This was written in response to a message board posting at Freelancewriting.com calling for personal essays for publication in a magazine targeted at affluent women ages 25-50.


The Stones of Notre Dame

It was nighttime in Paris. Bells were calling out ten o'clock in the unseasonably cold April air as I, along with my two best friends and travel companions, headed back to our hotel room on the Left Bank after a long day of museums and mispronounced French, cafes and crepes and misread maps.

In between the nearest Métro stop and our hotel lay the great cathedral of Notre Dame. Floodlights illuminated the stonework of the exterior, and it seemed, despite the late hour, to be open. On a whim, we made our way through the small crowd outside and pulled open the heavy wooden door.

We had been saving Notre Dame for tomorrow's daylight, so this was our first taste of the great church. We were on spring break during our year studying in the United Kingdom; over the past six months, we had seen plenty of cathedrals and knew pretty much what to expect-or so we thought.
Even Westminster and St. Paul's, seen in bright October sunlight, could not have prepared me for this immense cathedral, made all the bigger by the fact that it was draped in shadow. A few electric lights, hardly brighter than the flickering prayer candles in front of the little chapels in the aisles, hung in unobtrusive corners, silhouetting other people moving through the sanctuary. The nave seemed to go on forever in that light, the criss-cross of rib vaulting in the ceiling and the columns holding it up endlessly repeating themselves beyond the altar.

Somewhere, men chanted in Latin, their arch-shaped musical phrasings-voices climbing and descending the scale over and over-mirroring the arches wrought in stone all around me. I looked around for this mysterious choir, and found eventually that it was in fact a very modern recording of Gregorian chant being played through speakers hidden throughout the cathedral. Still, it was easy, in that low light, to pretend that the dark figures around me were really monks, singing their way through the nighttime office of matins. If I let my thoughts drift just a little, I could even hear the slap of monkish sandals on the worn stone floor, and smell the incense used for Sunday mass.

I subscribe to no particular faith, but this night was not about being able to recite a catechism or creed so much as it was about experiencing a kind of magic. This church and the stones that composed it had been here on this island in the Seine for more than eight hundred years. They had been through the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the rise and fall of Napoleon's empire; air raid sirens and the bootstamps of occupying Nazi forces had echoed off the walls. And yet I, in 2005, could still glimpse on this night what it must have been like to see Notre Dame de Paris in 1345, the year of its completion.

It was nearly eleven when my friends and I could deny our exhaustion no more. As we walked away, back into the noise of urban Paris, I looked back once, knowing I had left part of myself lodged among those stones, or maybe flying in the heady heights of the vaulted ceiling. I might see another hundred cathedrals, but none would be quite like this time machine of a building, showing both ancient and modern faces with sublimely equal grace.


Copyright 2006, Rebecca E. Helton.

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