Summary: Prologue
Jacques Saunière is in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre.
He pulls a Caravaggio painting off the wall in order to trigger
the gallery’s alarm and seal himself inside, away from an albino
attacker who is pursuing him. But the protective metal cage does
little to stop the man, who pulls a pistol on Saunière and asks
him to reveal where “it” is. Saunière at first pretends that he
does not know and then gives the albino a false location. The false
location is a lie that Saunière has carefully rehearsed. The albino
responds that the “others”—three of Saunière’s partners—had said
the same thing. Then he shoots Saunière in the stomach, says, “Pain
is good,” and leaves him to die. Saunière realizes that his three
partners are dead, and that if he dies, the secret they all shared
will die with him. He is desperate to prevent that from happening
but realizes he has little time left.
Summary: Chapter 1
Robert Langdon is asleep in his room at the Ritz in Paris
when the concierge calls to say he has an important visitor. Langdon,
remembering his lecture on religious symbology earlier that night,
figures the visitor is some conservative he offended and tells the
concierge to send the guest away. Langdon has a history of being
controversial—the previous year, he got into an altercation at the
Vatican.
After a while, the concierge rings again to let Langdon
know the guest is on his way to his room. The visitor, an agent
with the French Judicial Police, questions Langdon about his earlier
plans to meet with his acquaintance Jacques Saunière for drinks
after the lecture. Langdon says that Saunière stood him up. The
agent tells Langdon that Saunière is dead and shows him a picture
of Saunière’s body, which is arranged in a specific way. Langdon
is horrified and also afraid—he saw a corpse arranged in a similar
way before, and it led to the incident at the Vatican.
Summary: Chapter 2
The albino attacker, Silas, goes to a house that seems
to belong to his religious organization, where he has a bedroom.
He finds a cell phone in the bottom drawer of the nightstand and
calls the Teacher. He tells the Teacher that he has killed Saunière
and Saunière’s three collaborators, and that each of them named
the Church of Saint- as the secret resting place for the
keystone that he and the Teacher and their comrades seek. The Teacher
tells Silas to go to Saint-Sulpice immediately and retrieve the
keystone. Before obeying, Silas engages in some “corporal mortification,”
a masochistic practice of physical self-punishment, as a way of
doing penance for sins. Silas tightens the barbed cilice, a punishment
belt, around his thigh, and flagellates himself, all the while repeating
his mantra: “Pain is good.”
Summary: Chapter 3
Langdon leaves the hotel, and Jerome Collet, an agent
of the French Judicial Police, drives him across Paris to the Louvre.
In the car Langdon muses about the history of some of Paris’s famous
architecture. He wishes he could be with his former flame, Vittoria,
on the Eiffel Tower, a structure he mocks as a reflection of the
culture’s machismo. Collet drops him off by the glass pyramid, the
entrance to the museum designed by I.M. Pei. Inside, Langdon meets
Bezu Fache, the police captain nicknamed “the Bull.”
Analysis
Saunière’s murder is an instigating moment in the story.
By setting it in an art gallery, a place not normally associated
with drama or intrigue, Brown indicates to the reader that his novel
will take an unusual approach toward art. As a museum curator, Saunière
is respectful of art. When he commits vandalism by ripping the Caravaggio
off the wall, it symbolizes that the story will undo many of our assumptions
about the sacred nature of high art. This act of vandalism also
shows the lengths to which Saunière will to go to survive. Saunière
is not, however, willing to give up his secret, even if his reticence
means death. The reader may suspect that this secret has some connection
to artwork, since the opening scene is set in a museum, but aside
from that clue the nature of the secret is unknown. Its discovery
will occupy much of the novel.
