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Hunt for 'Code' clues in France

Along the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, not even one dead curator sprawls on the museum’s famous parquet floor.

And in the hayloft of a chateau outside Paris, the secret listening post just isn’t there.

Yet even if they can’t find all the details mentioned in the book, fans of “The Da Vinci Code” seem to have an insatiable need to link the fiction to reality — especially at the Louvre, where the opening murder scene takes place.

Jacque le Roux, an art historian and Louvre tour guide, happily sets straight the implausibilities in the murder mystery — including one in the first paragraph, where the victim is described as a 76-year-old curator.

Everyone knows the mandatory retirement age in France is 65, he says.

French winegrowers puzzled by vandalism

Winegrowers in northeast France are puzzled over the mysterious destruction of large swaths of two vineyards in Alsace, a region along the German border known for full-bodied white wines.

Saboteurs using long-handled pruning shears destroyed about 2,800 grape vines in the past two weeks by slashing their stems close to the soil, the director of the Alsace Wine Growers Association said Friday.

“We don’t really know who could have done this, whether it’s the work of a lunatic – or if it’s a settling of scores,” Jean-Paul Goulby said. “It’s very strange.”

The value of the damage is difficult to estimate, Goulby said, because future crops must be taken into account.

French town is named historic Civil War site

American cannon blasts bellowed in the English Channel 140 years ago, and bloodied bodies lined the deck of a sinking Confederate ship. Onlookers watched in horror from the Normandy coast.

On June 19, 1864, far from battlefields at home, the USS Kearsarge hunted down and sank a dreaded Confederate raider in one of the most important naval battles of the U.S. Civil War — off the coast of France.

The Confederate ship Alabama today lies where it sank under 198 feet of swirling currents about seven nautical miles off the French town of Cherbourg.

French Novelist Francoise Sagan Dead

French novelist Francoise Sagan, known for her haunting novel, Bonjour Tristesse, died Friday at the age of 69.

The Agence France-Presse news agency reported Ms. Sagan died in a hospital in the Normandy town of Honfleur Friday evening. The news agency cited cardio-respiratory problems as the cause of death.

Doctors said the novelist had been admitted several times in recent months to the hospital, which was near her home.

Ms. Sagan catapulted to fame as a teenager, with her first novel Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness). The bittersweet work depicted life of French bourgeois society at its most sophisticated and cynical. Ms. Sagan came from the same upper class surroundings that she wrote about.