Today, perhaps, only whisper it, but Notre Dame was not held in the esteem that it truly deserves

Can I recall the first time I ever entered Notre Dame? No, for it was always there, always part of my childhood, of my frequent visits to my uncle and aunt in their Paris home. But as I grew older, I started to wonder at its size, the stained glass that threw great rainbow rays across the nave, the expressions of the medieval imagination that were its gothic gargoyles up on the roof.

The crowds were always greatest for the great feasts of the Church, when pilgrims mingled with tourists. And it was then you realised how this monument to the faith of France, “the eldest daughter of the Church”, was truly international. During Holy Week, I would go to Confession to an English-speaking priest, my French not quite up to recounting the misdemeanours of childhood. Afterwards, kneeling in the pews, I could hear the murmurs of my fellow penitents: “Je vous salue Marie, pleine de grâce.” In Our Lady’s own church, the words were especially moving. This extraordinary edifice has been an expression of French faith for 800 years. Wars and revolution did not destroy it; on Monday night a fire came very close. It was as if the words of Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame had come to life: “All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time.”