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Paul Roumanet, curé of Saint-Sulpice in the 6th arrondissement's Luxembourg quarter, stands near the high altar of his magnificent baroque church, a bemused expression on his face, watching the tourists mill around him.

With the exquisite light from the 17th-century yellow stained-glass window of Jesus in glory bathing the interior of one of France's ecclesiastical architectural treasures, the priest mildly observes: "I can always tell The Da Vinc i Code tourists from the others. Always." The corners of his mouth lift in a smile. "They are not a great interruption right now."

Yes, but Father Roumanet is waiting.

Next week, the mega-tsunami of U.S. mass culture is expected to burst through Saint-Sulpice's doors, flood Paris, drench London and all but wash away the Scottish village of Rosslyn.

At the Cannes film festival on May 17, Hollywood will unveil its version of Dan Brown's numbingly successful novel -- 40 million copies sold -- of weirdly recast Christianity. Two days later, the movie will open on 100,000 screens around the world, possibly the most overhyped, mammothly avaricious entertainment event the world has ever known.

Sony Pictures has spent an estimated $45-million to market the film in the United States alone (the company has hired a publicist, Grace Media, that specializes in luring Christians to movies). The official French, British and Scottish tourism boards along with high-speed rail service Eurostar and hotel chain Novotel have all signed partnership contracts -- Code-tail agreements -- with Sony to mutually promote the film and Da Vinci-related travel.

Europe is thick with outstretched palms.

Thirty companies in Paris have sprung up to offer Da Vinci Code tours, quick-march walks past city sites mentioned in the novel.

Paris's famed Ritz Hotel offers a $900 night in Room 512 -- bathrobe, breakfast and illustrated copy of the book included -- where apparently the opening shot of the movie (Da Vinci good guy Robert Langdon is a hotel guest) was filmed.

Olivia Tsu Decker, the Chinese-American owner of Chateau de Villette on the Paris-outskirts, which appears in 20 chapters of The Da Vinci Code as the home of bad guy Sir Leigh Teabing, is charging $9,000 a day for a rental.

Ms. Decker, a San Francisco-based realtor who sells only houses valued above $5-million (U.S.), has a good eye for Da Vinci industry financial returns. Her other chateau outside Aix-en-Provence she advertises as being on the pilgrims' path of Mary Magdalene, who in Dan Brown's novel marries Jesus and bears his children, who later become the Merovingian kings of France. And a journalist invited for lunch at the Chateau de Villette is discreetly billed 32 euros ($45) after coffee.

On the other side of the English Channel, London's Westminster Abbey said no to the movie company's request to film on-site -- terming the novel "theologically unsound" -- but 275 kilometres to the north, the clergy of Lincoln Cathedral, cheerfully rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, accepted $200,000 to be an abbey stand-in.

Paris's Musée du Louvre, site of the grisly murder of curator Jacques Saunière that ignites Mr. Brown's plot, also said no to the film company, but was overruled by French President Jacques Chirac, and so the actors and cameras moved into the museum's corridors for a week of night shoots last July.

(A spokeswoman for the Louvre refuses to discuss the filming, the book, or the tourism impact. "We will talk about our collections," she says. "Not about anything else.")

And, of course, Ms. Decker said yes, welcoming 850 members of the film crew in 80 trucks and helicopters onto her property for nine days and allowing her antique pale-yellow floral-patterned sofas and arm-chairs to be replaced by dark, heavy masculine furniture considered to be the taste of evil Sir Leigh.

"It's too bad I couldn't keep some of the props," Ms. Decker says on a crisp spring morning, playing with the remote control that switches the chateau's waterfall on and off, "but I didn't want to be, you know, Hollywood."

Neither did Father Roumanet.

"I am responsible for everything that touches on Christianity and worship in Saint-Sulpice," he says, attempting to eavesdrop on a tour party that has halted in front of the altar. "I was not going to see the church turned into a branch office of Hollywood. I said I was not going to allow it, and even the cardinal could not have overruled me.

"The church is not looking for money."

Father Roumanet, a bespectacled, grandfatherly man in a suit and tie with a glint of humour that never leaves his eyes, reflects on what he has just said. "No, don't write that," he says, reaching with a thumb to a journalist's notebook to rub out his last quoted words.

The priest estimates Saint-Sulpice has had 200,000 Da Vinci tourists since the novel was published in 2003. One sees his point about easily identifying them.

Here is the poignant luminosity of Paris's second-largest church radiating from the stained-glass window of the apse. Here is the 6,588-pipe Grand-Orgue, one of the three great 100-stop organs of Europe.

Here are Eugène Delacroix's awe-invoking frescoes in the Chapel of the Holy Angels and the masterpiece of Giovanni Servandoni's rococo Chapel of the Madonna with its Pigalle statue of the Virgin Mary.

And every few minutes, a knot of tourists is led at speed by their guides through Saint-Sulpice's great west doors. They beeline to the gnomon -- the 11-metre-high, white marble obelisk in the north transept -- oblivious to light, organ, frescoes, chapels.

They have a collective look that is sheepish. They huddle together. They listen to two or three minutes of spiel from their guides, often young Americans. They photograph the obelisk. They photograph the strip of brass set in the stone floor that runs from the obelisk across the sanctuary. They leave.

Maybe some stay long enough to read Father Roumanet's message in French and English posted beside the obelisk, informing them that what they think they're looking at -- a mystical pagan sundial called the Rose Line consulted over millenniums by wise men of the world -- is in fact an 18th-century scientific device for measuring the parameters of the Earth's orbit.

"I acted preventively in writing it," says Father Roumanet.

His posted message reads, in part: "Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent bestselling novel, this is not the vestige of a pagan temple. No such temple ever existed in this place. It was never called a 'Rose Line.' No mystical notion can be derived from this instrument of astronomy except to acknowledge that God the Creator is the master of time."

The church has no apartment where a caretaker nun lives -- in the novel, Silas, the psychopathic albino adherent of Opus Dei, batters a caretaker nun to death in the novel with one of Saint-Sulpice's brass altar candlesticks. There is no secret chamber in the floor underneath the brass meridian strip where a clue to the existence of the Holy Grail may have been hidden.

Teenage prostitutes do not, as Mr. Brown wrote, hook outside the church on Place Sulpice -- because to do so would place them directly in front of the church's neighbour, the 6th arrondissement's largest police station.

And while guides take money from Da Vinci tourists to bring them into Saint-Sulpice, they do not leave behind donations for the church's upkeep, a matter of irritation to Father Roumanet. Why not post signs asking them to contribute, he is asked.

"A very good idea," he replies. He at once accosts the nearest guide. A conversation in rapid French ensues. The guide makes what look to be apologetic gestures. At the end, Father Roumanet smiles.

"It's all right, he's showing the organ," he says. "He's showing the church as it really is."

In Paris, the novel's plot is given birth and substance. In London, the wicked Sir Leigh unmasked. In 15th-century Rosslyn Chapel, 10 kilometres south of Edinburgh, the story has its dénouement.

Véronique Potelet Anty of the Paris Tourism Office says it is difficult to calculate what impact The Da Vinci Code has had to date on Paris tourism because most of the sites described in the novel have no entrance fees -- rather underscoring Father Roumanet's point.

But statistics she provides show a record 26 million tourists came to Paris in 2005, and 7.3 million visitors filed past the Mona Lisa -- one of the works of art central to Mr. Brown's story -- an increase from 6.7 million in 2004.

She also provides the interesting statistic that Eurostar staff have found more than 1,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code left behind by passengers on its trains.

As for the talk in the cafés of Paris. . . the French have a certain way of distancing themselves from American culture.

At La Closeries des Lilas, a restaurant of some repute on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, Denise Lemoine, swirling in silk elegance, sips a kir royal before lunch and makes a mild moué at the mention of the book.

Ms. Lemoine is a Parisian realtor and antiques dealer, a graduate of L'Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris and a descendant of the 18th-century French painter-brothers Louis-Nicolas and Henri-Joseph van Blarenberghe (Louis-Nicolas's works hang in the Louvre, Henri-Joseph's in the palace of Versailles).

She has read The Da Vinci Code and found it intellectually uninteresting. She does not understand why it has been such a tremendous success. "Foucault's Pendulum, it was so much better," she says, referring to the Umberto Eco novel that, like Code, explores codes, signs, hidden meaning and esoteric religious cults.

The Da Vinci Code, she says, "is the kind of book you take on a plane for four or five hours."

And then the dismissal. "Prostitutes on Place Sulpice," says Ms. Lemoine. "It's so condescending to Paris."