National Geographic - UK (2022-02)

Viollet- le-Duc meant a total mess,” Moulin said.

At Notre Dame, Viollet-le-Duc painted decora-

tive murals in all 24 side chapels; in the 1970s,

the 12 chapels of the nave were scraped back to

bare stone. But by then, the rehabilitation of the

great man’s reputation was just about to begin—

and the exhibition that 17-year-old Villeneuve

saw in 1980 was a turning point. “All at once we

went from a diabolical Viollet-le-Duc to a Viollet-

le-Duc who is practically a saint,” Moulin said.

Today most French restorers wouldn’t think

of undoing anything Viollet-le-Duc did. Moulin

thinks that’s a shame. He believes in preserving

history too—but trying to fix a building once and

for all in its “last known state,” he said, amounts

to declaring that history has ended for that

building: “It’s the definition of death.” And it

may not be what’s best for preservation. If the

roof of your cathedral has just burned off, Mou-

lin argued, it doesn’t make sense to rebuild the

rafters out of wood.

That argument was heard—and dismissed—at

Notre Dame. The forest and the spire will indeed

be built of wood, though with more fireproofing

and with fire-suppressing misters. The details

are still being worked out.

I

N 20 19, THE FIRE RAGING through

the oak timbers got so hot—almost

certainly more than 1,400 degrees

Fahrenheit—that it ate into the adja-

cent limestone walls and into the

tops of some vaults. Two stone specialists at the

monuments lab, geologist Lise Cadot-Leroux and

conservation scientist Jean-Didier Mertz, trained

as rope technicians so they could inspect the

damage. Mertz showed me some foot-long cores

they extracted from the two-foot-thick stones.

The surface of some stones turned to powder, and

fissures formed inside, causing as much as four

inches to peel off. But most of the blocks appear

to have remained thick enough to do their job,

Mertz said. He and his colleagues developed a

technique for sealing the fissures by injecting a

lime slurry. For the stones that need replacing,

scientists are searching for good matches north

of Paris; the city has grown over the medieval

quarries, which were then on its outskirts.

Most of the 507 tons of lead in the roof and

spire simply melted and rained into the church,

but the heat was intense enough to launch

lead particles into the smoke. The danger

from inhaling lead that night, unless you were

standing right by the fire, was “negligible,”

said Jérôme Langrand, a doctor and toxicolo-

gist who directs the Paris poison center at the

Lariboisière–Fernand-Widal hospital. The real

danger with lead is that it will be ingested acci-

dentally over time, especially by children, via

contaminated dirt in parks or playgrounds or

dust that settles inside homes. Alexander van

Geen, a Columbia University scientist who

walked around Paris spooning dirt samples into

paper bags, estimated that about a ton of lead

had fallen within a kilometer of the church.

But there’s no evidence it caused significant

poisoning, Langrand said. He and his col-

leagues analyzed blood from 1,200 children in

the affected area. They found concentrations

above the “level of concern” in a little over

one percent— about the same as in the French

population at large (and much less than in the

U.S.). In every case, moreover, an investigation

Like Viollet-le-Duc’s

spire, taller and more

ornate than the

medieval original, his

addition of the chimeras

reflected his ambition:

not just to restore Notre

Dame as it had been

but to create the ideal

Gothic cathedral.

NOTRE DAME AFTER THE FIRE 67