Notre Dame: thirty minutes to oblivion

The light lingers in the west sky these days as the sun sets in a blaze of intense colours. Some big birds fly rapidly towards the remnants of the light. Are they geese? I am not sure. I don’t know my birds very well. But they are very beautiful, regal almost, silhouetted against the fiery sky.

It is only later, as I scrolled through my Instagram feed that I realised that the skies over Paris were illuminated too but with the source of a very different light. As we ate our supper, something sparked, many miles away. As I tidied the kitchen, Notre Dame burned.

It’s been exactly ten years, give or take a couple of weeks, that I first saw Notre Dame in person, on a rainy day; under a grey sky. It was the end of March and Paris was still in the grips of winter. The bulk of the church towered above our heads, the two bell towers reaching for the sky. Hundreds of people were milling around in the square but we all seemed dwarfed,  inconsequential, beneath that magnificent structure and its ornate carvings; its saints and sinners; its angels and demons.

We went inside under the watchful, glaring gaze of various gargoyles and chimeras. The light was dim inside the cathedral, it was dark – almost – but as soon as my eyes adjusted I gazed up. Up towards a magnificent, vaulted ceiling that seems to reach to the heavens. And my gaze was held there for a while. For what may have been a minute or what could have been eternity, I stared, fascinated and awed, as always, by these medieval Gothic structures that are so different from our very rotund churches. But finally, I tore my gaze away from those dizzying heights and let it sweep around the church, letting it rest on the huge kaleidoscope of colours that make up Notre Dame’s rose windows. And then I sighed, letting out the breath I did not realise I had been holding, completely and utterly awe-struck by the craftsmanship, the artistry, the vision and the sheer audacity of those medieval builders – long gone, forgotten, and yet, somehow, immortalised by this centuries-old edifice. What were their thoughts as they laboured to build it? Did they realise how many centuries it would last? How many upheavals it would survive?

It’s been ten years since I was there and the scene is etched in my memory, retained as one of those defining moments that will stay with me forever. A  moment that I never thought to share – until now. Because, until now, that solid sandstone structure that had defied revolution and war, had seemed indestructible, invincible, aloof and untouchable.

But now that two-thirds of that gravity defying ceiling is just a pile of rubble and twisted, charred timbers on Notre Dame’s chequered floor and there is a gaping hole where once there was an intricate mesh of wooden and stone ribs that held up the roof, we know that this, too, is vulnerable. This, too, could have been destroyed and razed to the ground, leaving nothing but an ethereal memory in the minds of those who have been privileged enough to lay their eyes on ‘La Belle Dame de Paris.’

Thirty minutes, we now know, is all the time that was left. Thirty minutes that made all the difference between salvation and oblivion.

Location: Notre Dame, Paris, France

March 2009