She's dead...

I feel like I did when editors of Charlie Hebdo were murdered.  I feel like I did when Paris was assulted and far too many people died, including many who were at the Bataclan that night.

This is the place where the first island settlers built a temple to their river gods.

This is the place where the Romans built their own temple not long after the Parisii.

This was the place where Our Lady gave King Arthur the ermine cloak that blinded his adversary during the mano a mano fight with the Roman Frollo.

This is the place where  King Arthur then built his church to honor Our Lady.

This is the place where Saint Genevieve sealed a deal with Clovis to protect Paris against attacks from the Germanic hordes.

This is the place where giant chains were strung across the river to keep the marauding Normans out of the city.

This is the place where the alchemists mounted their bas relief plaques that were used to educate later generations in the making of the Elixir and instructing how to enter knowledge as the means of saving one's soul, including educating Nicolas Flamel, Fulcinelli, and a certain Nazi spy who came to see if he could steal the secret of making gold that would be used to fill party coffers.

This is where medieval revelers ended their naked bacchanalian Festival of the Donkey parades.

This is where the Festival of Fools was celebrated until the Church outlawed the inversion of authority (even if it was only for a day).

This is the place where hungry wolves were cornered and killed after entering the old city through a breech in the fortifications.

This is where the Philosopher's Stone was buried and the crow as sculpted to look at it from afar.

This is where the Church, fearful of so many things, had the beautiful statue of Saint Joseph carrying Jesus destroyed.

1789 revolutionaries nearly destroyed this place in their search for raw materials used to finance their war against the Prussians.

This is the place where Napoleon crowed himself while Bishops of Paris and Rome looked on and huge tapestries covered the damage caused by the revolutionaries.

This is the place that was rebuilt, in part due to Victor Hugo's wonderful history.

This is the place Charles de Gaule was nearly sniped as he calmly walked across the open space to celebrate the liberation of France at the end of World War II.

This is the place that today starting a 19h00 local time experienced a crisis of unimaginable horror and 30 minutes later, died.

I feel as hollowed out as Notre Dame de Paris now is.

A historian reminds us that these kinds of building are living, changing.  She's burned before and she'll in all likelyhood burn again.  She's been expanded, updated, changed, destroyed, changed some more, nearly destroyed time and again.  Each time we rebuild her.

The only sadness is that work and restoration will likely take longer than I have left on this earth.  Still, we saw her as she once was.  And that will have to do.