French Dispatch
A trip to Paris
I have not read Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “Notre-Dame de Paris.” However, as a nine-year-old in 1996 I watched the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” upon its initial theatrical release and—thanks to the miracle of home video—many dozens of times thereafter.
As such, the magnificent gothic edifice of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité in Paris has loomed larger in my imagination than any other religious structure—nay, than perhaps any other building on planet Earth—in the nearly three decades since “Hunchback” debuted.
One of the saddest days of my life was April 15, 2019, when a construction accident caused Notre Dame to burst into flames, collapsing its spire and inflicting God knows what damage to its glorious interior. In that moment, I was forced to confront the prospect of never being able to set foot inside the world’s most iconic cathedral. Of having missed the opportunity to come face-to-face with the divine.
As we now know, the fire’s destruction, while extensive, proved not as ruinous as it might have been, and thanks to the heroic efforts of an anonymous group of workers—alongside donations by a non-anonymous group of billionaires—the church managed to reopen to the public last December with all the pomp and circumstance befitting such an occasion.
A few months prior, my dad—having recently celebrated his 70th birthday in London—proposed celebrating his 71st in Paris, a city he had somehow not visited in nearly four decades, despite his lifelong penchant for world travel. Having set foot in the French capital not at all, I agreed to join him with nary a moment’s pause. Much as I value nothing more in life than sitting on the couch watching TV and drinking Mountain Dew, when the opportunity to see Paris presents itself, the only answer is “Yes.”
Indeed, prior to last month, had I drafted my “bucket list” of things to see and do before I die—an exercise I have yet to formally undertake—Paris would likely have contained more individual line items than a majority of the world’s continents. Now that I have experienced a full week’s worth of it—followed by three gratuitous days in the wilds of Normandy—I can confirm all the clichés are true. That the city comes by its illustrious reputation honestly in every sense of the term.
Obviously, I need not detail what makes Paris such a magical destination for international tourists, insomuch as approximately 19 billion others have done so since shortly after the birth of Christ. To be immune to its natural, architectural and cultural charms is to be functionally, clinically and spiritually dead.
All I can usefully do is emphasize I am the luckiest person on the face of the Earth. To observe how in a single week I managed—among many other things—to ascend the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, behold Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” and Renoir’s “Dance at Le moulin de la Galette,” wander the Hall of Mirrors and the gardens of Versailles, set foot on all five D-Day landing beaches, consume escargot and boeuf bourguignon, peek over the locked gate to Claude Monet’s water lily pond, purchase a used anthology of Oscar Wilde plays at Shakespeare & Company, enjoy a cappuccino at a gelato stand on Île Saint-Louis and float on a Bateaux Mouches cruise down the River Seine.
And bright and early on a Wednesday morning, I was granted admission—free of charge—to Notre Dame.
While it would be slightly hyperbolic to assert—in Churchillian fashion—my entire life had prepared me for this moment, it is nonetheless true that few events in recent years have so dropped my jaw and stirred my soul than standing athwart the front entryway to the most universally recognized, beloved and architecturally imposing house of worship in the Western world—to say nothing of its cavernous interior, up to and including its pair of miraculously undamaged stained-glass rose windows.
As with the Eiffel Tower—only more so—there is no proper substitute to seeing Notre Dame with your own eyes, bearing witness to its existence as a physical object occupying a specific plot of real estate in a living, breathing metropolis—as opposed to the dreamlike abstraction all famous buildings inevitably are to those who know them only by reputation.
Of course, doing so often requires inordinate amounts of planning, time, money and physical exertion—activities I generally find rather grating, if not outright repulsive. As such, I was entirely content to allow my dad to undertake virtually all the necessary legwork for this particular trip (as is his wont), and I believe I speak for both of us in concluding that—in every imaginable way—it was worth it.