Marie Darrieussecq: Trees gave birth to the Notre-Dame cathedral, the Seine river and rescued her

”Molten lead.” The words that all the parisians have on the lips. ”Molten lead.” Molten lead from the tower spire and taklaget has run down in the heart of Notre-Dame, and our hearts thought themselves burn, they also. Like a medieval torment. But while bjälklagen disappeared in a very cloud of smoke, sprayed the firemen tirelessly and carefully to the water on the lead that holds together the large windows, so that the thousands of small colored the glass would not dissolve. And the miraculous rosettfönstren kept receiving. And all the parisians start to talk technology, architecture, joists, taklag. We consider our familiar Notre-Dame which is a body that must be repaired. The morning after the disaster, I hurried to look at her, along with thousands of tourists and locals, and I met a fire truck, the applause – but they heard nothing: the exhausted heroes slept in their gilded helmets, leaned against the brandbilens window.

, and we at ten o'clock on Monday night dreamed nightmares that she would collapse. The two famous drum tower stands there yet, thanks to the firemen who made it up to flush water from the inside. Well, the spire fell, but it was from the 1800's, almost just now, in other words. Balzac and many others from that time protested against Viollet-le-Duc's romantic fantasies, the architect's bold ways to modernise europe. The spire will be built up again, or not: the most important thing is to travel the soffit. Or at least a structure. The original wonder bar the name of the Forest. In the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo's masterpiece, puts Quasimodo to the fire on it, after having registered that ”the wall was made of stone, the roof of lead, the soffit of the wood. This superb structure, which was called the forest.” The prophetic Hugo let the flames of fire turn out between the two clocks, and the lead run in bunches. 1831 Notre-Dame in a deplorable condition. The children in her neighborhood played ball in the church ship, messed up the inner walls. And the weather, which was much harder, taxed at the large lady. Hugo wrote his book in order to reflect the cathedral of his presence – and it worked. A large renovation was started and culminated with Viollet-le-Duc's spire.

when he promises a reconstruction within five years, with the modern methods and the one billion that have already been collected. Five years, before the Olympic games: as if it where big sports and finansparaden had nothing to do with the stillness of a cathedral to make. Notre-Dame was born slowly out of the forest. The soffit, which was unique in the world, was carved out of primeval forest in the Île-de-France around the year 1200, when Paris was an island in a sea of trees, bears and wolves. The trees that were chosen, high and straight, was cut down in the swamps in twenty-five years to be hardened against the pests. Thereafter, the dry in another twenty-five years. In the past sued the carvers hit generation after generation. It took another two hundred years to build the cathedral. The middle ages has left a precious drop of stone, wood and time on our modern shores. The thousand-year-old oaks still lived there inside.

, and it was the Seine which saved her, the Seine river that surrounds her since eight hundred years. The firemen pumped water out of the river all night. The Seine in the great rays of the sun fought against the flames to save his partner. Two boats from the fire department fed the hoses directly. And we cried, and hoped the water towards the fire, and they could ask bad, and I am an atheist gave them my support. A light breeze moved around in the flames and the sound of church bells rang, surprised in Parisnatten. Hold they said in a language of the bronze to his matron, and we got a lump in my throat. The water, the stone, the wood, the metal, the wind, and the fire is fought, and it was weird how strong it felt to be so ephemeral and human vis-à-vis what we have for the immortal.

over the wounded monument. Not on the poor, not of the schools, the hospitals, the sick, the children, not of the forest fires, climate refugees, not across the animal's cathedrals, that is to say, the large threatened vertebrates. Progress is not everywhere on the planet a loss of the beauty and life of the same dimensions as the Notre-Dame? Certainly. And when the imminent day when the tiger or the rhino disappears, then there is nothing we can ”recover”. But Notre-Dame symbolizes the might, all the world's threatened beauty? She belongs to us, and her name begins with NOTRE dame – OUR. And she is a ”lady”, in the feminine: she is modern, and it is a symbol that goes straight to the heart of all people, atheists or believers. Her fragility and strength are seen side by side in the worked the stone, and this has never been clearer than right now. On Monday night burned our hearts in a magnificent chords which overcame religions, age, differences. Her monumental matter of course, blinded us. We did not know how much we loved her.

Translation Lisa Lindberg

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