SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL FOR ANALYSIS

1. ‘She is lovely, no?’ The agent motioned through the windshield toward the Eiffel Tower. ‘Have you mounted her?’

Langdon rolled his eyes. ‘No, I haven’t climbed the tower.’

‘She is the symbol of France. I think she is perfect.

Langdon nodded absently. Symbologists often remarked that France – a country renowned for machismo, womanizing and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon and Pepin the Short – could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a thousand-foot phallus.

When they reached the intersection at Rue de Rivoli, the traffic light was red, but the Citroen didn’t slow. The agent gunned the sedan across the junction and sped onto a wooden section of Rue Castiglione, which served as the northern entrance to the famed Tuileries Gardens – Paris’s own version of Central Park. Most tourists translated Jardins des Tuileries as relating to the thousands of tulips that bloomed here, but Tuileries was actually a literal reference to something far less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted excavation pit from which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city’s famous red roofing tiles – or tuiles ().

2. The driver ignored the signs prohibiting auto traffic on the plaza, revved the engine, and gunned the Citroen up over the curb. The Louvre’s main entrance was visible now, rising boldly in the distance, encircled by seven triangular pools from which spouted illuminated fountains.

La Pyramide.

The new entrance to the Paris Louvre had become almost as famous as the museum itself. The controversial, neomodern glass pyramid designed by Chinese-born American architect I. M. Pei still evoked scorn from traditionalists who felt it destroyed the dignity of the Renaissance courtyard. Goethe had described architecture as frozen music, and Pei’s critics described this pyramid as fingernails on a chalkboard. Progressive admires, though, hailed Pei’s seventy-one-foot-tall transparent pyramid as a dazzling synergy of ancient structure and modern method – a symbolic link between the old and new – helping usher the Louvre into the next millennium.

‘Do you like our pyramid?’

Langdon frowned. The French, it seemed, loved to ask Americans this. It was a loaded question, of course. Admitting you liked the pyramid made you a tasteless American, and expressing dislike was an insult to the French.

‘Mitterrand was a bold man,’ Langdon replied. The late French president who had commissioned the pyramid was said to have suffered from a “Pharaoh complex’. Songlehandedly responsible for filling Paris with Egyptian obelisks, art and artefacts, Francois Mitterrand had an affinity for Egyptian culture that was so all-consuming that the French still referred to him as the Sphinx.

3. As they dropped farther into the subterranean foyer, the yawning space slowly emerged from the shadows. Built fifty-seven feet beneath ground level, the Louvre’s newly constructed 70,000-sguare-foot lobby spread out like an endless grotto. Constructed in warm ochre marble to be compatible with the honey-coloured stone of the Louvre facade above, the subterranean hall was usually vibrant with sunlight and tourists. Tonight, however, the lobby was barren and dark, giving the entire space a cold and crypt-like atmosphere...

Usually impeccably illuminated, the Louvre galleries were startlingly dark tonight. Instead of the customary flat-white light lowing down from above, a muted red glow seemed to emanate upward from the baseboards – intermittent patches of red light spilling out onto the tile floors.

As Langdon gazed down the murky corridor, he realized he should have anticipated this scene. Virtually all major galleries employed red service lighting at night – strategically placed, low-level, non-invasive lights that enabled staff members to navigate hallways and yet kept the paintings in relative darkness to slow the fading effects of overexposure to light. Tonight, the museum possessed an almost oppressive quality. Long shadows encroached everywhere, and the usually soaring vaulted ceilings appeared as a low, black void.

‘This way,’ Fache said, turning sharply right and setting out through a series of interconnected galleries.

Langdon followed, his vision slowly adjusting to the dark. All around, large-format oils began to materialize like photos developing before him in an enormous darkroom... their eyes following as he moved through the rooms. He could taste the familiar tang of museum air – an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon – the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.

Mounted high on the walls, the visible security cameras sent a clear message to visitors: We see you. Do not touch anything.

‘Any of them real?’ Langdon asked, motioning to the cameras.

Fache shook his head. ‘Of course not.’

Langdon was not surprised. Video surveillance in museums this size was cost-prohibitive and ineffective. With acres of galleries to watch over, the Louvre would require several hundred technicians simply to monitor the feeds. Most large museums now used ‘containment security’. Forget keeping thieves out. Keep them in. Containment was activated after hours, and if an intruder removed a piece of artwork, compartmentalized exits would seal around that gallery, and the thief would find himself behind the bars even before the police arrived.

The sound of voices echoed down the marble corridor up ahead. The noise seemed to be coming from a large recessed alcove that lay ahead on the right. A bright light spilled out into the hallway.

‘Office of the curator,” the captain said. ().

4. Nowadays, the term pagan had become almost synonymous with devil worship – a gross misconception. The word’s roots actually reached back to the Latin paganus, meaning country-dwellers. ‘Pagans’ were literally unindoctrinated country folk who clung to the old, rural religions of Nature worship.

5. Newton’s tomb consisted of a massive black-marble sarcophagus on which reclined the sculpted form of Sir Isaac Newton, wearing classical costume, and leaning proudly against a stack of his own books – Divinity, Chronology, Optics and Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. At Newton’s feet stood two winged boys holding a scroll. Behind Newton’s recumbent body rose an austere pyramid. Although the pyramid itself seemed an oddity, it was the giant shape mounted halfway up the pyramid.

6. When Russell Crowe told the world he was a changed man after the birth of his baby, everyone hoped that the macho – who once head-butted a fellow actor, pinned a TV producer against a wall and even attacked his own bodyguard – had finally turned over a new leaf.

7. Rock star Pete Doherty has already been in rehab three times, even having implants put in his stomach to help him fight his heroin addiction. But it looked like the love of a supermodel could bring the troubled singer to his senses.

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