The Da Vinci Code

Langdon and Sophie approach the tomb, also trying to solve the riddle. Newton’s tomb includes a huge orb on which are engraved constellations, stars, and planets, but which specific orb is missing is still unclear. Langdon feels certain that the final clue has nothing to do with astronomy but is more symbolic. Suddenly, Sophie notices a note left on the tomb:

I have Teabing.

Go through Chapter House,

out south exit, to public garden (433).

Langdon is relieved that Teabing is still alive and that Teabing’s captor hasn’t figured out the password yet. Hurrying through the exposed cloisters in the rain, he and Sophie find the entrance to the Chapter House is closed. Stepping over the guard rope, they enter a huge annex, but there is no egress to the public garden. They are at a dead end. Behind them, the door closes. The Teacher stands alone, a gun pointed at them. It is Leigh Teabing.

Teabing insists he never wanted to involve Langdon and Sophie in this affair, but it was unavoidable since they sought him out. He argues that Sauniére betrayed the Grail by not releasing the Sangreal documents on the appointed date: the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, the dawn of the new millennium. He also tells Sophie that her family’s deaths were not accidental as she had always believed. The Church, he claims, had them killed as a warning to Sauniére: “Be quiet, or you and Sophie are next” (439). Langdon is skeptical of the charges, however.

As a token of good faith, Teabing offers the keystone to Langdon in the hopes he will agree to help solve the puzzle. Convinced Langdon had acquired secret Priory information, Teabing intended to lure him to his home; he took great pains to keep them alive and only take the keystone; his false kidnapping allowed him to direct Silas to the Opus Dei residence and then tip off the police, effectively removing the monk from the equation; and finally, he sprinkled peanut salt into the cognac to trigger Rémy’s deadly allergy. Sophie vows to see Teabing arrested.

Silas carries a wounded Aringarosa through the rain, looking for a hospital. The bishop recalls his meeting at Castel Gandolfo five months before during which he received news of Vatican sanctions against Opus Dei: Aringarosa’s conservative ministry would no longer enjoy the support of the Pope. The bishop was outraged, but his arguments fell on deaf ears. Later, he received a call from the Teacher offering him a relic of great value that would grant him power over the Church. Only now, bleeding in Silas’s arms, does Aringarosa realize that he has been deceived.

Silas reaches a hospital, delivering Aringarosa into the hands of the doctors. He swears vengeance against the Teacher, but Aringarosa reminds him of the virtue of forgiveness.

Teabing demands to know if Langdon will help him, but Langdon is silent, not wanting to commit one way or the other. Forcing himself to focus on the riddle before him, he places himself in Sauniére’s mind, not a mind of science and celestial bodies but of art and beauty and goddess worship. As Teabing recalls the complex series of plots that got him to this point, Langdon announces that he knows where to find the password, but he won’t reveal it until Teabing lets Sophie go. She refuses, arguing the cryptex is hers, and she will not open it for the man who killed her grandfather. As Langdon pleads for Sophie’s freedom, Teabing senses that Langdon is lying—he hasn’t solved the riddle—and therefore both Langdon and Sophie are obstacles that must be eliminated. He orders Langdon to set the cryptex on the floor, but Langdon knows that if he does, Teabing will shoot. In the midst of fear and stress, Langdon has an epiphany. Staring down the barrel of Teabing’s pistol, he flings the cryptex into the air. Teabing drops the gun and lurches forward to catch the cryptex. He does, but the impact of his falling body shatters the vial of vinegar inside. Fearing the scroll inside is dissolving, Teabing pulls on the cryptex only to find it already open, its contents removed. The dials spell out the final password: A-P-P-L-E.

Langdon pulls the papyrus from his pocket but refuses to reveal its secret. Just then, Fache and the British police enter and arrest Teabing.

Silas, wounded and grieving, finds a secluded spot in Kensington Garden to pray. He prays for forgiveness for himself and for God’s mercy for Aringarosa. He feels his life slipping away into the silent mist.

Fache interrogates Teabing, convinced that his incoherent ramblings are just an act, a precursor to an insanity plea. Fache doesn’t believe him insane: Teabing’s intricate schemes are too meticulous and well thought-out.

At the hospital, Aringarosa recovers slowly; Silas, however, is not so lucky. When the bishop received news of Sister Sandrine’s murder, as well as the murder of the sénéchaux, he understood that Silas, under the Teacher’s influence, had veered wildly and tragically from the original plan; he has been working with Fache to bring the monk in before he could inflict more harm.

Fache returns the Vatican bonds to Aringarosa who requests that they be divided among the families of Silas’s victims. Fache and Aringarosa ponder their uncertain futures.

The papyrus scroll bears the final message: “The Holy Grail ‘neath ancient Roslin waits” (465), a reference to Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel, built by the Knights Templar in 1446. The interior of the chapel is filled with ancient symbols: Jewish stars, cruciforms, pentacles, roses, and many more, honoring all faiths but specifically, goddess worship. Langdon enters, but Sophie hesitates at the door, a feeling of déjà vu tugging at her memory. She is drawn to two pillars at the far end of the sanctuary, claiming she’s seen them before. This is not surprising, Langdon replies. They have been replicated in Masonic temples all over the world.

A docent approaches, indicating the chapel is closing soon. In a rush of memory, Sophie asks about a code, to which the docent replies: “Not your first visit to Rosslyn, I see” (470). The code is located on an architecturally odd part of the vaulted ceiling, a seemingly random jumble of symbols that, some believe, reveals the entrance to a massive chamber built directly below the chapel. Gazing at the ceiling, Sophie remembers a visit to Rosslyn with her grandfather shortly after the death of her parents and brother. She recalls an empty chapel and her grandfather stepping outside to perform a “big person” task while she lay on her back, trying to decipher the code. She fell asleep, and when she woke up, she stepped outside and saw her grandfather standing on the porch of a nearby house, speaking to someone inside. He was tearful and explained he was saying goodbye to an old friend.

As Langdon waits, the docent notices the rosewood box in his hands. His grandmother, he claims, has one exactly like it. Sophie exits the chapel without a word and walks toward the small house nearby, the chapel rectory where the docent lives with his grandmother. The box, he says, was made by his grandfather. In a flash, Langdon intuits a “web of connections emerging” (474). Indeed, the boy confirms that his family—parents and sister—died in a car accident the same day as his grandfather.

Sophie approaches the house and hears a woman sobbing, cradling a photograph of Sauniére. She turns and sees Sophie, and recognition slowly dawns on her. Sophie is her granddaughter. Sauniére’s long years of separation from his wife were for Sophie’s protection, she explains. The docent, her brother, appears, and their grandmother vows, at last, to tell Sophie the entire truth about her family.

For the last 28 years, Sophie’s grandmother has gone by the name Marie Chauvel. Both of Sophie’s parents, it turns out, had been direct descendants of the Merovingian line, descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. When Sophie’s parents died, Sauniére and Chauvel didn’t know if it was really an accident or an attempt to eliminate the last of Jesus’s royal bloodline. Sauniére and Chauvel separated and went into hiding. On the porch, Chauvel and Langdon chat about the Priory. She claims the Priory wants to keep the Sangreal documents hidden, never to release them. It is the mere idea of the Grail that inspires and revealing its literal incarnation would rob the world of its elegant mystery. Desperate for knowledge, Langdon asks if the Grail is indeed hidden in the chapel. Sauniére’s poem, she notes, refers to the “blade” and the “chalice,” the masculine  and the feminine . When closed as triangle and inverted triangle, the joined symbols become the Star of David, a prominent symbol in the chapel and a direct reference to a line of verse in Sauniére’s final clue: “The blade and chalice guarding o’er Her gates” (472). The Grail, Chauvel explains, is not literally in the vault beneath the chapel; one of Sauniére’s most profound desires was to return “her” to a final resting place in France. Langdon presses Chauvel for clarity, but she only replies that the Grail is no longer within Rosslyn. She tells him no more but coyly suggests that he will one day figure it out.

Sophie invites Langdon to stay for a few days, but he is returning to Paris the next day. As they stand side-by-side, gazing out over the Scottish countryside, Langdon invites her to join him in Florence the following month, and she accepts.

Langdon wakes up in his Paris hotel room, a thought nagging him. He showers and steps out into the early evening dusk. He walks to the Palais Royal, to the famous expanse of black marble with embedded bronze medallions. The medallions trace a direct north-south axis through the city, “The Earth’s original prime meridian…Paris’s ancient Rose Line” (486). He follows the medallions to his destination: the Louvre’s famous inverted pyramid (the “chalice”). He enters the museum and descends to the subterranean tunnels. There, beneath the massive, inverted pyramid sits a smaller one, the two apexes nearly touching: the blade and the chalice guarding the Grail’s final resting place.