It would take me a long time to dig out an old photograph of Notre-Dame, so here's something else to stand for transience: a jug of mustard blossoms. I cut an armful of them on Saturday, before the team of guys did their anti-fire brush clearance, and they've been adorning the table in my office at home ... and now every bit of that surface is covered, as I knew it would be, with fallen sticky yellow blossoms.
It's been horrific watching the footage of flames. I'm just hopeful that some - much - of the exterior carving remains. But it's also been fascinating reading about how restored, replaced, and reconstituted so much of the glass in the rose windows was. That's not to see that, most likely, some extraordinary medieval glass hasn't been lost. But much of it was C19th - not that this isn't a loss, in its turn, but not quite the same (and indeed, the windows in the nave replaced C19th windows, in the 1960s, in an attempt to recreate the medieval color and lighting). And of course, the original spire came down in 1786, to be replaced by the Viollet-le-Duc one. There's such a compelling story of making and remaking and restoration to be told, as part of all the decision-making that lies ahead about how to rebuild.
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