The Novelist Who Saved a Cathedral

By the 1820s, Notre-Dame was dying. The cathedral that had towered over Paris for six centuries was crumbling, and nobody seemed to care. During the French Revolution, mobs had smashed its stained glass, beheaded 28 stone statues of biblical kings — mistaking them for French monarchs — and melted the great bells into cannonballs. They even renamed it the “Temple of Reason” in their war on the Catholic Church. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor inside in 1804, workers had to hang tapestries just to cover up the wreckage.