Tree Substance in the Cathedral-Novel Notre-Dame de Paris

On 15 April 2019, when the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris erupted into flames, news outlets and social media responded with their own rapidly spreading fire of allusions to Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). In a haunting tableau of a fiery night sky as Quasimodo pours molten lead through the gutters of the balustrade, which in turn pours onto an unruly mob in the square below, Hugo seemed to have prophesied the monument’s near demise (Fig. 1). In a novel that resists the impulse of untrammeled progress as it wipes out vestiges of the past, Quasimodo’s fire underscores the vulnerability of a seemingly timeless stone edifice.