The Da Vinci Code

Sophie, after a falling out with her grandfather 10 years prior, feels no emotion over his death. Bidden to never contact her, Sauniére has abided by her wishes until he called earlier in the day to warn her they were both in danger. He hinted at a family secret, but Sophie suspected a ruse—her family was killed in a car accident years ago—so she never returned his call. Now, standing in a museum bathroom with Langdon, she wonders why her grandfather would bring them together in such a roundabout and macabre way. Convinced Langdon possesses important information, she argues they should flee to the US Embassy. He refuses, but she is insistent. Fache is intent on arresting Langdon, guilty or innocent, and escape is the only way to buy time.

Lieutenant Collet tries repeatedly to call Sophie, but she doesn’t answer. An increasingly agitated Fache senses she is not on the level—the Cryptology Department, it turns out, never sent her to the crime scene. Upon finding out Sophie is Sauniére’s granddaughter, Collet begins to piece together the puzzle, that the message was left for her, not Langdon. Suddenly, an alarm goes off. According to Langdon’s tracking device, it appears he has jumped from the second-story bathroom window.

As Fache sprints toward the bathroom, Collet tracks Langdon’s movements. The tracker is moving very fast, and Collet surmises that Langdon is now in a car. Looking through the broken bathroom window, Fache sees a truck driving away, its movements corresponding exactly to Langdon’s tracking device. Fache assumes Langdon jumped into the open bed of the truck, an “insane” drop of 40 feet. Langdon’s escape only confirms his guilt in Fache’s mind.

As Fache runs out of the bathroom, Sophie and Langdon hide in the shadows just out of sight. Moments earlier, Sophie embedded the tracking device in a bar of soap, broke the bathroom window, and dropped the soap into the bed of the passing truck. With all available police now chasing the truck, the Grand Gallery is empty. Langdon and Sophie escape down an emergency stairwell.

Sister Sandrine leads Silas through the austere Church of Saint-Sulpice, a landmark with a spotty reputation built over the ancient ruins of an Egyptian temple. Needing privacy, Silas asks for a moment to pray. Sandrine agrees to wait at the back of the church, but Silas insists she return to bed. She finally relents, leaving Silas alone at the altar, but quietly ducks into the choir loft and watches Silas from above. She wonders if he is the “enemy” she was warned about.

As Langdon and Sophie move through the abandoned gallery, they try to decipher Sauniére’s message. All of the clues—the Vitruvian Man pose, the pentacle, the Fibonacci sequence—are designed to grab Sophie’s attention. The pentacle is a reference to the Tarot, an ancient means of conveying information once prohibited by the Church. As they descend the stairs, Langdon realizes that all the clues have a single, unifying thread: the number PHI (1.618), the “Divine Proportion.” PHI’s importance stems from its consistent occurrence in nature: “Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1” (100). Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is a precise rendering of the Divine Proportion of the human body. In his classes at Harvard, Langdon shows the many examples of PHI in nature, art, music, and architecture. Even the pentacle’s proportions adhere to PHI, making it one of the most divine symbols in the world. Langdon’s reveries give him a flash of insight into Sauniére’s message—O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint! The words are an anagram. When unscrambled, the message reads: “Leonardo Da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!” (105).

The truth of Sauniére’s final message disturbs Sophie. Perhaps, she thinks, the message is only the beginning. Perhaps he meant for her to view the Mona Lisa which hung in a private gallery near the crime scene. She recalls visiting the painting with Sauniére as a young girl, puzzling over the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, wondering what secrets lay behind it. Convinced her grandfather left additional clues, Sophie decides to go back and examine the famous painting. She gives Langdon her car keys and instructs him to drive to the US Embassy.

As Langdon moves through a darkened corridor toward the exit, he becomes convinced that his role in this mystery is yet to play out, that Sauniére wanted his expertise for more than solving an anagram. Pondering the curator’s final words, Langdon has a sudden realization. He turns, running back up the stairs to the gallery.

Silas surveys the sanctuary of the church. There, in the south transept, he sees The Rose Line, a brass marker embedded into the floor like a massive ruler, a vestige of an old pagan temple upon which the Church of Saint-Sulpice was built. He follows the line across the altar to a large Egyptian obelisk, the hiding place, he believes, of the keystone.

Meanwhile, Aringarosa’s plane lands in Rome. Aringarosa anticipates Silas’s discovery, imagining the keystone will make him “the most powerful man in Christendom” (115).

Langdon catches up with Sophie at the Salle des Etats, the private gallery that houses the Mona Lisa. He asks her if the letters P.S. mean anything else to her beside “Princess Sophie,” Sauniére’s pet name for her when she was a girl. She recalls snooping through her grandfather’s bedroom as a young girl and finding a strange key on a gold chain. When Sauniére found her with the key, he admonished her to “respect other people’s privacy” (119). He told her the key opens a box filled with secrets and promised to give her the key one day, which bears the letters P.S. When Sophie confirms to Langdon the existence of the key (with the accompanying symbol of a fleur-de-lis), he tells her that her grandfather was a member of a secret society, the Priory of Sion. The Priory boasts many famous deceased members—Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo Da Vinci—and is renowned for its devotion to the sacred feminine. Meanwhile, on the banks of the Seine, Fache finds a bar of soap with the tracking device and angrily flings it into the river. 

From her perch in the choir loft, Sister Sandrine, a sentry for the Priory, watches Silas searching the altar for the hiding place of the keystone. When he finds what he thinks is a hollow spot beneath the floor, he looks for a tool with which to break the tiles. Sandrine knows that the arrival of Silas presages a warning from the Priory, a “call of distress” (125).