Swallowing her apprehension, Sophie moved slowly across the room. Not many people get a chance to visit her alone." Her grandfather paused in the doorway and motioned toward the painting. As they entered the Salle des Etats, her eyes scanned the narrow room and settled on the obvious spot of honor - the center of the right-hand wall, where a lone portrait hung behind a protective Plexiglas wall. "Le Louvre, c'est pas chez moi!" she challenged. She couldn't understand why everyone made such a fuss. She had seen pictures of the Mona Lisa in books and didn't like it at all. Despite her grandfather's obvious excitement, Sophie wanted to go home. "Up ahead is the Salle des Etats," her grandfather said as they approached the Louvre's most famous room. She set her jaw firmly and let go of his hand. The empty museum frightened her, although she was not about to let her grandfather know that.
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She felt small and insignificant as she gazed up at the enormous ceilings and down at the dizzying floor. "She's just a little bit farther," her grandfather had whispered, clutching Sophie's tiny hand as he led her through the deserted museum after hours.
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As Sophie recalled her first childhood visit to the Denon Wing, she realized that if her grandfather had a secret to tell her, few places on earth made a more apt rendezvous than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. She knew she should usher Langdon from the museum immediately, and yet instinct urged her to the contrary. Sophie gazed back up the emergency stairwell and felt torn. He easily could have visited the Mona Lisa before he died. In fact, Sophie now realized, the doors that opened into the chamber were situated only twenty meters from where her grandfather had been found dead. After all, the famous painting hung in the Salle des Etats - a private viewing chamber accessible only from the Grand Gallery. Was she supposed to visit the Mona Lisa? Had her grandfather left her a message there? The idea seemed perfectly plausible. Leonardo Da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!Why his final words to her referenced the famous painting, Sophie had no idea, but she could think of only one possibility. And tonight he was forced to use it as a makeshift code.Her grandfather's voice had called out from beyond with chilling precision. "My grandfather probably created this Mona Lisa anagram long ago," Sophie said, glancing up at Langdon. While being interviewed by an American art magazine, Sauniere had expressed his distaste for the modernist Cubist movement by noting that Picasso's masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a perfect anagram of vile meaningless doodles.Picasso fans were not amused. In fact, one of his anagrams had gotten him in trouble once when Sophie was a little girl. I should have seen this!She now recalled that her grandfather - a wordplay aficionado and art lover - had entertained himself as a young man by creating anagrams of famous works of art. Sophie knew the explanation, and the realization made her feel even worse. "I can't imagine," Langdon said, staring at the printout," how your grandfather created such an intricate anagram in the minutes before he died." Sophie had spent three days with an English dictionary until she found them all. Once he had written the English word" planets" and told Sophie that an astonishing sixty-two other English words of varying lengths could be formed using those same letters. When she was young, often her grandfather would use anagram games to hone her English spelling. After all, she was no stranger to anagrams - especially in English.
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Sophie's expertise in complex cryptanalysis had caused her to overlook simplistic word games, and yet she knew she should have seen it. Her shock over the anagram was matched only by her embarrassment at not having deciphered the message herself. For an instant, standing in the exit stairwell, Sophie forgot all about trying to leave the Louvre.