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The Weekly contributor William Langley marvelled at the cathedral’s beauty just one day before it burned.

ON THE COOL, sunny evening of April 14, I walked along the Quai de Montebello on the Left Bank of Paris, looking, with a familiar sense of wonderment, across the river to the great cathedral of Notre Dame, where the main Sunday mass was being held.

Nowhere could offer up a mass like Notre Dame. From the soaring descants of the choir to the stupendous rumble of its 8000-pipe organ to the incomparable flourishes of filigree stonework, this was a place where religion, art, history and an entire nation’s sense of being converged.

Less than 24 hours later, the 850-year-old cathedral was a burned-out shell.

The blaze began in an attic and raced with terrifying speed along the roof, devouring dozens of ancient wooden beams and toppling the 40-metre high spire.

As anyone who has lived in Paris knows, the cathedral is more than an architectural adornment, a place of worship or a tourist site. As the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, a tough socialist rarely given to displays of sentimentality, said through tears: “Notre Dame is the whole story of Paris.” It had survived wars, revolutions, pillagings and scandals.

In recent years, as France has struggled with social division and terrorism, the cathedral has taken on a new role as a symbol of certainty and permanence, a reminder that the city has come through worse times than any of its current inhabitants are likely to know.

It has played a part in my own life, during the five years I lived, sometimes precariously, in a pokey apartment just down the river. To catch a glimpse of the cathedral’s Gothic magnificence was to be reminded of why you’d come to Paris in the first place.

My last sighting of it was on the way to have dinner with friends in the Latin Quarter. My wife, Lesley, and I had travelled from London to watch our son run in the Paris Marathon. With spring in the air, and the cherry trees in full bloom, I don’t think I have ever seen the old place looking so serene and beautiful.

As French President Emmanuel Macron says, it must be rebuilt. This will be a challenge not only for those whose lives it has touched, but for the whole world.