Meanwhile, Sophie and Langdon hide in the shadows of the museum.
The narrator explains that Sophie broke the window using a garbage
can and then threw the GPS tracker, which she had imbedded in a
bar of soap, out the window and onto the truck. Once all of the
police have left the building, Sophie tells Langdon to go down a side
stairwell with her. Langdon is impressed with Sophie’s quick thinking.
Summary: Chapter 19
Silas enters Saint-Sulpice. Sister Sandrine offers to
give him a tour of the church, but he refuses it. He asks her to
go back to bed, saying he wants to pray and can show himself around.
She agrees, but she is suspicious of him. Hiding in the shadows,
she watches him pray, thinking that Silas might be the enemy she
was warned about.
Summary: Chapter 20
As he tries to decipher Saunière’s message, Langdon realizes
that everything in the message relates in some way to PHI, or 1.618,
the number of Divine Proportion, starting with the Fibonacci sequence. He
thinks of a lecture he gives about how PHI is the numerical proportion
of many things in nature and in art, including the pentacle, the
symbol of the sacred feminine.
Suddenly, Langdon realizes that the word portion of Saunière’s message
is actually an anagram. He unscrambles it and gets: “Leonardo Da
Vinci! The Mona Lisa!”
Analysis
It is not surprising that Saunière would want to bring
Sophie and Langdon together—as Brown demonstrates in this chapter,
they make an effective team. Unlike the many sexist characters that
populate the novel, such as Fache, Langdon clearly respects women. When
Sophie figures out how to trick the police by embedding the tracking
advice in a bar of soap and throwing it out the window, Langdon
is humbled and impressed by her cleverness and quick thinking. But
Langdon is not simply looking on in wonder; he pulls his own weight,
breaking the code that neither Sophie nor anyone in her cryptography
department could solve. Langdon is an academic and extremely book-smart,
while Sophie is the one with the street smarts. She can think on
her feet and wriggle out of difficult situations.
Brown introduces his characters’ backgrounds without breaking the
narrative thread. By revealing that Sophie was not in contact with
her grandfather because she was traumatized by something she witnessed
him doing, Brown intentionally creates confusion. The novel is structured
to make us sympathetic toward Saunière, the victim, but on the other
hand, Sophie’s anger with him forces us to question his integrity.
