Notre Dame Update

Photo by Nivenn Lanos on Unsplash

“Notre Dame on fire”, said the message on my phone. Sitting at the dinner table at a friend’s house in northern Italy, I hid my tears as the live video unfolded before my eyes. Soon the spire came crashing down through the cathedral’s roof. It was April 15, 2019.

The tragedy was plastered on the front page of newspapers around the world the next day. And to make it even worse, no one knew why it had caught fire. Sylvia Whitman, of Shakespeare and Company bookstore...