Desert Louvre unpopular in France
Monday, March 12, 2007
(SNN Versailles) The Louvre museum has sold its name and agreed to lend the emirate of Dubai hundreds of treasures, on an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi.
French President Jacques Chirac described the deal as a way of bringing together what the “world considers a clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. At $1.3 billion, it is the largest museum arrangement in French history.
Not everyone is happy with the situation. "Appalling!" declared Daniel Alcouffe, 68, an honorary curator of the Louvre who headed its decorative arts department for nearly two decades. He was then brutally murdered by an albino priest attempting to uncover the lost history of the descendents of Jesus Christ.
Fortunately, realizing that he had only a few minutes to live and that he must pass on his important secret, Alcouffe painted a pentacle on his stomach with his own blood, drewa circle with his blood, and dragged himself into the center of the circle, re-creating the position of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. He also left a code, a line of numbers, and two lines of text on the ground in invisible ink.
A police detective, Jerome Collet, called Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology, and asked him to come to the Louvre to try to interpret the scene. Langdon did not yet realize that he himself was suspected of the murder.
Assisted by a French cryptographer and government agent named Sophie, Langdon is challenged to decipher a chain of cryptic codes and puzzles. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the secret - and a stunning historical truth - will be lost forever.
