Notre Dame de Paris

[Shelter]

To all French friends here on GH - my heart is heavy because of the horrible pics from Paris. Notre Dame is burning - I don't want to believe it. Three years ago we've been there! The heart of France is destroyed! Is it an assault or really a slipshod company during their renovation work?

 

[gorgik9]

To all French friends here on GH - my heart is heavy because of the horrible pics from Paris. Notre Dame is burning - I don't want to believe it. Three years ago we've been there! The heart of France is destroyed! Is it an assault or really a slipshod company during their renovation work?

I've seen the horrible images on Swedish TV tonight and just like Shelter it has made me so very, very sad

Notre Dame de Paris is one of the truly great gothic cathedrals and was starting to be built in the 1160s - it's a grandiose gem of European architecture and art.

From all the comments I've heard in Swedish media the theory of problems due to the renovation work seem the most plausible: As soon as you put a large amount of electric cablage into a building with 800 years old wooden constructions you're threading on very thin ice. A tiny little spark and - ka-booom - you'll have the wood constructions on fire.

Horrible X_X

 

[trypt]

Too sad , But it will be rebuilt. Its had fires in the past I believe.

 

[tonka]

It's not just the building. The artwork , the windows, the sculptures.
I can at least say that I experienced it a few times in it's glory.

 

[gqstud]

I was there 10 yrs ago and I'm just saddened that it happened in the holiest time of the Christian Faith. My heart goes to the French people.

 

[haiducii]

It’s sad and heart-breaking hearing about this, plus it makes it even worse that this happened during the Holy Week. The amount of history being lost is priceless!

“The church of Notre-Dame of Paris is without doubt, even today, a sublime and majestic building […] a vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal handiwork of a man and a people”.
- Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)

 

[trencherman]

It’s sad and heart-breaking hearing about this, plus it makes it even worse that this happened during the Holy Week. The amount of history being lost is priceless!

“The church of Notre-Dame of Paris is without doubt, even today, a sublime and majestic building […] a vast symphony in stone, as it were; the colossal handiwork of a man and a people”.
- Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)

It fell into terrible disrepair during and right after the revolution and it was Victor Hugo who spearheaded the campaign to stop its obliteration.

The loss we feel now was what people who cared must have felt when the library of Alexandria, the Parthenon and the Old Summer Palace (called the Yuanmingyuan in Chinese) were consumed by flames. Civilization's gems each and all.

 

[trencherman]

​

 

[topdog]

It fell into terrible disrepair during and right after the revolution and it was Victor Hugo who spearheaded the campaign to stop its obliteration.

It certainly did, as you would expect being over 500 years old at the time. In addition it was looted and defaced during the French Revolution and reviled as the nobles and clerics were lumped together as the enemies of the people.

Victor Hugo almost single-handedly changed its fate not with his opinions and pamphlets, but with his art. His novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wildly popular and changed public opinion about the cathedral which led to a campaign to restore it to the landmark we were able to experience up until yesterday.

Speaking of Hugo and his novel, this music has been going through my head - the finale of the stage version of of the Alan Menken / Stephen Schwartz musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (You can find it here.) It brings me to tears anyway, so why should today be any different.

 

[mark_63]

I think it is safe to say that all our members feel for the loss incurred by our French members

 

[trencherman]

Cultural exchange

The Chinese have developed a knack for building knock-offs. There are replicas of famous tourist spots all over the country. May be the French authorities should look into engaging them to rebuilt a reasonably cost-effective reasonable facsimile of Notre Dame.

They can even promise them to repatriate the artifacts they looted from the Summer Palace as partial settlement.

 

[Rigor100]

The Chinese have developed a knack for building knock-offs. There are replicas of famous tourist spots all over the country. May be the French authorities should look into engaging them to rebuilt a reasonably cost-effective reasonable facsimile of Notre Dame.

They can even promise them to repatriate the artifacts they looted from the Summer Palace as partial settlement.

Disney land Paris is a knock off of the original in the US I suppose. So every is copying.:blushing:

The Great Wall of China sure isn't a knock off. There is probably a knock off Great Wall of China somewhere in Disney land Paris, with Mickey Mouse standing on it and waving to the kids below. $15 entrance.

 

[golfdelta21]

Rebuilding Notre Dame in photos

 

[larryisreal]

My stone masons heart is bleeding seeing this.

 

[dargelos]

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, France's rich and famous were competing with each other to promise ever larger donations towards the repair cost. So far only about ten percent of the pledges have actually been paid, mostly by the more humble donors. Despite a 66% tax kickback, none of the biggest pledges have yet to turn into real money, the kind the restorers are in desperate need of.
The Bible makes it clear that God takes a very dim view of anyone who uses charity for grandstanding purposes. You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool the man upstairs. There is no stairway to heaven, that was just the name of a song.

 

[garth33]

I also heard the repairs were going slow - I hope good people and nations will step forward to restore the amazing structure to its former glory.

 

[dargelos]

Good news being in such short supply, we must cling to whatever crumbs we can find.
There are beehives on the sacristy roof of Notre Dame, amazingly it seems that the bees inside have survived the blaze without harm. For months it has been too dangerous for the beekeepers to tend to them but now they can confirm that the hard working insects are in good health. Smoke has a sedating effect on them, it is believed that they would have slept through the fire and only woke up when it was all over. Asleep, they require very little oxygen and can resist extremes of temperature.
Don't try this at home, if your house is on fire, get the fuck out of there, you cannot sleep through it, you are not a bee.

 

[trencherman]

Now the segment of us that no evidence can ever persuade has a new tool in their arsenal of stupid. Remember that blight that was decimating bees and frogs, whatever it was, they’d claim it’s not rising temperature.

 

[larryisreal]

Now the segment of us that no evidence can ever persuade has a new tool in their arsenal of stupid. Remember that blight that was decimating bees and frogs, whatever it was, they’d claim it’s not rising temperature.

I think you're off the topic...

 

[trencherman]

I think you're off the topic...

If you cannot follow the flow of exchange from one comment to the next, that’s not my problem.