Paris awoke on Tuesday with embers still smouldering at Notre Dame de Paris after the medieval cathedral caught fire and saw its wooden roof and large parts of the interior go up in flames and pillars of smoke.
Onlookers knelt in the street to pray and groups sang hymns around the crowded site on Monday evening as firemen fought the sudden blaze and struggled to remove priceless relics and artworks housed in the best-known cathedral in France.
The Paris fire department said the cathedral treasury, a museum containing centuries of religious art such as chalices, monstrances, vestments and paintings, was saved. It is located on the southern side of the cathedral, to the right of the choir section.
As morning broke, the large golden cross over the traditional altar and a statue of the Virgin Mary were still standing amid soot-blackened walls and a sludge of ashes and water inside the building. Two of the most famous relics — the Crown of Thorns of Jesus and the tunic of Saint Louis, the thirteenth century French king and saint — were saved.
Firemen feared the north tower would catch fire, possibly bringing its bells crashing to the ground and even bringing the south tower down with it. But it was finally declared safe late in the evening. The spire on the roof, where renovation work may have been the source of the blaze, collapsed into the cathedral in the evening, leaving a gap in the Paris sky for all to see this morning.
Photographs from inside the building showed embers still burning around the new altar, at the meeting of the nave and transept where the spire fell in from the roof. Firefighters put out the last embers by late morning.
Among the relics certainly lost were a thorn from the Crown of Thorns and relics from Paris's patron saints Saint Denis and Saint Geneviève. They were included in the weather-vane atop the spire when it was restored in 1935.
Pope Francis wrote to the Archbishop of Paris: "Following the fire that devastated much of the Notre-Dame cathedral, I associate myself with your sadness, as well as that of the faithful of your diocese, the inhabitants of Paris and all the French. In these Holy Days when we remember Jesus' passion, his death and his resurrection, I assure you of my spiritual closeness and my prayer.
The cathedral’s great organ, whose pipes cover part of the large rose window over the main western entrance, escaped the flames and was probably not damaged by water pumped into the building by the 400 firemen who fought the flames.
But it would probably have to be dismantled and rebuilt before it is ever heard again, a process that could take many years.
It was still unclear how much damage the still-standing stone structure had suffered from the searing fire or cold water pumped in from the Seine. Architects said the wild swings in temperature could weaken the Paris limestone used to build Notre Dame.
It was still unclear how much damage the still-standing stone structure had suffered from the fire or whether the great organ, whose pipes cover part of the large rose window over the main western entrance, had been damaged by fire or water pumped into the building by the 400 firemen who fought the flames.
“We will rebuild this cathedral together,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared on Monday evening after watching the cathedral burn. “We will appeal to the greatest talents … and we will rebuild. Because that’s what the French expect, because that’s what our history deserves, because it’s our profound destiny.”
Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo went inside to view the damage on Monday evening, followed by a small group of photographers. On exiting, Hidalgo said: "There is a big hole in the roof, where the spire was, which is now crumbled in the nave. The altar and its cross were preserved. It's less terrible than I feared."
France has seen a series of attacks on Catholic churches in recent months, with a fire at the large Paris church of Saint Sulpice — which featured in Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code” — on 17 March. That blaze appeared to be arson, possibly set by homeless people.
But Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz said: “There is nothing that indicates a voluntary act.” The official inquiry into the fire was described as an investigation into “involuntary destruction by fire” due to the renovation
Macron announced that a national collection would be taken up for the reconstruction of the 850-year old edifice. Several separate efforts have already sprung up to repair the building, one of the earliest Gothic cathedrals and the spot from which French road distances to the capital city are measured.
The French luxury goods firm LVMH and the family of its founder Bernard Arnault announced they would contribute €200 million to the reconstruction of the cathedral. The investment firm of the family of François Pinault, another of France's richest businessmen, pledged €100 million. City and regional officials also offered funds from public coffers.
“This is a tragedy that has touched all of us,” said Pinault on Tuesday morning. “It’s our duty to reconstruct this cathedral. It will be a collective work. We will be many to participate in it, each according to our own means.”
Mayor Anne Hidalgo said she would call an international donor conference for the reconstruction of Notre Dame.
Messages of sympathy poured in from around the world, including from leaders of many religions. “The first message I got was from the Chief Rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia, who told me ‘this is the place for everyone. I am crying with you’,” Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit said.
Church officials said France’s large Muslim minority and its small Protestant community had also sent messages of support and solidarity.
Building authorities said it would take several days to assess the damage to the stone structure, the most visited monument in Europe. Notre Dame attracted 13 million visitors a year, twice as many as the Eiffel Tower.
The roof quickly caught fire in its "charpente", the tinderbox of age-old timber supports between the stone ceiling that tourists see from inside the cathedral and the tile-covered roof.
“Notre Dame is a giant matchbox,” said Serge Delhaye, a fire expert for the Paris Court of Appeal. “The charpente is very old. With all that wood dust and decomposed timber, a spark, some welding or a short-circuit can set off embers that are hidden for several hours or even days, and develop insidiously into a fire."
The heat of the fire and streams of cold water used to extinguish it may have damaged the cathedral’s inside walls and pillars of Paris limestone. Fire officials said it could take several days to determine if the shell of the building was still structurally solid.
Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, elected president of the bishops’ conference on 3 April, recalled that his own cathedral in the northern French city of Reims had been rebuilt after being almost completely destroyed during the First World War.
"This is a great pain, [Notre Dame] is the symbol of human effort, of peace of beauty, of faith for many, even beyond the Christian faith,” he said.
"I'm sure we'll be able to restore it to its original splendour, but it's really very sad. Moreover, we’re in Holy Week. This will take years of work, it's going to be an eyesore in the city of Paris for some time to come.
"I am now Archbishop of Reims, which was bombed during the Great War, and we could raise it again thanks to the genius of the architects and, it should be said, with the help of the Americans."
Stéphane Bern, a television presenter and national heritage specialist, said he never thought he would see Notre Dame in flames.
"It's like a person we love,”he said. “We did not pay much attention to it and all of a sudden, we see it disappear and we say to ourselves: 'Maybe I should have told it that I loved it more. '"