What a peerless jewel it was, this cathedral, still more beautiful than Notre Dame in Paris. More open and lighter, more slender also, with its columns like long reeds, wonderful to be so fragile, and yet to hold firm; a wonder of our French religious art, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had caused to blossom there in its mystic purity, before they came to us from Italy, to materialize and spoil everything, the sensual heaviness of what we have agreed to call the Renaissance.... Oh! the coarse and cowardly and imbecile brutality of those bundles of iron, launched in full flight against the lace-work, so delicate, that had risen confidently in the air for centuries, and which so many battles, invasions, scourges have never dared to touch!... That great closed house, there, on the square, must be the Archbishop's residence. I try ringing the bell at the entrance to ask the favor of admission to the cathedral. "His Eminence," I am told, "is at mass, but will soon return." If I am willing to wait.... And, while I wait, the priest who receives me relates to me the burning of the episcopal palace: "Beforehand, they had sprinkled the roofs with I know not what diabolical substance; when they then threw their incendiary bombs, the timbers burned like straw, and you saw everywhere jets of green flame, which spread with the noise of fireworks." In fact, the barbarians had premeditated this sacrilege, and prepared it long ago; in spite of their foolishly absurd pretexts, in spite of their shameless denials, what they wished to destroy here was the very heart of old France; some superstitious fancy drove them to it, as much as their instinct of savages, and this is the task they plunged into desperately, when nothing else in the city, or almost nothing, suffered. "Could not an effort be made," I said, "to replace the burned roof of the cathedral?--to cover the vaulted roofs again as quickly as possible? For without this they cannot resist the coming winter." "Evidently," he said, "at the first snows, at the first rains, there is a risk that everything will fall, the more so, as those charred stones have lost their power of resistance. But we cannot even try that, to preserve them a little, for the Germans never take their eyes off us; at the end of their field-glasses, it is the cathedral, always the cathedral; and as soon as a man ventures to appear on a turret, in a tower, the rain of shells immediately begins again. No, there is nothing to be done. It is in the hands of God."