Guest Column by Andrea Goulet | Why the Penn Book Center is our Notre-Dame
(05/11/19 4:04pm)
When the spire of Notre-Dame Cathedral caught fire last month, Le Monde and other news outlets were quick to quote a passage from Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (known to Disney fans as The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The French novelist’s lines seemed prescient, even prophetic: “All eyes were raised to the top of the tower. What they saw was extraordinary. On the top of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose-window, rose a great flame between the two bell towers with swirls of sparks, a great, ragged, furious flame, from which at times the wind would snatch a strip into the smoke.”