What it meant to be in Paris at the time of the Notre Dame fire.
“The Notre Dame is on fire.” My wife looks up from her phone. We are on the top floor of Galleria Lafayette, an elegant Parisian department store, browsing wooden toys for our 18-month old son. I shrug it off with the kind of phone-news skepticism native to someone whose career is phone news.
“Probably some construction thing. It’s like a stone fortress,” I grouse, and return to shopping. Notre Dame on fire? Seems impossible.
But it isn’t.
Mo Mozuch
That was the first pic I snapped. From six stories up in the Galeries Lafayette, I could just make out flames licking the tip of the 300-ft flèche. The smoke is more obvious, as are the crowds, clustered at windows and corners and sightlines on the street. They thicken as we walk to the 4th arrondissement, the cathedral’s neighborhood for 800-plus years. They say time is the fire in which we burn. We know it is history. We have to see it.
Mo Mozuch
My wife took that pic one day earlier. Notre Dame is magnetic, an old stalwart in a city that is itself ancient. Begun in 1163, Notre Dame took more than a century to finish. To us, its gorgeous sculptures are decoration, blandishments in honor of Catholic glory. But to the French peasants, they were the Bible itself.
