The Weekly Screed (#906)

“A vast symphony in stone”

By David Benjamin

“Someday, the fire of 2019 may fade into the history of Notre-Dame. It may take many years to repair the damage. But the great cathedral will reinvent itself…”

                             —Michael Kimmelman, New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — Much of the breathtaking majesty of Notre Dame de Paris derives from its thoughtfully wrought location. She was made to look up to.

Situated near the tip of an island engineered to rise above the surrounding neighborhoods, Our Lady is exposed on three sides. She splits the Seine, baring her backside and opening her left flank to view from the Latin Quarter. Her facade, with a limestone-lace rose window and bell towers that thrust upward like clenched forearms clad ornately in chainmail, overlooks a naked plaza a hundred yards long and almost as broad. At sunset, she turns to gold.

The city impinges on Notre Dame only on her northern exposure, where she looms imperiously over dwarfed buildings and souvenir shops across the narrow stretch of the Cloitre Notre-Dame, her gargoyles staring stonily at the meek tourists who mill forever below.

My favorite view of the old girl is upriver, from the Pont de la Tournelle, where—in the distance—her intricate but comparatively humble nave hunkers below a now-absent roof. In the foreground of this vantage point, at the tip of the Ile de la Cité, noted by few, is a barred window, barely above the water line (and occasionally below). This subtle evocation of prison marks the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, a haunting cellar that remembers, with deafening silence, the 200,000 French citizens shipped eastward—never to return—to the Nazi death factories.

Speaking of views, I’m also fond, especially as the trees turn and lose their leaves, of the Left Bank along the quai de la Tournelle. The great church, framed by nude sycamores above riverside ranks of booksellers’ boxes, swells larger as I walk and muscles into the capricious Paris sky.

  

This week, when suddenly the television showed film of Notre Dame on fire, flames spearing that sky, Violette-le-Duc’s self-consciously Gothic spire finally collapsing into the transept, I felt the same gut-sickness that hit when I saw the Twin Towers burning in New York. But I refused this parallel, because no one—no matter how awful the scene in Paris—was dying at Notre Dame. The fall of Our Lady’s spire did not poison its city nor seal the fate of 2,000 innocents.

Resisting the call to bathos, I turned my mind to Victor Hugo, whose affection for Notre Dame defined his aesthetics. He sneered at the Panthéon on the hill above the Luxembourg Garden and he regarded Val de Grace as a cheap imitation of St. Peter’s. (Hugo didn’t like domes.) But he fell in love with Notre Dame, even without steeples on the bell towers and despite the corruption of the fat priests who luxuriated inside. He compared its arduous emergence at the very heart of Paris to the six days of creation in Genesis.

While the lady was burning, I couldn’t watch. I shut off the TV and sought a silver lining in those ugly clouds that poured from Quasimodo’s attic. I consoled myself knowing that Notre Dame has seen days almost as dark and much longer. Over the centuries, she’d been invaded, ransacked, set on fire, secularized by Jacobin zealots and neglected into a state of near ruin for most of century.

When finally I learned that Paris’ most manly men, the firefighters of the Sapeurs et Pompiers, had saved the cathedral, I felt an almost religious assurance that she would rise from her ashes. I trust already that the faithful French will, slowly and meticulously, restore Notre Dame almost exactly as she has appeared for 850 years. President Emmanuel Macron has stuck out his neck and bet his ass on Esmerelda’s resurrection. Victor Hugo’s ghost will demand nothing less.

There are other blessings that might well emerge from this tragedy. I suspect, for example, that Our Lady’s conflagration marks the death knell of the Yellow Vest protests. The inchoate leaders and free-lance vandals of the gilets jaunes will look petty and selfish if they resume their marches, chants and kvetching at a profound moment of national grief and devout togetherness. Parisians, indeed, come off much better singing “Ave Maria” on the rue St.-Julien-le-Pauvre than they do smashing jewelry-store windows on the Champs Elysées.

One of the odder improvements likely to derive from this disaster will be evident on the parvis in front of Notre Dame. More than ever, after the fire, the old cathedral will be one of the most photographed sights on the face of the earth. The church will still draw shutterbug tourists like paparazzi to Anita Ekberg. One of my favorite pastimes, over the years, has been coming up behind sightseers filming Notre Dame with their camcorders, and—with a gentle nudge—whispering, “It’s not moving.”

So, yes, the cameras, smartphones, selfie-sticks and camcorders will continue to click and whir on the great plaza. But the queues, to get inside, to climb that narrow and claustrophobic staircase to the catwalk will disappear, perhaps for all time but certainly ’til every nail has been driven and every bronze gryphon restored to its roost. Maybe without Notre Dame to climb, visitors will discover that Paris is not a city of soaring towers and nosebleed vistas. Paris is a horizontal place, a benign labyrinth for strolling, for peering around corners and bumbling into wonders—like Notre Dame de Paris.

For all its grandeur and hauteur, Paris is a human-scale town, full of workmen’s villas and public fountains. It doesn’t need CinemaScope, nor is Technicolor called for. To step onto one of its balconies and behold Paris between its chimney pots and garrets is—in the words of a late friend and lifelong Parisian, Margaret Orsal—like “opening a jewel box.”

If the view includes Notre Dame, even now in its worst moment, it inspires a gasp of awe. She was built to stand out and she always will. Our Lady of Paris is a work of human craftsmanship, hard labor, fearsome faith and artistic genius almost beyond imagination. Since it was built, it has outlived thirty kings, four republics and a hundred million Frenchmen. Come rain or shine, hellfire or Hitler, it will outlive a hundred million more.