The Paris Review

Almost two years ago, I learned about a private apartment in Paris that might be available for a short stay, the way one hears rumours about cottages on secluded lakes or ski chalets on distant slopes. Usually they are booked for the next ten years or have just been devastated by a hurricane or raging wildfire, but in this case, I was in luck.

Forget April in Paris: I opted for May 2025, which would precede the annual tourism crush beginning in late June — or so I thought — but mostly because it coincided with a significant birthday for my husband. What better place to celebrate than the city where we’d spent our honeymoon more than five decades earlier? Besides, we would be staying within earshot of the bells of Notre-Dame, the twelfth-century Gothic cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, which had finally reopened after a catastrophic fire in April 2019. In the wake of the conflagration, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, had promised to rebuild, because “Notre-Dame is our history, our literature, part of our psyche.”

Its site on the Île de la Cité, between the left and right banks of the Seine, had been exalted by both pagans and Christians for a thousand years when construction of the cathedral began in 1163. Besides being the place where ten-year-old Henry VI of England was crowned Henri II of France in 1431, Notre-Dame was where Napoleon anointed himself as emperor in 1804 and where Charles de Gaulle celebrated the liberation of Paris in 1944.

Our honeymoon had been a little less consequential, but I still remember climbing Quasimodo-like up the narrow winding stairs inside one of the bell towers. We were seeking adventure and an aerial view of Paris rather than sanctuary, but I averted my eyes from the open windows as the distance between me and the ground escalated. I knew from many visits to Niagara Falls that it would be hard to resist the impulse to jump, if only to swallow the terror of falling. A friend of mine once told me about a similar incident when her lover decided the sooty tower was the perfect place to propose marriage. When she resisted, he dangled himself on a ledge, threatening to drop unless she promised to marry him. She did, and they are still together.

The things we do to appease the men we love.

What I didn’t know when I booked the one-bedroom apartment for a visit many months later was whether we would still be upright. Fortunately we were, and, having agreed on some ground rules — no driving, no overnight visitors, and at least one meal, preferably lunch, in a restaurant or bistro every day — we packed our bags and set off. As with most trips, we learned a lot but not necessarily the things we had anticipated, especially about Notre-Dame, which, by consensus, represents the heart and soul of France. Just before it reopened in December 2024, Macron, who had allocated government money and spearheaded the broader fundraising and restoration efforts, publicly congratulated the artisans and labourers for their spectacular efforts: “The inferno of Notre-Dame was a wound for the nation,” he declared. “And you were its remedy.”

In restoring the building, with its side chapels, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses, Macron was following the example of the poet, novelist, essayist, and statesman Victor Hugo. Two hundred years ago, Hugo was as influential, as prolific, and as multi-talented as Margaret Atwood is now. So when the exalted proponent of Romanticism made the cathedral a compelling character in his 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1482, people took notice. An impressive 31,000 copies were sold within eighteen months, according to the translator and editor John Sturrock, and the novel became even more popular when, two years later, it was published in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then as now, tourists flocked to the iconic setting.

Hugo had chosen the year 1482 carefully: after Gutenberg had invented his printing press but before Columbus had “discovered” America. As Sturrock explains in a recent Shakespeare and Company edition, he had written the novel “not merely to capture the Paris and people of the Middle Ages — in which he had long been interested and done enormous research — but with the express purpose of saving the great Gothic cathedral itself. Because, by the early nineteenth century, Notre-Dame was in a state of near-ruin.” Time and events, especially the recent French Revolution, had been unkind to the cathedral. It was repurposed as a “temple of reason” to reflect the ethos of liberté, égalité, fraternité; all but one of its bells were melted down to make cannonballs; the nave was converted into a storage area for wine and grain; and most of the statues were destroyed, indeed beheaded, in the mistaken belief that they represented kings of France instead of saints and apostles.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame does not compare to Hugo’s Les misérables, but it tells a cinematic tale about the sixteen-year-old Roma street dancer Esmeralda; her canny goat, Djali; her besotted suitors, including the hapless poet Pierre Gringoire; the warped archdeacon Claude Frollo; and Quasimodo, the deaf and hunchbacked bell-ringer who offers her sanctuary.

That story galvanized public sentiment and shamed the government of the day into salvaging the decaying landmark. The restoration effort, which began a decade later, was carried out under the direction of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who had earlier worked on nearby Sainte-Chapelle, which had been commissioned, with its spectacular stained glass windows, by Louis IX in the thirteenth century. Viollet-le-Duc ordered new bells, repaired the smashed gargoyles and beheaded statues, installed glorious stained glass, and designed a new spire to replace the one that had been built between 1220 and 1230. Essentially, this was the grimy, dark cathedral my husband and I had visited back in the early 1970s, the Vietnam War era, when many of my friends were dodgers or deserters and I proudly wore a Maple Leaf pin.

Many of the random conversations we had with other travellers this spring reminded me of those fractious times. Mass tourism, even in the months before school was out, meant that there were queues everywhere, including at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, and that crush put us into contact with plenty of people from Donald Trump’s America. My patriotic psyche was triggered as we watched shame and contrition flash across so many faces when they learned our nationality, followed by apologies and jocular pleas for Canada to annex parts of the United States. It became commonplace to reassure strangers that we didn’t blame them because their increasingly dictatorial leader refused to recognize us as a sovereign nation.

Consequently, we had become accustomed to saying “Don’t worry” or “It’s okay” or “We aren’t blaming you” and then watching eyes glaze over as we explained the separation of powers in a constitutional monarchy, which means that Charles III is our head of state but not our head of government. Weirdly, nobody wanted to talk about Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV, the Chicago-born, Spanish-speaking Augustinian who is the first American to be elected pope. Politics and religion don’t always mix, as my mother, a fervent Catholic, used to say.

My dog, not surprisingly, has a better sense of direction than I do, so I was happy to follow my husband’s lead across the Pont au Double for our first close‑up of Notre-Dame. It had been in my consciousness since our arrival the day before, and now there it stood, majestic and pristine, the sun turning its limestone walls a delectable eggnog shade, the three western arches resplendent with sculpted figures, the spire once again a visible beacon in the sky. The rest of the building was shrouded in scaffolding, rigging, and hoarding as artisans continued to work on the new roof, replacing the one that had collapsed during the fire.

That was the first surprise: the inside of the mighty cathedral might have been finished, but the outside was still a work in progress. The second and bigger shock was the size of the serpentine crowds, which wove through a series of barriers on the right side of the huge public square west of the building and milled about along the length of one of its external walls. Before the fire, Notre-Dame had been a huge draw for tourists, but it was often ignored by Parisians in a secularizing society. Now, as in Hugo’s day, everybody wanted to visit, including us.

Entrance was free — it is a church, after all — but group and individual tickets were recommended to reduce wait times. Neither of us was keen on queuing for two or three hours, but we hadn’t come all this way to miss Notre-Dame, and if the best way to get inside was to attend mass, I was willing to swallow my lapsed Catholicism and sit quietly while the faithful took Communion.

My husband looked at me in astonishment when I proposed my plan, because he knows my views on organized religion. After weighing the options, he agreed. The bells were pealing when we returned early the next morning, chilly even for May. Feeling hungry brought back all the buried strictures from my youth: the gnawing in my stomach because we were forbidden to eat anything before Communion, a fast that began the previous midnight, and which always made me feel nauseated when the altar boy started swinging the incense burner to signal the Eucharist was nigh. Nowadays the rules are so lenient that fasting need last for only an hour, and seniors like us can stop for a breakfast sandwich on the way to church. Even so, we had both skipped coffee and croissants for an additional ten minutes of sleep.

The barriers were already in place in the Parvis de Notre-Dame as we joined the line forming for the 8 a.m. service. I stared at the two main towers, wishing I could get closer to their magnificent facades, but security guards weren’t letting anyone through other than a few visiting priests in long black robes and ski jackets, who had clearly come prepared for brisk weather.

As we waited, a clean-shaven American with a receding hairline, dressed in jeans and a puffy jacket, asked if we were in the line for mass. After I nodded yes, he said he lived in Birmingham, England, but was in Paris with a buddy to attend a football match and had come to the Île de la Cité because, like us, he thought going to mass would be a good way to tour the cathedral. He was surprised that so much remained to be done to the outside and worried especially about the health risks of replacing the roof with lead. Was historical authenticity worth using a known contaminant, he ventured. I reported the details I had read in a lengthy article in the New York Times about the precautions the design team had ordered, including masks, haz‑mat suits, and showers at the beginning and end of shifts, and suggested with a shrug that we wouldn’t really know for another twenty years if, or when, diabolical symptoms started appearing. That didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he let the matter go as he rubbed his cold hands together, before shoving them into his pockets.

Another American, living in Europe, came up and asked the standard question: Is this the line for mass? She sounded as though she came from New England and had freshly tinted auburn hair that had been pulled back into a loose braid hanging below her shoulders. Just when I expected her to mention the T‑word, she began explaining that she had worked as a docent at the cathedral when she had lived in Paris before the fire and launched into what she could remember of her spiel, identifying the bas‑reliefs above the three portals and explaining that the one on the left was dedicated to Eve and the central one to Mary, the second Eve. You mean the good Eve? I blurted. This stopped her cold. She turned and stared at me and said, “If you say so.”

Her reaction stunned me. Silently, I wondered if, in my absence from the church, Eve had been exonerated from the ignominy of being the fallen woman who had caused her husband and family to be banished from the Garden of Eden, similarly to how Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II in the early 1960s to loosen the rules around Communion and confession. But I wasn’t there to interview her, so I listened attentively as she continued to explain what she could remember of the figures sculpted into the arches — a much more interesting conversation than the apologies for American-style demagoguery that we had already tired of hearing.

Finally a priest came out of the cathedral, ushered the visiting clerics inside, and opened the main wooden doors wide so that we could enter. The sounds of the refurbished organ swelled as we walked in and raised our eyes to the soaring walls and the three luminous rose windows. The architecture critic Rowan Moore, writing for the Guardian, said it best: “The effect is staggering. It takes the breath, stops the heart, catches the throat. The heat of the fire has been replaced by light, reverberating through repeating and intersecting lines and curves, the mouldings and tracery of gothic architecture.” The result, he rightly concluded, is “a space that seems to glow.”

In the distance, past the rows of chairs, the new altar, with its blunt salad-bowl form, adds a deliberately modern element. Designed by the Parisian Guillaume Bardet, the liturgical furnishings, which include the baptismal font, lectern, and tabernacle, required several tons of bronze. They have offended some traditionalists. Indeed, the National Catholic Register in the U.S. has complained that for “a historic cathedral, resplendent with stained glass and stone vaulting paired with a $760-million renovation, it is hard to reconcile the new furnishings as having a semblance of ‘noble beauty.’ ”

Personally, I’m okay with the abrupt juxtaposition of then and now, although I did find it odd that the surpliced priest who invited those of us attending mass to join him around the vaguely brutalist baptismal font was carrying a cellphone, which he consulted frequently, as he delivered a brief history of the cathedral, the terrible fire, and the reconstruction efforts. He was much more like a tour guide than the remote fathers speaking Latin that I remembered from decades earlier.

After he finished his presentation, he turned around and led the way to the altar, singing “Alleluia,” the hymn of praise to the Lord, as faithful worshippers joined in, including, to my surprise, the football fan I had recently befriended. He must have been an altar boy, I thought, listening to his resonant tenor as he responded to the priest’s incantations.

My acquaintances from the queue were not just curious tourists, like the lout who had pushed ahead of us to claim a seat in the first row of chairs and was busily holding his own cellphone aloft so he could photograph the freshly cleaned windows. They, like so many others, were devout Catholics, I realized, as they crossed themselves and knelt in prayer on the hard footrests. I felt like an interloper as I quietly sat in my chair, surrounded by people who, like my long dead mother, believed that Jesus was a real person who had risen from the dead.

It was all coming back: finding my baptism certificate in the old steamer trunk in my parents’ bedroom that declared “father not present,” because in the vernacular of the time he was “too good” a Protestant to set foot in a Catholic church; missing the rehearsal for my First Communion because I had absent-mindedly chewed a cookie before mass; the marital compromise that shifted my older sister and me to a public school in the days before Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, while still attending mass on Sundays with our mother. No longer being taught by nuns or studying religion as a curriculum subject had left me unable to comply with a priest’s command in the confessional to make a “good” act of contrition, a shame I carried along with the ridicule I experienced when an arrogant grade 6 teacher discovered my mixed religious background and demanded to know, in front of the class, why I wasn’t in the Catholic school where I belonged. Were the taxes too high? she inquired snidely, to which I could respond with only a bewildered shrug.

Religion has never brought me the peace, joy, or sense of belonging that the celebrants around me seemed to be feeling as they lined up for Communion. Even that was different from the way I remembered kneeling down, pressing my hands together with my fingers pointed toward heaven, raising my face, closing my eyes, and opening my mouth as the priest placed the cardboard-tasting Host on my tongue.

There wasn’t even an altar railing covered in a white cloth, I realized with a start. Some of the faithful knelt on the floor and put their hands together in prayer, closed their eyes, and opened their mouths, while others stood and held out a hand to receive the unleavened wafer, which they then put in their own mouths. Was it the pandemic and the fear of spreading germs that had caused this change? Or was it another democratization, like turning the altar around so that the priest faces the parishioners rather than having his back toward them? I had much to learn about the workings of the contemporary Church, but did I care enough to do the research? After all, I was here only to see the restoration.

After Communion, another bell interrupted my reverie, and suddenly people were standing, turning from one side to another, smiling and speaking to their neighbours — many of them strangers — as though they were greeting friends at a cocktail party. This congeniality was too much, especially so early in the morning.

I turned to my husband as a way of avoiding the person on the other side of me. I had wanted to be an anonymous observer, not part of a religious community. So why suggest going to mass, I chastised myself sternly, recognizing my hypocrisy and desperate for the rites to be over so I could walk around, look at the statues, admire the reliquary, and think about the Virgin Mary, who had managed to become pregnant without indulging in sex with Joseph. A bizarre feat, that so‑called Immaculate Conception, and a behavioural mode that had indoctrinated generations of women into thinking that taking pleasure in sex was if not immoral, then at least unnatural. Maybe I should reread Marina Warner’s classic 1976 treatise, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, I thought, or quiz the former docent on how Mary’s role has changed, or not, over the centuries. But I abandoned that notion when I spotted her a couple of rows over, head bent, once again deep in prayer as she knelt on the hard footrest.

Instead, my husband and I wandered around in awe of the new cathedral created out of the ashes of the old one, retaining its medieval structures as it welcomed a rebirth. And then, realizing that we were starving, we walked to a nearby boulangerie for cappuccinos and croissants — and watched Parisians go about their lives.

I thought that visit would be the end of my churchgoing, but two weeks later an old friend arrived in Paris — his favourite European city — and wanted to visit Notre-Dame. So back I went to morning mass. An Anglican, he had none of my hang‑ups about crossing himself, genuflecting as we entered our row of chairs, kneeling on the footrests, or exchanging peace messages with strangers. He was embracing Catholic mass as an experience, not resisting it. I was astounded, but because he was comfortable, I could feel myself relaxing. The ritual was becoming more familiar, less threatening, and I realized my fears of divine retribution were softening as I was swept up in the voices singing around me and the communal dedication to a religion I had long abandoned. There might be something about this going-to-mass thing, I thought. I can escape the hassles and demands of my ordinary life for an hour or so and soak myself in religious spirit in this beautifully resurrected cathedral.

So I went yet again — by myself. It was the day after the Throne Speech, in which Charles III had reminded us of the promise of Canada when his “dear late mother” opened Parliament in 1957 and urged us to be “clear-eyed” because “the world is a more dangerous and uncertain place than at any point since the Second World War.” Now is the time, he suggested, to take heart. “As the anthem reminds us: the True North is indeed strong and free!” Feeling chuffed about my country, I expected concurrence when I fell into conversation with an American woman as I lined up for the third time outside Notre-Dame. Not so. She told me she was from Florida and proudly boasted that she had been to mass seven days in a row. That certainly put my three visits in a month to shame. I should have known better, but I assumed once I told her where I was from, she would offer what by then was a standard apology for her president’s outrageous behaviour, so I readied my “Don’t worry” response.

“I am a big Donald Trump supporter,” she retorted. “We are learning how much money we have been wasting abroad,” she continued with an angry glint in her eye. I looked at her blankly, at least I hope so, but silently I demanded, “You mean by saving kids from starvation, providing medicine for HIV/AIDS patients in Africa, and complying with a free trade deal your hero signed with Canada?” I quickly changed the subject because the last thing I wanted was an argument about politics in this place.

“I gather a lot of Canadian snowbirds are selling their condos and moving back home,” I suggested, as an inept attempt to change the topic. “Yes,” she agreed, “but Florida is packed,” which I guess was a polite way of saying good riddance. “Our roads can’t support all these people coming into the state,” she continued. “I hear that all the time at the country club.” Where was my Maple Leaf pin when I needed it?

Just then a mother-daughter duo showed up — finger- and toenails polished, makeup glistening, hair pouffed — and asked if this was the queue for mass. On hearing it was, the daughter struck a cheesecake pose so her mother could click a photo to send back home to the States.

“I don’t speak French,” the daughter complained, but the Trump supporter had a solution for that too. There is an app called Hallow, which translates a homily as the priest is delivering it into the language of your choice. Apparently you can also use it to recite the rosary or to attend mass remotely.

How do you take Communion or make a confession on an app, I wondered? The absurdity of confessing to one’s phone reminded me of a family barbecue decades earlier on a Sunday afternoon with some of my mother’s distant relatives. Drink was being consumed, and one fellow with a paunch and a leer was behaving badly. My father sidled up to me and said in a low voice, “You know, they all went to mass this morning.”

At the time, I laughed. Now I felt empathy for all of us seeking a way to find meaning in our harried lives and prayed silently for mass to begin so I could escape my companions and, like so many others, find sanctuary in Notre‑Dame.