Shining in the rubble, golden symbol of the miracle of Notre Dame
DRAMATIC REPORTS AND PICTURES
BENEATH the light rain that greeted a sleepless Parisian dawn yesterday, there was one over-riding emotion: That some sort of miracle had occurred in the early hours as it transpired one of the world’s greatest medieval buildings had survived wholesale destruction.
The near- cataclysmic fire which had raged through the Cathedral of Notre Dame for eight hours during the night had finally been brought under control and smothered by first light.
Notre Dame has, without doubt, been horribly damaged. France, along with much of the world, has been deeply shocked at the near-demise of ‘ Our Lady of Paris’. Yesterday evening, fresh images of the wreckage were released showing the nave piled high with charred and twisted timbers.
Yet it could have been so very much worse. The 850year-old towers which stand guard over the entrance and the immortal bells hanging within are in one piece. So, too, is some of the stained glass. ‘Our Lady’ lives on, bloodied but unbowed.
At the same time, the fire had produced another miracle of sorts. This avowedly secular country suddenly seemed to have rediscovered its sense of the spiritual yesterday, if only for a few hours.‘I have never known so many people talking openly about God, about religion and saying prayers in public,’ said caterer Marie-Astrid d’Arras. ‘So many people have become Catholic once again.’
Underpinning all this talk of divine intervention was a single image which first appeared in the Daily Mail yesterday.
I was one of the first people inside the smouldering cathedral as the worst of the fire subsided. I accompanied the French prime minister, Edouard Philippe, and a handful of aides on a preliminary inspection of the charred shell.
We found flames still flickering in some of the upper reaches and a lake at our feet. Then, through the foul- smelling miasma of smoke and hose water which filled this roofless void, we suddenly spotted an image that has come to define this near- disaster: The golden cross above the altar. How on earth had it managed to avoid the fate of everything else in the seat of the blaze, let alone remain upright?
Even avowed atheists took to social media yesterday to profess how moved they had been by this poignant symbol of defiance. Several Anglophile Parisians told me it reminded them of that famous wartime image of St Paul’s Cathedral standing tall during the Blitz.
For the authorities, there were more earthly considerations, notably finding out how the hell this had all happened in the first place. France might be praying a little louder than usual. But it is also pretty angry, too.
President Emmanuel Macron knows he needs to show a firm grip on every aspect of this episode and his interior minister Christophe Castaner vowed to identify the culprits yesterday. Attention was firmly focused on the contractors responsible for repair work on the roof in the area where the fire broke out. The fact that it started just moments after the end of the working day could provide a link.
Mr Macron cleared yesterday’s Cabinet meetings of all other business to focus exclusively on Notre Dame. Such is the mystical hold this 12th Century Gothic masterpiece has on the national psyche.
A key issue will be the cost. Under French law, the ownership of the cathedral rests with the State but the French taxpayer received a handsome head start yesterday when two of the country’s richest families pledged 300million euros before breakfast. By last night, the fighting fund had hit an astonishing 600million euros.
As stories began to emerge of the gallantry of the firefighters – and of a particularly heroic priest seen running into the inferno to retrieve some of Notre Dame’s treasures – messages arrived from world leaders, including one from the Queen. ‘Prince Philip and I have been deeply saddened to see the images of the fire which has engulfed Notre Dame Cathedral,’ she told President Macron. ‘My thoughts and prayers are with those who worship at the cathedral and all of France at this difficult time.’
Tomorrow, she will attend her beloved Royal Maundy service at St George’s Windsor, the traditional prelude to Easter Sunday.
There will be no Easter at Notre Dame, for the first time in nearly nine centuries. There was also a message yesterday from the Prince of Wales. ‘I realise only too well what a truly special significance the cathedral holds at the heart of your nation,’ he told Mr Macron. ‘But also for us outside France it represents one of the greatest architectural achievements of Western civilisation. It is a treasure for all mankind.’
By way of consolation, he alluded to the Royal Family’s own experience of the 1992 fire which ravaged much of Windsor Castle. ‘Our hearts go out to you and the people of France more than you can ever know, especially in view of our experience with the devastating fire at Windsor Castle 27 years ago,’ the Prince went on.
It was the Prince, together with the Duke of Edinburgh, who led the five-year, £40million rebuilding programme. It more than restored Windsor to its former glory.
Mr Macron would be well advised to pick up the phone to the Queen or her eldest son for a few useful tips on how best to resurrect a medieval treasure.
Other world leaders expressing their solidarity yesterday included Pope Francis, who announced he was placing the Vatican’s heritage
experts at France’s disposal. After all, one of his predecessors, Pope Alexander III, was here to see the foundation stone laid in 11 3.
The outpouring of international goodwill only added to the emotions I encountered in Paris yesterday. I found young men playing mournful recitals on the cello. Here and there, nuns broke into song or prayer. Gawping crowds encircling the cathedral’s island site on either side of the Seine filled miles of pavement and brought traffic to an escargot-style crawl.
In front of Notre Dame itself, a succession of sombre politicians talked of a need for national unity. After months of civil disobedience by the antiMacron ‘gilets jaunes’ movement, there is a sense that the appetite for organised dissent has waned in the last 24 hours.
‘There is a spirit which lives inside and above this building, one you don’t find in, say, the Eiffel Tower,’ said Ambrose Laurent, secretary of France’s Conference of Bishops Then the bishops issued a joint statement saying every cathedral in France would ring its bells today at the precise time when Monday’s fire broke out.
Sitting with his drawing pad next to the Seine, I found retired steel executive Robert Gest, 72, sketching the cathedral. He said he wants to leave it to his grandchildren as a reminder of what happened. ‘There has been so much bashing of the church and religion in this country that perhaps this experience will make people think about it a little more,’ he said. ‘After all, the great cross is still there.’
WHEN we first heard the news, it wrenched at our hearts. We all felt we were losing something infinitely precious and something almost personal to ourselves.
As the fire hoses were trained on the inferno, men and women were running bravely in and out of the flaming building, saving here a statue, a religious relic, there a painting, a precious vestment — each separate object in its way a symbol of the huge numbers of human beings whose creativity had made this place. Human beings whose deepest hopes, imaginative dreams and aspirations had helped create what is perhaps the greatest cathedral in the world.
Passionate
Notre Dame has been, for all of us, an embodiment of Paris and its history. Of that city’s medieval Catholic past, its religious wars, its national triumphs and disasters.
When I try to put into words what it was like on Monday evening to see the images of Notre Dame in flames, it seems almost uncanny to me now. Because only two weeks ago, looking round for something to read on a holiday, I took it into my head to read Victor Hugo’s masterpiece which most of us know as The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. Its French title is simply, Notre Dame De Paris, one of the great works of French literature.
I had never read the book, and knew only the 1939 film with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo the hunchback, obsessed with love for Esmerelda and deafened by ‘the bells, the bells!’ But it begins with a great disquisition on Gothic architecture and what we all owe to it.
Hugo, who wrote the book in 1830, could not have been more vivid and passionate in his descriptions of Notre Dame with its flying buttresses and towering spires, its high arching interiors. He regarded its architects as poets who had liberated man’s spirit.
Soaring to the heavens, the cathedral was to him the greatest expression of collective human endeavour and, though he was a non-believer, of humanity’s faith in God.
The paradox of Notre Dame today — and, indeed, of all the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe — is that in this largely post-Christian age it has outlasted its original reason for existing.
And yet that is why it matters so much to us, modern, confused and agnostic as most of us are.
In times of faith, the cathedral was divisive. The French were tearing themselves apart with religious wars — Protestant versus Catholic — in the 16th century, and they tried to abolish Christianity with equal zeal during the Revolution, demolishing other Gothic cathedrals and churches while Notre Dame thankfully survived.
But now, in our secular world, cathedrals unify us as never before.
Why do these wonderful great Gothic edifices of the Middle Ages, and Notre Dame in particular, have such enormous significance in our lives? Why do hundreds of thousands of visitors each year flock to Notre Dame, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Salisbury, York Minster, Cologne?
It is because we recognise that the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are among the greatest — I would say
the greatest — works of art in Europe. This is partly because they are not the work of individuals, but of whole communities.
Unlike the symphonies of Beethoven or the plays of Shakespeare, they are anonymous and collective. European humanity made them over centuries, and European humanity has loved and adapted and needed them ever since they were built.
It is astonishing to me that we use the word ‘medieval’ as a term of abuse. We say, ‘It is positively medieval’ to mean some practice is brutal, cruel or unsophisticated.
When we use such a phrase, we should look at the architecture produced in our own age — inhuman tower blocks, multi-storey car parks smelling of urine, ugly shopping malls — and ask what we have built that comes within a million miles of the sophistication of Notre Dame.
And we should then ask what that building set out to do. Yes, in the narrowest terms, Notre Dame set out to be a place of Catholic worship, where monks could chant the psalms and mutter the mass.
But a cathedral is making a statement about humanity, about the centrality of beauty to human experience and about the ultimate, awe- inspiring puzzle of our existence.
Cherish
To these buildings, nations have come together in their times of great collective experience, for the state funerals, royal weddings, solemn memories of war that bind us all together.
To these buildings, too, however, when no ceremonies are in progress, millions of men and women have come quietly for hundreds of years with their own secret sorrows, joys and hopes.
And, staring upwards at the swooping arches and coloured glass and the carved statues of kings, virgins, prophets and angels, they have confronted the deep mystery of the world.
Lord Salisbury, the great Victorian prime minister, addressing a group of scientists in 1894, said: ‘ We live in a small bright oasis of knowledge surrounded on all sides by a vast unexplored region of impenetrable mystery.’
In our own day, some socalled born- again atheists have ignored this fact. They have held out the pathetic illusion that every aspect of life can be explained in materialist terms.
The huge numbers of people who cherish our cathedrals know this is not the case, and that at the deepest level, while retaining all our critical faculties and all our powers of reason, we need these spaces, and the music and light they contain.
Vivid
Our hearts cracked when we saw Notre Dame burn for another reason. It happened at a time of miserable squabbling over the future of Europe. Brexit has made some people imagine that Europe is a dirty word.
The truth is that whatever we think about Brexit or a customs union, or any of the esoteric options lying before our often-idiotic politicians, we are all heirs of a great common history.
So much of our music, our philosophy, our idea of right and wrong, came to us filtered through the Christian story, whatever we might make of that story now.
We do not necessarily believe in the way our forebears did. But this only increases our devotion to the Gothic masterpieces of the Age of Faith.
Few houses of faith have such a vivid story to tell as Notre Dame de Paris.
The work of rebuilding will begin as soon as the rubble is cleared. The common determination to restore the place will be shared not only by the people of France, but by all Europeans — who, as they watch Notre Dame rise again, will once again marvel at the values and stories and human creativity embodied in such a temple.