Summary: Chapter 83

Teabing lies his way into the Temple Church. He tells Sophie and Langdon that the Knights Templar used to run a primitive sort of bank, storing gold in their churches and allowing people with the right documents to withdraw the gold while they were traveling. Teabing, Sophie, and Langdon make their way into the tomb, where ten knights lie.

Summary: Chapter 84

Outside of the Temple Church, Rémy drinks vodka and thinks about how he will soon be rich. He unties Silas and tells him that he, too, serves the Teacher. They each take a gun and Rémy says they have a job to do. At the airfield, Fache is furious with the policemen who have not stopped Teabing.

Summary: Chapter 85

Teabing, Sophie, and Langdon try and fail to find the missing orb to which the verse referred. There are ten tombs containing knights; nine of the tombs are decorated with statues of knights. One has no statue.

The altar boy who let them in comes back and asks them questions. He hears a sound and goes to investigate. Rémy and Silas, who have entered, threaten him. The boy wets his pants in fear, and then he is allowed to run away.

Summary: Chapter 86

Silas holds Langdon at gunpoint and demands the cryptex, but Langdon threatens to smash it on the floor and ruin the papyrus inside unless Silas lets Sophie and Teabing go. Since the Teacher has had Rémy instruct Silas not to shoot anyone, Silas doesn’t know what to do. The Teacher has also told Rémy not to show his face, but Rémy takes Teabing at gunpoint and makes Langdon give Silas the cryptex. Rémy leaves with Teabing. Silas keeps Langdon and Sophie at gunpoint.

Summary: Chapter 87

At the chateau, one of the agents comes in from the barn and tells Collet to come look at something. In a loft in the barn, out of view, a high-tech surveillance station is set up. Collet asks who is being observed, and the agent says the answer will surprise him.

Summary: Chapter 88

Sophie and Langdon descend into the subway. Sophie tells Langdon that the best thing they can do for Teabing is to call the police on Rémy and Silas and turn them into fugitives. Langdon wants to go to a library and look up one of the phrases from the poem on an electronic database. But when Sophie calls the police, they transfer her to Fache, who tells her he knows Langdon is innocent and he wants her to come into the London police station to ensure her own safety.

Analysis: Chapters 83–88

The difference between the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church of Rome, while not explicitly analyzed, is significant to the story. Teabing refers to the Church of England, or the Anglican Church, and its propensity for bleak architecture. Anglicans and other non-Catholic sects of Christianity differentiated themselves from Roman Catholics through lack of decoration and artifice. The Roman Catholic affection for theater, which we have seen embodied by Aringarosa and his enormous ring, was offensive to some Christians, who split off to form their own sects. The Knights Templar’s association with this bleak and unadorned place, then, is appropriate.

Rémy is revealed as a traitor when he fails to come to Teabing’s aid during Silas’s attack. Still, it comes as a shock to find that he is betraying his employer simply for money. Rémy does not want to be a servant to Teabing for his entire life, so he turns against the employer who has been so kind to him. Rémy’s betrayal echoes the biblical story of Judas, who betrayed Jesus for money.

The tombs are a classic dead end of the type Brown seems to favor. Teabing and Langdon do not know it, but the tombs do not actually contain bodies. They are just statues placed over empty space.

In this part of the novel, Brown gets closer to revealing the identity of the Teacher when he reveals that the Teacher doesn’t want anyone to get hurt in the process of carrying out this mission. This revelation about his personality, combined with the fact that he has access to electronic surveillance and that he is not known to Bishop Aringarosa, suggests that perhaps he is not associated with the Church. At this point, the identity of the Teacher is the second most important secret of the book, after the location of the Grail itself.

In the subway, Sophie and Langdon reverse roles: for once, Sophie is the one who wants to involve the authorities, and Langdon is the one who is leery of the police. Since they found Saunière, Langdon has dropped his naiveté and become suspicious and cautious. In one way, The Da Vinci Code is not just a thriller but also a coming-of-age tale about Langdon.

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