincent Ferrer, made similar claims … claims apparently supported by the exiled pope Benedict XIII?”

Again, there are no answers forthcoming.

On the Opoul plateau are two castles, one in the village itself and the other, the castle of Salveterra, shown above, on a rock outcrop overlooking it, with a view of the Mediterranean Sea. The latter has been there since at least 1172, and the village since 1246, once known as Salveterra and with a small chapel whose remains still exist.

From the plateau you can see the tower of the castle of Perillos, probably a deliberate line of sight in the event of invasion, so that warning fires could be lit. Below, an aerial of Perillos.

Every May 1 people get together on the plateau for the Chronodrome, a welcoming party for any time travellers who might be arriving from the future. Perillos.com (though it’s not clear if this is André Douzet writing) says a satellite known as KEO was to be launched into space in 2005, bearing “a numeric library containing the sum total of our current knowledge and the cultural history of humanity.

“At the end of the 50,000 years, KEO will land on Earth and our distant descendants will hold in their hands the keys to our civilisation … I am wagering that in the distant future our descendants will have discovered the medium to travel through time. Therefore, we are inviting them to leap back to our epoque and give us some small sign that they have received our message.

“To ensure that they are not mistaken in either the time or place, we have indicated a precise spot — the castle in Opoul — and a date — the 1st of May with a margin of 50 years. Thus the contact could take place any 1st of May between the years 2000 and 2050.

“What we expect from the ‘chrononauts’ is at least a visual ’sign’ in the sky above the place reserved for the Chronodrome. The advantage of a visual sign is that it should have a minimal impact on our physio-chemical environment so as not to have any effect on theirs in the future. The appearance of a hologram, a light, or any sign of contact would represent a veritable victory.”

This is a god’s-eye view of a distinctly Dalinean flourish in the local landscape.

Curiously, the astronomer Cassini of the Observatory in Paris spent more than a year in the area in the 17th century making a map, on which Perillos is identifed as “white space”, a designation normally used for unknown territory.

Nearby is Tautavel, one of Europe’s oldest settlements. In the cave called the “caune de l’Arago” the remains of pre-Neanderthal people were found in 1971, including the skull of “Arago XXI”, 450,000 years old.

There’s another artist in the picture here: the French-Catalan sculptor and painter Marcel Gili (1914-93). Just down the road from Perillos is a museum dedicated to him.

“Discovered” by Maillol, the stone cutter’s son exhibited his work in Perpignan in 1932 and the following year in Paris, where he met abstraction-creationists Delaunay, Leger and Dufy. He became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Superior de Paris.

THERE’S STILL MORE TO THIS STORY: Continue to “Roger Erasmy, the ‘Heirs of Dali’ and the Perpignan railway car”.

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As to the painting, “The Mystery of the Railway Station at Perpignan”, it was first exhibited in New York on December 18, 1965. Nearly a decade later it was back in the Big Apple, as the centrepiece of a show at the Knoedler Gallery.

For the record, the full title is:

“Gala Looking at Dali in a State of Anti-Gravitation in His Work of Art ‘Pop-Op-Yes-Yes Pompier’ in Which One Can Contemplate the Two Anguishing Characters from Millet’s ‘Angelus’ in a State of Atavistic Hibernation Standing Out of a Sky Which Can Suddenly Burst into a Gigantic Maltese Cross Right in the Heart of the Perpignan Railway Station Where the Whole Universe Must Begin to Converge”

Louis Markoya was at the time Dali’s protegé, and the maestro asked him to paint “the picture of his name for the Knoedler window”. He used his variant on “Markoya”.

“Mark Oil, you are to paint the picture which will welcome the world to my new show. It is to be painted in black and white, in the style of Andy Warhol, and it should be six feet by four feet. It shall say DALI and that is all, though you should sign it like it was typed by a typewriter.”

Louis’ next assignment was trickier: Dali handed him a drawing showing a field of wheat with the written note, “Wit cret Luis”, meaning “Wheat to be created by Louis”. (Seen below is a Dali ink sketch, “Long Live the Station at Perpignan, Long Live Figueras”, from 1979.)

Dali saw wheat as the food staple on which the economies of some nations depend, Louis has explained, and utilised it in his art in the form of sublime loaves of bread and the body of Christ. But for this exhibition, Dali wanted a waving field of grain as a frame for his masterpiece — and he wanted artificial wheat.

“Dali wanted me to procure thousands of shafts of plastic wheat. The wheat was to be attached to tiny springs and the springs were to be attached to small mounting plates.

“Nowhere was plastic wheat to be found. El maestro was getting more and more pissed, when I decided I’d show up with reams and reams of real wheat stalks, which he could not believe, in that day and age, could be had (as opposed to plastic).

“But he was pleased. The wheat field was installed directly in front of the painting. The Knoedler people were turning blue when Dali had workers drilling holes in the hardwood floors to install the shafts.”

The final phase of the plan didn’t pan out: large fans that would toss the wheat to and fro as if in a farmer’s field. This notion proved just too impractical.

A refreshingly lighter reminder of Perpignan’s link to Dali, its close neighbour, came in January 2009 when Lluis Colet sat down at the railway station and talked non-stop for 124 hours — mostly about Dali, his fellow Catalonian — to break the world record for the longest speech.

The 62-year-old civil servant nattered on for five days and four nights to cap the previous Guinness record by four hours.

The first time Dali’s work was seen in the United States it was at the 27th Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928.

Three of his paintings were on view at Andrew Carnegie’s museum (pictured in the aerial shot below), though not “Female Nude” or “Unsatisfied Desires”, seen above, which had caused a scandal earlier in the year when they were shown at the Maragall Gallery in Barcelona.

Dali responded during a lecture by insulting “all the painters who were doing twisted trees”. He was proud of causing an uproar. A few years later at Barcelona’s Atheneo he called the founder of an event’s host organisation “the pederast and the great hairy putrified man”.

“Everyone threw chairs and broke up everything,” he scoffed. “The police had to protect me.”

In Paris, meanwhile, Dali signed his first contract, with art dealer Camille Goemans, met again with Picasso and Miro, made his first direct contact with surrealist ringleader Andre Breton (seen here in a photo by Man Ray) — and made another tour of the brothels.

In Figueras in the autumn, Dali and Luis Bunuel wrote the screenplay for “Un Chien Andalou”, which would end up as a conceptually incoherent yet graphically riveting 17-minute milestone in cinema history, best remembered for its scenes of a straight razor slicing across a woman’s eyeball (actually a cow’s eye) and ants devouring a rotting hand.

“Enigmatic Elements in the Landscape”, 1934

On June 6, 1928, “Un Chien Andalou” had its premiere in Paris, and the avant-garde critics raved about it. The film, Dali boasted, “plunged like a dagger” into the city’s heart.

In November Dali’s first one-man show in the City of Lights was held at the Goemans Gallery, with 11 paintings on view. Camille Goemans had sent him an enthusiastic telegram in Cadaques saying he was prepared to buy three paintings of Dali’s choosing for 3,000 francs and exhibit all his work upon his return to Paris.

But it was between these events, and not in Paris, that Dali met Gala, who would set the course of his life on a considerably different tangent.

An address I’ve come across for Dali’s original apartment in Paris is 88 Rue de l’universite, though I’m not sure of the date. It would certainly have been in the late 1920s, likely around the time “Un Chien Andalou” premiered.

The building is pictured below, facing away toward the Seine. Not far from here is Goeman’s gallery.

This was “the dark apartment”, Dali wrote years later, “where I first discovered the intensity of Gala’s gaze”, one that he said Paul Eluard had characterised as “the look that pierces walls”.

And under the influence of that gaze, Dali added, he painted “The Sublime Moment” in 1938 (above left), “Telephone Grilled Sardines at the End of September” in 1939 (above right) — both discussed further in this post, and, in 1937, the picture below, “Herodias”.

Herodias was a Jewish princess descended from King Herod, but it’s more likely, judging from the imagery, that Dali was thinking of the mediaeval witchcraft cult that revered Herodias, daughter of Diana, the goddess of the hunt.

The flat on Rue de l’Universite is also where Dali painted “Enigmatic Elements in the Landscape” in 1934, seen at the top of this post and here in closer detail.

He’s portrayed Vermeer at an easel set out on the Ampurdan plain, where the boy Salvador, next to his nurse, strikes his usual pose in sailor suit holding a hoop. In the distance are forms of the sort Dali called simply “symbols”, specifically “symbolic of hierarchies”.

Another spectre familiar from his paintings of this period rises draped by a row of cypress trees and a tower, recalling the Pichot family’s Mill Tower and the belltowers of local churches.

According to the website Moodbook, journalist Cyrus Sulzberger of the family that owns the New York Times bought “Enigmatic Elements” at the Carnegie Institute surrealist exhibition in Philadelphia that same year. He paid for it in $5 installments and came to believe it brought him good luck. Later obliged to sell it, he realised his mistake and, not long before his death, arranged to buy it back again.

“The Font”, 1930

In January 1930, flush with the success of his sold-out show at the Goemans Gallery the previous month, Dali brought Gala here to Carry-le-Rouet on the Cote d’Azur where, until March 8, they took rooms at the Hotel du Chateau de Carry — “where no one could come and ferret us out”.

Carry-le-Rouet is today proudest of being the long-time summer home of the beloved film comedian Fernandel — whose portrait Dali would have painted, “disguised as a Velasquez dwarf”, had the war not intervened.

Gala was suffering with an unspecified gynaecological problem (she’d had herself sterilised after the birth of her and Paul Eluard’s daughter Cecile), but Dali kept busy with his work, including the painting “The Invisible Man” and the book “The Visible Woman”.

“We had the hallway stacked with wood,” Dali wrote in his 1942 biography, “so that our fireplace would never for a moment be without a fire — and so that no one could come and disturb us on the pretext of bringing us wood … For two months we did not once go outdoors!”

He and Gala would long after remember this stay as “one of the most active, exciting and frenzied periods of our lives”, often saying to each other, “You remember the time at Carry-le-Rouet?” Gala foresaw lean times ahead, but not for long.

In her readings of the tarot cards she saw a dark man with money. This, as it turned out, was the art philanthropist the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, from whom an offer of help indeed soon arrived.

On hotel stationery Dali wrote to the Viscount about selling one of the three versions he’d just completed of “Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion”, and to Luis Bunuel about his new ideas for “l’Age d’Or”, the film they’d begun scripting the summer before in Cadaques.

“The Great Masturbator”, 1930

Following their two months of hiding out in Carry-le-Rouet on the wintry Cote d’Azur, Dali and Gala had a quick visit with Garcia Lorca in Madrid and then, in April 1930, enjoyed something of a “honeymoon” on the Spanish coast at Torremolinos, whose beach is pictured above.

Today the resort village has a Salvador Dali Avenue, although there’s nothing unusual about that in Spanish towns. The Dalis’ abode was far from the street that would be named after him.

“We rented a fisherman’s cottage which overlooked a field of carnations on the edge of a cliff falling abruptly into the sea. This was our honeymoon of fire! Our skins became dark as those of the fisher folk.”

Their bed was as hard as dry bread, Dali wrote, but he came to appreciate the “gentle bruises and aches” that resulted, “for then one perceives that one has a body, and that one is naked.

“Gala, with a build like a boy’s, burned by the sun, would walk about the village with her breasts bare, and I had taken to wearing my necklace again. The fishermen of this region had no modesty of any kind, and would drop their pants a few metres from us to perform their physical functions.”

Aware that he was close to Malaga here, on Picasso’s native turf, Dali admired the men lining up to take a shit and taking their time about it, all the while trading “epic obscenities” and cheering their children’s sling-shot battles.

The fights “often ended with a few cracked skulls”, he observed.

“The sight of their children’s blood would awaken a little the personal hostilities among the defecators and, quickly pulling up their trousers and carefully readjusting their genital parts, which were always of handsome and well-developed proportions, they would start arguing among themselves … and would in turn end the polemic with one or two knife jabs.”

Amid such reveries Dali continued with “The Invisible Man” on canvas and completed “The Visible Woman” on paper.

Their surrealist friends came to visit, and in their bickering over left and right ideologies Dali could see that Spain was destined for civil war, a Medusa with snakes in her belly rather than on her head, the “serpents mutually strangulating one another in a continual iliac passion of death and of erection”.

Bad news arrived in a batch: the Goemans Gallery, which still owed him money, was going bankrupt; Bunuel was going ahead with “L’Age d’Or” without Dali; the carpenter building their house in Port Lligat wanted more cash. Salvador and Gala found themselves without enough change to even get home.

Dali strode out among the dunes alone, punching himself in the face, but in the tooth he knocked out he found the key to hope. He recognised “the advantage of my infirmities” and saw how necessity might give birth to opportunity.

In Paris Dali had been seeing Picasso and Éluard twice a week, but “society people” every day. His and Gala’s best friends there were Coco Chanel and the Sert girls, sculptor Roussie and Bettina, another fashion designer. Dali called Bettina and Roussie “fairy skeletons of the sveltest poetry”.

Hailing from Georgia, Roussie (Roussivani) was the second wife of the muralist Jose Maria Sert, who in 1936 prodded Salvador to paint “The Great Paranoiac”, seen above. Dali had adored the gossip at the soirees hosted by Sert’s first wife Missie, as well.

Well-connected with eligible American women living in Paris, Roussie Sert was also the enabling sister of the skirt-chasing Mdivani brothers, who styled themselves “princes”. Between them over the years they married Pola Negri, Barbara Hutton, Louise Astor Van Alen and several other American heiresses.

It was Alexis Mdivani who wed Van Alen and then Hutton’s first husband, and then Van Alen married another brother, Serge. A third brother, David, married the American actress Mae Murray.

They and their sisters Roussie Sert and Nina Huberich became known as the “marrying Mdivanis”.

In the photo from 1925, Roussie sits between her sister, on the left, and an unidentified friend.

Jose Maria Sert had a house three hours’ drive from Port Lligat, above the beach in the Mas Juny in Castell, in Palamós, which Salvador and Gala often visited for weeks at a time with the rest of the gang from Paris. Marlene Dietrich and Luchino Visconti were also among the guests.

“This period of summer enchantment”, Dali wrote, “the last days of happiness of Europe” before the Spanish civil war and the world war that followed, ended for him on August 1, 1935, when Alexis Mdivani and his then-lover the Baroness Maud von Thyssen-Bornemisza were killed in a car accident on the road from Palamos to Figueras.

Jose Maria refused to return to Castell afterward, and Roussie, Dali recalled, “was to die of grief over this four years later. To tell you how much I loved this being I shall tell you only that she resembled — as two ‘pearls of death’ resemble each other — the portrait of the young girl by Vermeer of Delft in The Hague Museum.” He doubtless refers to “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”, painted in about 1665.

On one of his visits to see Sert, Dali was set up with a tiny studio in a stone fishermen’s hut that’s recently been “rediscovered” and turned into a minor tourist attraction. You can read about the “archaeological” project on this website, from which the two photos below originate.

It was recognised for its significance in art history following a 2003 municipal survey of obsolete structures that might be removed in the interest of nature conservation. Three years later someone noticed a depiction of a horse on the wall of this one-time stable and it seemed like Dali’s work. A search of the property records showed that it no doubt was.

The “Dali Shack” has a door described in Catalan as la porta torta, which might translate just as suitably as “the awry door” or “porthole”.

Sert sold the property in 1944 to Albert Puig Palau, and it became something of a pilgrimage destination for artists and intellectuals, and with them Dali returned.

“Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History”, painted in 1935-6, contains at least two architectural elements that Dali drew from Palamos, according to his biographer Ian Gibson.

He reckoned the district’s the Casino La Unión echoes in the porch of the Chirico-style building on the left, while the prominent structure in the centre was modelled on the Art Nouveau palace of the Ribera family. Both buildings disappeared years ago.