So, okay, here's the thing: they are are NOT the bread of the sacrament. This is important, because Cathars don't believe in Communion or Mass (or any of the Catholic sacraments.) The bread wasn't even particularly holy, because no material things are holy to Cathars.

HOWEVER, if you sat down for a meal with one of the itinerant Cathar holy men - the Goodmen who travelled around in hiding from the Church, visiting believers - then of course you would break bread with him, and he would bless the bread, and then if you were one of *those* people, you would save a bit of the bread as a memory of when you met the Goodman, and then you would try to get bits of bread blessed by as many of the different Goodmen as you could, and then you would brag about how many different Goodmen you'd collected to other people who also had a hidden collection of deeply illegal and very stale bread (since those Catholics assumed it *was* some kind of holy thing, even though it DEFINITELY wasn't it was just souvenirs.)

I was left wondering if there was a related Catholic tradition of collecting bread that had been blessed by certain bishops or hermits or whatever as extremely perishable holy relics, but Ladurie didn't mention that.