The Da Vinci Code

CHAPTER 21
The Mona Lisa.
For an instant, standing in the exit stairwell, Sophie forgot all about trying to leave the Louvre.
Her shock over the anagram was matched only by her embarrassment at not having deciphered the 
message herself. Sophie's expertise in complex cryptanalysis had caused her to overlook simplistic 
word games, and yet she knew she should have seen it. After all, she was no stranger to 
anagrams—especially in English.
When she was young, often her grandfather would use anagram games to hone her English 
spelling. Once he had written the English word "planets" and told Sophie that an astonishing sixty-
two other English words of varying lengths could be formed using those same letters. Sophie had 

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spent three days with an English dictionary until she found them all.
"I can't imagine," Langdon said, staring at the printout, "how your grandfather created such an 
intricate anagram in the minutes before he died."
Sophie knew the explanation, and the realization made her feel even worse. I should have seen this! 
She now recalled that her grandfather—a wordplay aficionado and art lover—had entertained 
himself as a young man by creating anagrams of famous works of art. In fact, one of his anagrams 
had gotten him in trouble once when Sophie was a little girl. While being interviewed by an 
American art magazine, Saunière had expressed his distaste for the modernist Cubist movement by 
noting that Picasso's masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a perfect anagram of vile 
meaningless doodles. Picasso fans were not amused.
"My grandfather probably created this Mona Lisa anagram long ago," Sophie said, glancing up at 
Langdon. And tonight he was forced to use it as a makeshift code. Her grandfather's voice had 
called out from beyond with chilling precision.
Leonardo da Vinci!
The Mona Lisa!
Why his final words to her referenced the famous painting, Sophie had no idea, but she could think 
of only one possibility. A disturbing one.
Those were not his final words....
Was she supposed to visit the Mona Lisa? Had her grandfather left her a message there? The idea 
seemed perfectly plausible. After all, the famous painting hung in the Salle des Etats—a private 
viewing chamber accessible only from the Grand Gallery. In fact, Sophie now realized, the doors 
that opened into the chamber were situated only twenty meters from where her grandfather had 
been found dead.
He easily could have visited the Mona Lisa before he died.
Sophie gazed back up the emergency stairwell and felt torn. She knew she should usher Langdon 
from the museum immediately, and yet instinct urged her to the contrary. As Sophie recalled her 
first childhood visit to the Denon Wing, she realized that if her grandfather had a secret to tell her, 
few places on earth made a more apt rendezvous than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
"She's just a little bit farther," her grandfather had whispered, clutching Sophie's tiny hand as he led 
her through the deserted museum after hours.

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Sophie was six years old. She felt small and insignificant as she gazed up at the enormous ceilings 
and down at the dizzying floor. The empty museum frightened her, although she was not about to 
let her grandfather know that. She set her jaw firmly and let go of his hand.
"Up ahead is the Salle des Etats," her grandfather said as they approached the Louvre's most 
famous room. Despite her grandfather's obvious excitement, Sophie wanted to go home. She had 
seen pictures of the Mona Lisa in books and didn't like it at all. She couldn't understand why 
everyone made such a fuss.