'Code' breakers search Paris for fictional facts

Ms. Decker, a San Francisco realtor convinced by the book's premise, has already run a couple of tours of her chateau for people she says who "come here on their own search for the truth" about Mary Magdalene.

Some of them, she adds, seem a little confused about the line between fiction and reality. "They wanted my autograph," she recalls. "I told them I didn't write the book, I just own the chateau, but they insisted."

That happens with other literary Meccas, too. The baseball diamond carved out of a cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa, where the film "Field of Dreams" was shot, has nothing to do with "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, the ballplayer whose story was told in a book of the same name by W. P. Kinsella, which was turned into the film. But the movie site still attracts thousands of fans a year, especially from Japan.

Prince Edward Island in Canada has been transformed by "Anne of Green Gables," whose author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, lived there. Summers in the small town of Cavendish - which boasts a house said by the tourist authorities to have inspired "Green Gables" - are now a far cry from bucolic calm depicted in the book as hundreds of thousands of sightseers visit.

Getting too real carries its own dangers, though. Peter Mayle was hounded from his home in Provence when he made the mistake of describing its location too precisely in his first book, "A Year in Provence." Fed up with coming in from his garden to find perfect strangers sitting on his living room sofa demanding an autograph, he fled with his wife to America for several years.

If the busloads of tourists in Provence were there simply because they were curious to see a place that had captivated them in print, others are drawn elsewhere by "fascination with the spark of creativity," suggests Cousineau.

That would explain the groups of tourists standing around outside the nondescript patent office in Bern, Switzerland: Albert Einstein is said to have come up with the Special Theory of Relativity while he was working there in 1905.

Others find magic in the Long Island, N.Y., birthplace of "Leaves of Grass" author Walt Whitman. Still others pay to take a tour of Silicon Valley that includes such sacred sites as the garage in Palo Alto, Calif., where William Hewlett and David Packard began working together in 1939.

"People like to go to where it all began," says Cousineau. "Perhaps it's because we feel we might share in the genius, that a little bit might rub off on me."

Meanwhile back in Saint Sulpice, Father Roumanet is beginning to grumble about the 15,000 extra visitors who have passed through his church in recent months because of "The Da Vinci Code."

In June he posted a tartly worded notice near the brass line, pointing out that "contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-seller, this is not a vestige of a pagan temple" as the book claims, but part of a 17th-century scientific instrument to measure the earth's orbit.

"The misfortune of our contemporaries," the priest sighs, paraphrasing the English Catholic poet G.K. Chesterton, "is perhaps not that they have ceased to believe, but that they are ready to believe anything."

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