It was Monday evening and I walked out of the office around 7pm. I was taking my normal route home from Sentier to Le Marais by walking south on the crowded, café-laden Rue Montorgueil. As I turned onto the rue I saw huge clouds of yellowish smoke billowing across the sky from east to west. Strangely, no one seemed to notice it. They continued drinking their aperitifs and chatting contentedly with their friends. I hoped it was no big deal.
When I got to the open space near Châtelet and Église Saint-Eustache de Paris I could see the sky more clearly. The sun in the west was a red dot nearly blackened out by the smoke. It reminded me of the sky during the Northern California forest fires from previous years. Tourists were taking pictures of the dark sun for their Instagram accounts, but as I tried to eavesdrop on conversations no one seemed to be talking about where the smoke was coming from.
It was at this point I turned to social media and opened up Twitter. My heart sank as the first thing I saw was a picture of Notre Dame on fire. I picked up my pace and started walking/jogging toward the Seine, toward the center of Paris. The armageddon-like smoke roiled overhead.
About three blocks from the river on Boulevard de Sébastopol, the crowds became thick and I could see for the first time the legendary cathedral and the flames engulfing the roof below her spire. I felt a pit in my stomach as I was now certain that this was no minor blaze. As I inched closer I thought to myself, it is going to burn to the ground.
I squeezed my way through the droves of Instagraming onlookers to the Hôtel de Ville. I climbed on an embankment and watched in dismay. The gigantic orange and yellow flames burned with such intensity and might. The mustard-colored smoke shot out of the fire like a volcanic eruption–so much smoke. The sense of loss was palpable. I heard someone calling it one of the greatest, if not the greatest, symbols of human civilization. And now it was being devoured by flames.
The spire falling was a climatic moment. It had been red hot for what seemed like an eternity. We all knew it would fall but we held on to hope. It teetered on the edge of catastrophe, but resisted as if God’s own hands were holding it up. Destiny, it turns out, had other plans. The spire slowly started to fall. For a split second the crowd collectively gasped in incredible sorrow. The fall accelerated and the spire crashed into the roof. Drones and phones transmitted the heartbreaking image around the world.
I had only lived in Paris for a few months and could not consider myself Parisian, or French, or Catholic, or even Christian. Yet I felt like somehow I had failed, or we had failed, or rather our collective 21st-century humanity had failed. Notre Dame has stood for more than 800 years and it burned on our watch. In the days following, I found that this feeling was common.
As the curtain of night started to fall on Paris, I turned away from the fire and began to walk back to my apartment a few blocks away. I was facing the crowd now and it was a dramatically different perspective. I saw a couple hugging in sadness and an older woman sobbing in tears. The skaters had stopped skateboarding. A police woman was frozen, unmoving like a statue. Time, too, stood still. Disbelief had turned into sad acceptance. Everyone there was crying with their eyes and staring at the heart of Paris still aflame.
A few blocks away, I was surprised to see the cafés of Le Marais were still quite full with people. They were drinking, dining, chatting and smiling oblivious to the tragedy just around the corner. How could they be having fun right now? How could they laugh? At first I was annoyed, but then I realized that this was Paris, an old city and an old soul. Life would go on as it always had.
As I lay in bed that night, I asked myself, “why did this happen? what is the greater meaning behind this?” Given the state of the world these days, my mind couldn’t help making some symbolic apocalyptic connections. I wondered what was next. My mind swam with questions. Of course, I thought, it was possible that I was making too big of deal of it all.
As I fell into a fitful sleep, every church bell in Paris was ringing in mourning and solidarity. It went on all night. That, at least, felt right.
