Code to a fortune... mix sex and religion and call it the Holy Grail

GIVE a Frenchman the chance to mock America and he will take it. It has ever been so - but especially in these days when American restaurants have been pouring French wine down their sinks and renaming ‘French fries’ as freedom fries.

Now Dan Brown, author of international bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, has given the French an opportunity to laugh at the Americans and make money out of it. Tour guides in Paris are taking American tourists on a ‘Da Vinci Code’ tour. Jean-Manuel Traimond, the man behind the idea, originally wanted to call it “The Da Vinci Con Tour” because of all the inaccuracies in the book. However, local hotel porters advised him that this would be too provocative for their American clients, and bad for business.

Traimond’s wheeze is to take the excited tourists to various French landmarks mentioned in the novel, and then to disappoint them by pointing out all the contradictions. For example, Brown’s novel has it that Francois Mitterrand instructed that his famous glass pyramid in the Louvre museum would be constructed precisely of an occultish 666 pieces. Tourists are invited to count 674. Then they are taken to the Church of Saint Sulpice only to discover that there is only one floor in the place, with no sign of that mysterious second floor on which part of the book’s plot depends. Other anti-climactic moments follow.