Some time after six in the evening on April 15, 2019, Rémi Fromont was sitting at the Brasserie Saint-Malo, a lively café in Montparnasse, Paris, when his phone rang. "Notre-Dame is on fire," said a friend on the other end of the line.
Fromont, the chief architect of historic monuments at the French Ministry of Culture, assumed that the call was a joke. But when the caller insisted that he was dead serious, Fromont leapt out of his chair, got on his bike, and pedaled north toward the cathedral.
Fromont is a slim, elegant man of 46 with a cherubic face framed by tight brown curls. Born in Vincennes, outside Paris, he had spent his career renovating sites of national importance, and was intimately familiar with the medieval structure. Notre-Dame was a tinderbox, and if the fire couldn't be controlled, he knew the result would be calamitous.
Fifteen minutes later, Fromont arrived at Notre-Dame de Paris, on the Île de la Cité. Wisps of smoke were rising from the cathedral's lead roof covering. An ominous glow was beginning to envelop the Flèche, the over 300-foot-tall spire added by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. But beneath the spire lay a greater risk: the cathedral's medieval roof frame, a roughly 300-foot-long, 30-foot-high assemblage of medieval axe-hewn oak beams so dense and intricate that it had been nicknamed la forêt-the forest.
A colleague who had arrived a few minutes earlier approached Fromont. He, too, knew about ancient wood's combustibility.
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