Five years on, Notre Dame is back

Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron and the people of France for bringing Notre Dame back to life. The cathedral will celebrate Mass tomorrow for the first time since December 2019, though of course the toffs (Mr Macron last week, Messrs Trump, Zelensky, and others today) got a peek beforehand.

Notre Dame may not be the most beautiful building in the world -- I'd vote for the old Paris Opera, now called the Palais Garnier. But Notre Dame is the only building that ever made me weep. That was in April 1955, when as a fall-away Catholic I knelt on its marble floor in the company of three or four large women in black, and the tears ran down my face. I remember the interior as very dark, with the exception of the rose window, which glowed with what I think was morning light, and which -- miraculously, it would seem -- survived the fire that brought down the cathedral's roof and spire.

There were other seeming miracles in Notre Dame's restoration: the speed of it, done in five years as promised in a Kennedyesque moment by France's brash young president, and above all its fidelity to the Notre Dame that people remember from 2019, and 1955, and as far back as the oldest Parisian's childhood. Even the roof, its lead covering vaporized and spread across Paris for everyone to breathe, has been restored, lead on oak, and the environmental hazard be damned! Mr Macron had other ideas, but the people of France overruled him. Good for them.