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.
“The curator of the museum gets killed near the main gates of the gallery,” le Roux says. “They say as well that he closes the security system with an iron gate. … There is no iron gate but a wood door. It’s the possibility that is fun for us to show during the tour.”
Still, he does not disparage those now known as “Da Vinci Code” tourists.
“There is no bad reason to come to the Louvre,” he says. “To us it is interesting as well, because we can start a conversation and discuss other things.
“They spend more time in front of the paintings and they try to spot details, symbols — basically what the painters wanted to tell them, rather than what they wanted to show them.”
But across town at the Church of St. Sulpice, where the novel’s mad monk uses a candle holder to murder a fictional nun, the church fathers are not so upbeat about the additional attention.