Chapter 3

"My French stinks," thinks Langdon, which I find somewhat hard to believe about someone with such a profound knowledge of Western art. This unlikely state of affairs does, however, allow the dialogue to proceed in English, although the chances of finding a French policemen who converses in a foreign tongue without at least one cutting remark about monoglot Anglos seem pretty slim. Still, at least we get an amusing linguistic misunderstanding/knob gag from the situation. Clouseau lives, it seems.

We get an American-in-Paris guide to the city, with special attention paid to the museums, although one suspects that the crack about "Louvre Lite" might be a case of Brown biting the hand that feeds him. To be fair, the author isn't too heavy-handed with the didacticism here, although he makes some peculiar assumptions about what his readers will or won't know: Mitterand and I.M. Pei require job descriptions; Goethe and Art Buchwald, it seems, have sufficient name recognition without.

Since the whole situation's been set up to enable Brown to conduct his action and dialogue in English, it seems a pity that he has only a passing grasp of the language. In precisely what manner is the Louvre "monolithic", especially when Brown then explains that it's shaped like a horseshoe? But he excels himself with the sentence about Monet, announcing that the artist-for-people-who-prefer-teatowels-to-art "literally inspired the birth of the Impressionist movement". Apart from the dodgy art history (Monet indirectly gave the movement its name, when one of his paintings was namechecked by Leroy, but surely Turner and Manet inspired it as much as anyone), that "literally" really does mark Brown out as an illiterate bumpkin. What did Monet do? Breathe in the concentrated essence of Degas and Renoir?

And then we meet Bezu Fache. Your homework for this evening is to come up with a decent anagram of that, in a language of your choice.