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“As one watched, the utter brilliance of the flame set them in motion. There were serpents that appeared to be laughing, gargoyles one seemed to hear yapping, salamanders blowing into the flames, dragons sneezing in the smoke.”
—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris
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THE FIRE BEGAN IN A high crevice of the cathedral known as “the forest.” On a cool spring evening, the scorching heat of the flames caught hold of the wood and crept through the innards of the Gothic structure. Silently. Invisibly. Until it was too late.
He watched in rapt attention, like everyone else. And immediately hated himself for it. He didn’t think of himself as being anything like them.
Anyone standing beyond the western courtyard of Notre Dame Cathedral would have been forgiven for believing the medieval church was constructed entirely of stone, and therefore incapable of burning. In fact, the latticework roof and frame had been built out of the wood of thousands of oak trees. He learned, afterward, that the most common estimates ranged from 5,000 to 13,000 ancient oak trees. He usually valued precision, above all else, yet the wide range of guesses was forgivable, he decided, considering the wooden frame was one of the oldest surviving parts of the original building. The cathedral had been constructed nearly 800 years ago. The names of the original architects and their records were long ago lost to history.
But not the names of the men involved in the nineteenth-century restoration. Those men were remembered. Architect, artist, and restorer Eugène Viollet-le-Duc breathed new life into the crumbling church, and kept meticulous records of all those involved, from charpentièrs to tailleurs de pierre, and everything in between those carpenters building scaffolding and the stonemasons carving gargoyles.
And he couldn’t forget the man initially responsible for saving the cathedral. Novelist Victor Hugo, whose prose captured the collective imagination of the citizens of France and propelled the restoration forward. Hugo imagined a romantic medieval cathedral that had, in truth, never existed. Quasimodo could never have lurked among such a wide array of gargoyles and chimeras, because they hadn’t been there. Not until Hugo imagined them in his fiction.
The stones had weathered centuries of natural erosion from rainwater and pollution, architectural disagreements about what form the cathedral’s various restorations would take, and purposeful destruction from both idealistic revolutionaries and Nazi occupiers. If only the gargoyles could have cried out as their claws warmed with heat and their throats choked on smoke, perhaps they could have sounded the alarm before it was too late. By the time the thick gray smoke openly billowed around the famous limestone gargoyles added to the cathedral in the 1800s, the heroic firefighters were powerless to save the roof and spire.
It was those stones that gave him the idea. As he watched the billowing plumes of smoke, he couldn’t help smiling.
He didn’t feel entirely good about feeling giddy with happiness at the destruction. He wasn’t a monster, after all. But he was about to become a very rich man.