She must already have been burning when I walked past on my way home from work, deep in a funk about how the best things in life are hard to get and easy to lose.
I walk past the Cathédrale Notre-Dame every morning and most evenings as I cross the river to and from the office. You get the best view of her (in my opinion) from the south-east, floating on the water, her intricate buttresses inviting you to pause and linger. My favourite place in all of Paris is a very specific point on the Pont de Sully, two-thirds of the way across from the Left Bank to the Ile Saint-Louis, where the Eiffel Tower peers into frame to the left and the Cathedral dominates the foreground. In three years she has become my reference point, my anchor, my talisman, a vast unmissable reminder of the fact that when life gets too real – too stressful, too uncertain, too lonely, too much – I am in living in Paris, and that if there are days when all I achieve is to be here, it is enough.
I did not notice she was burning.
After a long hiatus I’ve been running again, almost compulsively, pulling on my sneakers not out of obligation but to satisfy a rekindled desire. I got home at seven and by seven ten was stepping into my street. I saw the smoke almost immediately, a vast yellow-grey pillar rushing up from somewhere down the hill. Serious, and close. People were slowing down and staring upwards. But I had heard no explosion, saw no flashing lights, felt no urgency in passersby, and I’d been waiting all day to run, so I turned left with minimal curiosity.
Beside the Pantheon, a crowd was gathering to stare down the rue Valette towards the river. It was so close you could see the flames and I ran on thinking, I’m right to be scared of my heating. Someone’s lost their apartment tonight.
I ran a slow lap and a half of the Jardin de Luxembourg, taking the long way around the Jardin des Grands Explorateurs. As I headed for the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde for the second time, I paused to check my phone. Messages from London, Minneapolis, Guatemala City: awful news about Notre-Dame. What I had ignored, CNN had clearly not.
History was being made and unmade just around the corner and I shamelessly diverted my run towards the Pont de Sully, the perfect vantage point. The bridge was empty of traffic and packed with people, silent and still. Along the banks of the Seine, over the Pont de la Tournelle, crowds gathered with unnerving calm, saying uncharacteristically little, staring. Police with rare emotion etched into their features shooed us away from the edge of the bridge, clearly creating an exit route in case of panic or incident, but doing nothing to impede the swell of awestruck arrivals.
And we watched. We watched the steady rise of smoke, the regular flicker of the flames, the ineffectual arcs of water dabbing at the stone walls from poorly positioned cranes. We gasped when a portion of roof fell or caught anew, and we pointed at reddened windows that hinted of a nave alight. Against the perfect evening sky, the Eiffel Tower seemed hesitant to put on her lights.
There was a kind of welcome purity to the sadness. No one had died, it seemed. The Cathedral had been evacuated safely and there were no reports of trapped firemen or lost priests. There was no sign of intent or evil. We were not watching Timbuktu crumble, or the great Mosque of Aleppo surrender to heavy weapons, or Gumbi Gumbi trees fall under the tread of mining bulldozers. Fire is a terrifying force, but a neutral one.
Long after the cold had crept under my running gear I walked home and curled up in front of the television, unable to sleep until I knew what I would see from the bridge the next morning. On the screen, a series of images: the President and his wife on the parvis; bystanders praying, and – with no apparent sense of irony – lighting candles; drone footage from above, the whole Cathedral transformed into a fiery cross. The towers were at risk – it came down to a matter of minutes, they would say later – but survived.
If history has taught us anything, it is that it is in the nature of cathedrals to burn, and to be rebuilt. Before the flames were extinguished, billionaires were offering nine-figure donations in a kind of besuited dick-measuring contest. I thought about the gilet jaunes decrying the cost of living and the homeless man I greet every morning and wondered how much is too much for a roof.
I wake up early on Tuesday morning with a scratching in the back of my throat and I wonder how much of Notre-Dame I have breathed in during the night. In the cold light of day she stands resolute, her stonework intact, the scaffolding tricking the eye into thinking she’s exactly as she was. Today I slow down and take her in.