The terrible images of the blaze that ravaged Notre-Dame-de-Paris in April 2019 are unforgettable. When the spire collapsed, it was like seeing French history go up in smoke, and prompted the unusual sight of people praying spontaneously in the streets of Paris. As part of a costly programme of reconstruction, which is  of considerable symbolic import to the French nation, President Emmanuel Macron suggested that the cathedral’s lost windows be replaced with contemporary stained glass. I confess that this reminded me, in some oblique way, of a scene in the 1947 comedy The Bishop’s Wife, in which David Niven, as a cash-strapped bishop who dreams of building a new cathedral, is offered a generous donation by a rich lady who requests that a stained-glass window featuring a saint should display the countenance of her husband. In any case, what may have been a desire on Macron’s part to leave his distinctive mark on the Paris cathedral was unanimously blocked by a panel of architectural historians who voted instead in favour of a more traditional design.

On 11 July this year, another spire, that of the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption in Rouen, went up in flames. Although the images of a twisting column of smoke rising thickly from the steeple against a background of scudding clouds were unsettling, the event was not at all comparable in scale and seriousness with what happened in Paris – or even in Nantes, where in 2020 a blaze started by an arsonist destroyed the cathedral’s 17^th-century organ. Rouen’s cathedral has been the object of an extensive series of repairs since 2010, and the fire started on a scaffolding platform built around the spire and covered with plastic tarpaulin, at a height of 120 metres. It is likely that the cause was accidental. The fire was quickly extinguished, and the cathedral re-opened to the public the next day.

The damage was thankfully minimal, yet the incident should act perhaps as a useful reminder of just how remarkable an edifice Rouen’s cathedral is. It has survived many disasters. In 1200, a fire ravaged the surroundings of the cathedral but spared its new tower and façade. In 1514, the original Gothic spire, known as ‘l’aiguille’ (the needle), built in the 13^th century, was damaged by fire and a new one, clad in gilt-coloured lead, completed in 1557. The cathedral was ransacked by Huguenots in 1562, with many statues destroyed or decapitated. In 1683, a hurricane damaged its turrets and arches and caused the destruction of its organ. The cathedral was re-purposed under the French Revolution as a Temple of Reason, and later restored as a cathedral in 1796. In 1822, its wooden spire burned down after being struck by lightning and a cast-iron replacement was completed in 1884. The cathedral was damaged by a fire in 1940, and by extensive bombing in 1944. Today the colossal edifice still stands, its cast-iron spire – the tallest in France – rising to 151 metres, its monumental façade softened and humanised by the charming asymmetry of its towers – the result of centuries of architectural evolution.

Besides its historical and religious significance, there is another aspect to Rouen’s cathedral’s symbolic resonance within French culture. Not only did the façade of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption inspire a series of Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, which captured it at different times of the day in differently coloured lights – they were later appropriated by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein in his 1969 Rouen triptych.

Rouen’s cathedral also shares with Notre-Dame de Paris the distinction of featuring at the heart of a masterpiece of French literature. In Victor Hugo’s towering Gothic Romantic 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, set in 1482, the tragic adventures of Esmeralda and Quasimodo revolve in and around the Parisian cathedral. In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), set in and around Rouen, Flaubert’s home city, the unruly and quixotic provincial heroine, her imagination fatefully shaped by the conventions of romantic fiction, seeks to escape the strictures of married life by having adulterous affairs and living beyond her means.

In a pivotal chapter, the cathedral appears as the setting of Emma Bovary’s disastrous decision to engage in a liaison with Léon Dupuis, a notary’s clerk. Emma and Léon, who had met before and engaged in a tentative romance, have met again by chance at the theatre in Rouen with Emma’s husband in attendance, and later arranged to meet alone in the cathedral. The two pages that follow are wonderfully strange. Léon is a man of prosaic sensibility who, while waiting impatiently for Emma, examines a ‘blue-stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets’ and carefully counts ‘the scales of the fishes and the buttonholes of the doublets’ in the religious scene. But – and this unfortunately confirms how compatible the two lovers are in their delusions – he also experiences the sort of feverish hallucination that is typical of Emma herself, imagining her arrival as: ‘the church as a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours’. When she does appear, Emma, clinging to ‘her expiring virtue’, hands Léon a letter of renunciation and – at once comically and tragically – attempts to pray for succour in the chapel of the Virgin, making every effort to connect sensorially with the atmosphere of the cathedral, but to no avail. The couple – an exasperated Léon and a passively resistant Emma – are led around the cathedral by an overbearing beadle who points out the many beauties of the church in a well-worn commentary of crushing banality.

Flaubert knew the cathedral extremely well, and he takes great pleasure at having the unsuspecting beadle point out to the would-be adulterers the monument to Louis de Brézé that shows him as a transi, or cadaver, decending into his tomb, flanked with a statue of a weeping Diane de Poitiers, his wife – who was also the favourite of Henri II of France. ‘And to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin,’ the beadle concludes. As Léon and Emma make their escape, the beadle calls after them in vain to look at the steeple – only nine feet shorter than the great pyramid of Egypt! – and Léon imagines it as an open chimney, rising grotesquely from the cathedral ‘like the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier’ and through which his love might vanish ‘like a vapour’. He soon bundles Emma into a cab, an enclosed carriage that resembles, most improperly, a confessional on wheels, and where they do consummate their affair, as it were, all over the streets of Rouen.

In a letter to his lover, the writer Louise Colet, Flaubert, reflecting on the ardent romantic sensibility of his younger years, compared himself to the cathedrals of the 15^th century: ‘Between the world and I there existed I know not what stained glass painted yellow, with stripes of fire, and gold arabesques, so that everything was reflected onto my soul, as though onto the flagstones of an embellished, transfigured and yet melancholy sanctuary.  And nothing but beauty walked there. They were dreams more majestic and better outfitted than cardinals in scarlet cassocks.’ The evocation of Rouen’s cathedral in Madame Bovary is a tour-de-force of pathetic fallacy, at once mocking the workings of a conventional imagination yearning for adventure and lust, and gesturing towards the romance of the great ancient building that rises at the heart of the novel, and at the heart of French history.