Fire damages Paris’s historic Notre Dame Cathedral

My social media feeds have been overwhelmed by my friends and colleagues mourning the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral these past two days. As a scholar of medieval studies, I get it — the building had a special resonance for lovers of history, architecture, and art.

But when I read that the fire was most likely caused by restoration workers, my heart broke for them. These roofers and restoration experts do the tireless work of keeping these buildings functional for all of us, and they do it at great personal risk and with little recognition.

French President Emmanuel Macron declared on Tuesday that Notre Dame Cathedral, which suffered extensive damage in a massive fire Monday, will be rebuilt in five years and will be “even more beautiful than it was.”

Officials and specialists are still assessing the damage inflicted on the Paris landmark by the fire — and by the soot and smoke it produced and the water used to douse the blaze.

Notre Dame de Paris was never the preferred cathedral of kings. French monarchs avoided it, preferring to be crowned at Reims, about 80 miles northeast of Paris, and buried at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, which is now a Parisian suburb.

Notre Dame was instead the cathedral of ordinary Parisians. Since the Middle Ages, it’s been the backdrop against which the city’s inhabitants have lived their lives. The building, which stands on a small island in the Seine River, was a constant amid the upheaval of the French Revolution and the terrors of the Nazi occupation. As one 14th century scholar wrote, the cathedral was “like the sun among stars.”

A massive fire engulfed the historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Monday evening, destroying the monument’s spire and most of its roof.

Fire crews and investigators are now assessing the full scale of the damage to the centuries-old cathedral less than a day after hundreds of firefighters battled, and finally extinguished, the relentless flames.

My center of gravity in Paris is on the left bank, the corner of Rue Saint-Julien le Pauvre and Rue de la Bûcherie, where Shakespeare and Company — the famous English-language bookstore Hemingway wrote about in A Moveable Feast — is nestled within sight of the Seine.

I’m no Parisian, but I’d like to think I’m no longer merely a tourist. Thanks to work obligations, I’ve spent weeks and months at a time in Paris over the past five or six years, mostly in the summer. Whenever I return, even for a short visit, I go straight to the bookstore, which seems to always be sprouting new nooks and crannies; one year a cafe, one year a room for comics. Last year, it had added a whole room of art and design books, with a velvety couch. There’s a bookstore cat that slinks about the place.

The iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, was engulfed in a massive fire Monday evening that has destroyed the monument’s spire and threatened to consume the entire structure.

After fire crews battled the relentless flames for hours, Paris fire officials said late Monday night that the cathedral’s two main rectangular towers had been “saved and preserved,” though much of the monument’s roof has been destroyed along with the spire.

Notre Dame is on fire, and its spire has fallen.

As of Monday afternoon, we don’t know for sure how the fire began or how extensive the damage is, but the world has responded to the news with an outcry of horror and grief. “Paris is beheaded,” one man told the New York Times as the spire fell.