Those who cared to pay attention to the accident did lament the sad fate of Notre Dame but did so, it seems, for peripheral, insufficient reasons: predictably the reasons were about national pride and cultural chauvinism, secular and personal concerns, and even some academic and aesthetic complaints about lost artifacts and marred beauty. The fire would persist for several more hours as people gathered in the area near the cathedral, and thousands more gathered around different forms of media and watched in vain as a manmade marvel of design and engineering was ravaged by the error of man-made technology. On April 15, 2019, the world beheld a mournful spectacle in Paris as the fading light of day was pierced with raging tongues of fire that were consuming the fabled cathedral of Notre Dame: its roofing, its spires, seemingly even the flying buttresses of the great Gothic edifice. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Book 3, Ch. Tempus edax, homo edacior which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.

But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer…On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. Thence entered I the recesses of my memory, those manifoldĪnd spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with

Tempus edax homo edacior