Notre-Dame

By David Berlinski

David Berlinski
Paris 

Il y a un feu au cœur des choses. I smelled its smoke from my bedroom window before I saw the fire. From the street, I could hear the fire, cackling like mad, before I could see the flames. Then they shot up from deep inside the cathedral’s roof. The police began shooing everyone away. I joined a small crowd that had gathered on the quai aux Fleurs, just where it meets the pont d’Arcole. No one had yet been locked by fascination.

When the steeple began to fall, a sigh went through the crowd, a sound I had never heard before.

The next evening, I saw President Macron on television. He made a short speech promising that France would rebuild Notre-Dame within five years. No one believed him. Before the embers had completely cooled, architects were proposing to put a swimming pool on its roof. The Catholic Mass, they observed, might be celebrated poolside.

I had watched the scaffolding go up, the cranes like gigantic stick insects, but the worksite was quickly protected by high walls topped by barbed wire. Climb over that, you miserable scélérats, French officials must have thought. The city put up a series of display panels on the rue du Cloître, the text in French and English. They showed the work in progress. Young women were depicted bending tenderly over chipped gargoyles; carpenters, manhandling enormous oak beams. An immense labor was underway. Consumed by the fire, the roof had been comprised of eight-hundred year old oak timbers locked into an intricate lattice. No one knew how the twelfth-century architects had done it. They must have had cranes of some sort. After the panels had gone up, I managed to speak to one of the architects on the site. I asked him about the swimming pool. He said Macron had wavered for a week or so, but then Jean Nouvel had intervened. Notre-Dame was to be faithfully restored. I was surprised. Jean Nouvel had designed some of the world’s most hideous buildings. Entire orchestras had entered the Philharmonie de Paris and never emerged. Perhaps they were in occultation. There may have been something to the swimming pool, after all.

And then it was done. On Saturday, December 7—odd that no one noticed the date—Notre-Dame was consecrated anew. The original plan had been to hold the ceremonies outdoors, and under a slanting winter sun; but a cold mean wind had whipped Paris, and by late afternoon, it had begun to rain. An elaborate shed was set up on the esplanade.

In the hour before the ceremonies began, French television showed a procession of stubby black SUVs, like Stormy Daniels all front and no back, making their way slowly along the rue d’Arcole. Whatever happened, I wondered, to the sleek Citroëns that used to carry les gros manitous? They were always swishing through Paris at high speeds. I once saw Jacques Chirac in the back of a blue Citroën C6, his great nose at peace.

Guests were greeted car-side by young women holding umbrellas. No one looked graceful. The men got out of their cars by first planting both feet on the pavement and then trying to rise out of the ensuing crouch by pushing on the door frame with their elbows, leaving their rear end to their wives, face à fesse. Some guests refused umbrellas, and those who did not discovered that the young women were concerned chiefly to cover their own heads. Important figures were introduced to President Macron and his wife, and then forced to pose stiffly for a group picture. Donald Trump took his turn. He had been photographed at the Elysée Palace wearing a blue suit meant for a man twice his height and four times his weight. Now he stood glowering at the camera, bundled in an overcoat. He was afterward seated next to Jill Biden, the two of them engaging in a curiously warm conversation, Trump obviously pleased that Jill Biden knew how to smile, and Biden, that Trump knew not to drool. The camera returned often to Elon Musk. He had conceived the desire, it was said, to place Notre-Dame in orbit. Holding up his hand but keeping his thumb folded into his palm, he had assured French journalists that only four rockets would be needed.

Everyone was seated, the esplanade filled. The rain continued to fall, the wind whipping it sideways. Macron got up to deliver an address, Notre-Dame hulking in the rain behind him and dark, no part of the façade glistening. As Macron began to speak, the cathedral slowly began to glow, lit up from the inside, the light streaming across the newly-cleaned rose window and pouring across the esplanade. The word MERCI in gigantic letters appeared on the western face of the cathedral, Notre Dame rising like a mastodon in the winter rain and into the winter light.

The fire, Macron explained, had begun somewhere on the cathedral roof and after consuming the timbers had begun an inexorable march westward toward the two front-facing towers, where the cathedral’s great bells were housed in yet another wooden lattice. He had been there, Macron told the crowd; he had consulted the fire chiefs; and he had been told that once the fire reached the towers, the bells would fall, taking the towers with them. The cathedral would be lost. There was no way in which to fight the fire from the esplanade. The firemen would have to enter the cathedral, now submersed in smoke, and with the flames directly overhead, climb the narrow stairs to the transom between the towers. Twenty men were needed. The risk of death was very high, but the time was very short. One of the French newspapers later revealed that a contingent of suburban firemen declined to volunteer. The Parisian pompiers went up the narrow staircase, their helmet lights bobbling in the enveloping gloom. One by one they crossed the transom from the south to the north tower. Everyone watching must have thought of the Twin Towers in New York.

And then came word: Nous sommes mâitres du feu.

Macron having finished, the clergy of Notre-Dame now stood before its massive closed wooden doors to begin the ceremony of consecration. They were dressed only in white clerical robes. The Archbishop of Paris, Mgr. Laurent Ulrich, approached the central door, holding an immense crozier. He was full of authority. He wrapped on the oak doors three times with the butt of his crozier. Notre-Dame, Notre-Dame, he said, ouvre tes portes. There was silence for a moment. Thou still unravished bride of quietness. And then from inside the cathedral, a choir responded, the organ sounding above it.

The Church is the bride of Christ.

The ceremony was repeated three times. Had it been prolonged, the Archbishop would have risked hypothermia. The doors swung open at last and a great light poured out of the cathedral. French cameras followed the Archbishop inside and for the first time the restored interior stood fully revealed. The walls had been scrupulously cleaned, the limestone restored to its twelfth-century pinkish white. Where before, the interior of Notre Dame had given chiefly the impression of smoky brown, there was now sharp clear color everywhere, an ascending sense of light, with even the clergy dressed in very fashionable robes of white, blue, and yellow. Over twenty years, I had gotten to know the cathedral very well, but now, for the first time, I could see how completely it had captured the Gothic imperative which by compressing width and promoting height forces the eye upward. The original architects had seen all that; they had built for eternity; and they had relied on light, white, and bright to achieve their effects. They had neglected to consider how dirt and soot would compromise their vision. The Notre-Dame that I had known was brown, dingy, and dull. It was full of mystery. No wonder that Fulcanelli had seen in its symbols a secret system of alchemical signs.

Now all that was gone.

Was it the same, the cathedral? It was impossible to tell. If it had lost something of its causal connection to the past, it had reacquired its original colors and with those colors, its intended design. It stood now as a new Gothic cathedral. No one minded in the least. Not me, either. When everyone had come into the cathedral from the esplanade and gotten seated, the pompiers filed in two-by-two. They were in red uniform and each man was carrying his helmet. They were small men, for the most part, with knobby and unassuming faces. They gave nothing away, but they walked as men, and in that entire audience, such was the irony of the event, only Donald Trump—of all people!—could have faced them as a man who had faced death, too. The applause began at once. No one dared cheer in the cathedral, but the applause was steady, unforced, sustained, and it lasted a long time.

Nous sommes mâitres du feu, the pompiers had said. And it was true.

But everyone in the cathedral knew, at last, what all firemen know: Le feu ne s’éteint jamais.

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