Dan Brown’s St Sulpice
Searching for The Da Vinci Code in Paris
We flew to France in the Spring of 2014 and spent three weeks in Paris, living in a cramped but still delightful apartment on Rue de Conde in the city’s 6th arrondissement.
The apartment was ideal in that just about all the things we wanted to see in Paris were within walking distance. Three of the world’s finest museums hugged the shores of the River Seine just a few blocks north of us. The Latin Quarter spread out just a few blocks east of us. Ernest Hemingway, while on his way to visit Gertrude Stein, cut through the Luxembourg Gardens just a few blocks south of us. And the stately though somewhat ungainly church of St Sulpice stood its grounds just three blocks west of us.
Three books helped me prepare for our three-week stay: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (during the 19th century) by David McCullough; Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his life in Paris during the 1920s; and Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code. I also armed myself with a fourth book which was full of maps, Christina Henry De Tessan’s Forever Paris, whenever we embarked on a neighborhood walk.
We didn’t need a map to find St Sulpice. We just had to walk a half-block to Rue St Sulpice and turn left to see its towers two blocks down. So, we explored the church and its square on one of our early neighborhood walks and came back a week later with our Irish cousins (who were also Dan Brown fans) and then again for Sunday Mass a couple of weeks later.
One of Dan Brown’s major plots in The Da Vinci Code involves the Paris Meridian, an imaginary line that ran right through our neighborhood. In his novel Brown calls the Meridian the Rose Line and he has his line bisect the Louvre’s triangle on one side of the Seine and then it continues through St Sulpice. Brown was close but he cheated just a tad in both instances: the meridian does cut through the grounds of the Louvre but several meters east of the triangle. And it is close to St Sulpice but just misses the church, by about a hundred meters.
There are more than a hundred bronze medallions that mark the Meridian through Paris and we found several in our neighborhood, thanks to King Louis XIV. He wanted the Meridian to perfectly bisect the royal observatory he was building just south of the Luxembourg Gardens.
St Sulpice is famous for its gnomon, the part of a sundial that casts a shadow. It was built in 1727 by the astronomer Henry Sully to calculate Easter and can be seen right in the middle of the church. The gnomon is an obelisk on the church’s north wall that catches the winter sun from a hole in a stained-glass window on the church’s south wall. The gnomon continues across the floor and ends near the church’s south wall. The summer sun strikes the floor portion of the gnomon. According to Brown, the gnomon is right on the Rose Line. Well, it’s not true but it is necessary for his plot to make any sense. So, most of his fans have forgiven him!
Over the years there have been many famous people associated with St Sulpice. The Marquis de Sade was baptized here. Victor Hugo was married here. Catherine Deneuve lives in an apartment overlooking the church’s square. Ernest Hemingway converted to Catholicism prior to marrying his second wife and they attended Sunday Mass at St Sulpice during the time they lived in Paris.
A replica of The Shroud of Turin was on display in the church’s vestibule during the time of our visit.
St Sulpice is also famous for its organ, which is revered as one of the best in the entire world. After attending Mass one Sunday we stayed for another hour or so listening to an organ recital.
Some of the chapels in St Sulpice feature frescos which were painted by none other than Eugene Delacroix. And one day we walked to the Delacroix museum which is about halfway between St Sulpice and the Louvre. It’s close to the Paris Meridian, too!
There’s a stained glass window near the St Sulpice gnomon with the letters “SP” in prominence. The letters stand for Saint Pierre (Peter), who is a co-patron saint of the church. But according to Dan Brown, the letters stand for “Priory of Sion,” a secret organization formed to guard the Holy Grail and protect a major secret concerning Christ’s life in The Da Vinci Code. This yarn spun by Dan Brown makes for an entertaining story and the movie starring Tom Hanks was a great box-office success. But it’s all fiction.
In 1884 representatives from 22 countries voted to make the Greenwich Meridian the official prime meridian (0 degrees longitude) of the world. French cartographers held out until 1911 when they finally adopted the Greenwich Meridian, too. In 1973 optical instruments were discarded in favor of more modern scientific instruments and a new IERS (International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service) Reference Meridian was adopted. This new meridian is 102 meters east of the old Prime Meridian at Greenwich. The GPS run by the US Department of Defense uses this new IERS Reference Meridian to determine longitude.
So, the St Sulpice gnomon has nothing to do with the Paris Meridian which runs about 100 meters east of the church. And Dan Brown’s Rose Line has nothing to do, either, with the Rosslyn Chapel outside Edinburgh. But that didn’t stop us from visiting the chapel when we visited Scotland a couple of years after Paris. And we had fun in both Scotland and Paris!
For more information on our visits to St Sulpice in 2014 see my Crow Canyon Journal blog here, here, and here.
