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Agnès Poirier’s lively account of the majestic cathedral relates key episodes from its past and the night that fire almost destroyed it
Until late into the evening of 15 April last year, I stood with what felt like half of Paris in the Quai de Bourbon on the Ile St Louis, perhaps 150 metres from Notre Dame, and watched as one of the western world’s great architectural treasures burned. No further away but on the south bank of the Seine, along with hordes more onlookers, many in tears, some praying, stood Agnès Poirier, who can see the 850-year-old Gothic masterpiece from her apartment window.
Less than a year later, Poirier, whose racy read on artistic and intellectual Paris in the 1940s, Left Bank, won many plaudits, has produced a slim, vivid and engrossing history both of that night and of the edifice she calls “always far more than just a cathedral… The face of civilisation, and the soul of a nation”. Continue reading...