tumbling through choking smoke, Antoine-Marie Préaut was on a divine mission. The conservator of the 4,000 or so historic monuments in the Paris region made his way through the burning Notre Dame cathedral on April 15 to rescue from a locked chest the Crown of Thorns that Jesus is said to have worn to his Crucifixion. The minutes were ticking by, and there was no certainty Préaut and the firefighters accompanying him would succeed in recovering the priceless relic. “I barely had any consciousness about what was happening,” he says. Then he heard a roar from the huge crowd that had gathered on the square outside the medieval masterpiece in the heart of Paris, and his heart sank. “We heard the cries of all Parisians outside,” he says. “We said to ourselves, ‘The spire must have fallen.’”
The cause of the blaze is still unknown, yet what it exposed is clear — the fragility of our most cherished buildings and the wistful attachment we hold to the spaces within their walls. The cathedral’s spire snapped off like a twig just before the sun set, crashing 314 ft. into the nave, through the ceiling that carpenters had painstakingly carved by hand in the Middle Ages, using 5,000 oak trees. Within France itself, the Notre Dame fire laid bare another, more complicated fragility: a tension rippling through the country, pitting the urge to preserve the past, and traditions of an exceedingly proud nation, against the need to overhaul its hidebound ways and modernize its system.
