Video: To many Parisians, the Cathedral of Notre Dame has embodied the heart of the French capital for more than 800 years. Here’s a look back at the cathedral’s history. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)
That an edifice like Notre Dame Cathedral could survive so much and then, in an instant, by accident, be engulfed in flames and devastated in a matter of hours causes, in 2019, a sensation that is at once harrowing and dully familiar. We assume that things are durable because they have lasted. But in the words of G. K. Chesterton "to be breakable is not the same thing as to be perishable.